Author: Amrit Bhandari

Balancing successful wildlife protection and expanding human populations leads to reduced human-wildlife conflict in Zambia’s North Luangwa Ecosystem

As the global community wakes up to the deepening biodiversity crisis, many of Africa’s wild spaces are under threat, not from guns and poachers, but from the shovels and agricultural fields of smallholder farmers trying to make a living. While a family growing corn or cotton may seem less ominous than a man holding a gun and poached ivory, the negative impact on wildlife can be equally devastating.

Each year, rural communities broaden their search for increasingly-scarce arable land and encroach on wildlife habitat. While this move makes sense from the farmer’s standpoint, this expansion intensifies human-wildlife conflict, often resulting in deadly human-animal confrontation, crop destruction, and attacks on livestock. Forests and wetlands converted to fields may never revert back to habitat for elephants, leopards, lions, antelope, and other key species that help to sustain a balanced ecosystem. This loss of habitat and change of land use represents a generational change.

To combat this growing trend, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and Frankfurt Zoological Society are partnering with local communities in the North Luangwa Ecosystem of Zambia to strengthen the land and resource rights of rural communities, in the hopes of improving long-term land use planning to prevent encroachment into wildlife habitats, protect individuals’ rights to their land, and support sustainable livelihoods.

The Luangwa Valley is the oldest section of the Great Rift valley, a landscape along Africa’s largest undammed river that blooms with the rains from November to March. At the heart of the valley are the North and South Luangwa National Parks, bordered by an escarpment on one side and the Luangwa River on the other. The area’s abundant elephant populations were decimated by poaching in the 1980s, and rhinos were poached to local extinction. Since that time, large investments have helped to return a healthy population of elephants and other species to the area.

The valley is also home to 70,000 people and over 4,500 settlements in five customary chiefdoms, a population that has tripled over the past forty years. The chiefdoms are located in areas known as Game Management Areas, buffer zones to the national parks designed with the dual objectives that both wildlife and communities flourish. But these buffers are being pressured both by increasing wildlife populations, due in part to successful conservation efforts, and farmers. Each year, farmers prepare new tracts for agriculture, cutting deeper into habitats, within the current ranges and prime habitats of elephants and hippos, as well as predators.

Clarifying Land Rights and Usage

In Zambia’s customary settings, land ownership and conflicts are managed by chiefs and village headpersons, who typically allocate property by telling families that they can expand their plot from one edge to a tree some distance away. Unfortunately, these verbal records are easily forgotten and open to interpretation. In addition, headpersons are often open to influence and bias, and as a result may allow some farmers with connections or influence to expand farmland outside of planned agricultural areas as fertility declines on well-established fields.

“We spend most of our time resolving conflicts between households every agriculture season. It is tiring. I know generally where people have lived, but I am asked to make decisions with very little information,” remarks a headperson from Kafoteka Village Action Group in Chifunda Chiefdom.

Working with chiefs and local community resource management groups, USAID and Frankfurt Zoological Society are supporting land use planning and documentation of households’ land and implementation of inclusive and transparent land governance across these landscapes of hundreds of thousands of hectares. With more secure land rights, communities can better manage their land and designate areas for agricultural expansion that do not create conflict with wildlife.

With USAID support, community enumerators are now documenting customary land with GPS-enabled smartphones and large-scale maps. After holding sensitization sessions with communities about the customary land documentation process, enumerators walk each and every field boundary and record the names of landholders and potential beneficiaries, paying special attention to the rights of women and children. This leads to the production of a community map for validation, which is ultimately approved by the community and signed by the chief. The chief then distributes land documents, proving an individual’s rights to a particular piece of land, which not only decreases conflict but can lead to better long-term land use planning.

Preparing for the future is an urgent task. Using these community maps, the traditional leaders and community members then develop long-term land use plans that cater to human and wildlife needs.

“We know the elephants will not respect the boundaries of our fields or our land certificates. But if we can use land planning to decide where we should not allocate new fields, we may be able to live in peace,” explains Chief Chikwa. “With FZS [Frankfurt Zoological Society], we’ve done land use plans and identified the areas for conservation, agriculture, and expansion. These household field maps will feed into the bigger plan.”

The future of Zambia’s wildlife landscapes and those around the world will be determined by what happens in the multi-use zones surrounding national parks. Mapping customary land holdings and engaging in long-term land use planning is critical to reducing human-wildlife conflict. It can help communities strategically decide where to expand in order to reduce encroachment on animals’ habitats, and better balance community needs and conservation imperatives. Local communities must be active participants in this effort, helping to both secure their rights and ensure that Zambia’s rich biodiversity is protected for the next generation.

The U.S. government-supported Public-Private Alliance for Responsible Minerals Trade (PPA) offers a successful model for advancing responsible mineral sourcing in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Great Lakes Region of Central Africa.

Minerals needed for our electronic devices such as computers and cellphones and renewable technologies such as electric vehicles are often sourced from conflict-affected countries with weak governance systems including the Democratic Republic of the Congo.  For these countries, mineral wealth can be a double-edged sword. Mining is a crucial economic sector and a direct source of livelihoods for an estimated two million artisanal and small-scale miners, but the sector is also known for its damaging effects: it can finance armed group activity, fuel corruption, and cause vast environmental damage, labor violations, and human rights abuses. 

Global demand for minerals is surging, especially for those minerals needed for low carbon technologies. More than ever before, we need better models to support responsible sourcing of minerals from high-risk areas. Responsible sourcing of minerals is an umbrella term used to describe sourcing designed to be “socially responsible,” “green,” or “sustainable” by implementing supply chain due diligence and sustainability schemes (Brink et al., 2019). For the last decade, the Public-Private Alliance for Responsible Minerals Trade (PPA) has advanced responsible sourcing of minerals from the DRC and the Great Lakes Region of Central Africa. 

The Alliance is a multi-stakeholder effort that brings together leaders from the private sector, government, and civil society to advance supply chain solutions to the issue of conflict minerals. It focuses on minerals linked to conflict and instability in the region and prioritizes tin, tantalum, tungsten, and gold. Jointly founded in 2011 by USAID and Department of State, the the Alliance offers funding and coordination support to organizations working in the Great Lakes region to develop verifiable conflict-free supply chains; align chain-of-custody programs and practices; encourage responsible sourcing; promote transparency; and bolster in-region civil society and governmental capacity. The  Public-Private Alliance for Responsible Minerals Trade Secretariat is managed by the civil society organization RESOLVE.

After ten years of supporting responsible sourcing, the leaders and influencers that make up the Alliance are assessing how to best address the next generation of challenges in responsible sourcing.  Since its inception, the Alliance has raised more than $2.5 million in private sector contributions, with an additional $36 million in parallel funding from USAID for mining governance and traceability projects.  Public-Private Alliance for Responsible Minerals Trade-supported projects include early support for the development of a conflict-free artisanal gold supply chain that led to the first export of conflict-free gold from the DRC to the United States, piloting community-based interventions to mitigate human rights abuses and increase women’s leadership in mining communities, and identifying and addressing barriers to responsible finance for the artisanal sector. Successful PPA projects such as conflict-free gold supply chains, may be scaled-up by large donors such as USAID. 

Virtual Delegation and the Next Generation

In December 2021, the Alliance held a virtual delegation to the Great Lakes Region of Central Africa, where nearly 70 attendees from the private sector, civil society, and the U.S. government discussed shared objectives and alignment and U.S. Embassy priorities. 

Lucy Tamlyn, U.S. Ambassador to the Central African Republic; Michael Hammer, U.S. Ambassador to the Democratic Republic of the Congo; and Marcia Eugenio, Director of the Office of Child Labor, Forced Labor, and Human Trafficking at the U.S. Department of Labor, opened the virtual delegation. PPA speakers included representatives from Apple, Google, Intel, and the civil society organization, IMPACT, among others.

“With its abundance of natural resources, the DRC is at the heart of the critical minerals discussion and will play a central role in the future of green energy,” Ambassador Hammer said in the opening remarks.

The Alliance members expressed continued commitment to responsible sourcing and identified shared challenges that would benefit from deeper engagement and collaboration with U.S. embassies in the region.  Alyssa Newman of Google reiterated that the Alliance, “is an important platform for connecting minerals governance to other issues and projects Google is investing in” and that Google would like it to continue to advance “due diligence and ethical supply chains, human rights, labor rights, and strengthen civil society and inclusive economic development.” Other potential areas of future collaboration that were raised included tax harmonization, the simplification of legal export processes, public-private co-investment opportunities, and the importance of tackling systemic issues including fiscal and governance reforms and land tenure.

As consumers and governments increasingly demand sustainable and ethical sourcing of minerals, public-private partnerships like the Public-Private Alliance for Responsible Minerals Trade are playing an invaluable role in bringing stakeholders from across the mineral supply chain together to discuss roadblocks and advance key objectives. The Alliance brings large private sector players to the table with civil society organizations and allows members to collectively support promising projects to ensure that increased demand for critical minerals does not come at the expense of local communities. As Intel’s Adam Schafer reflects, “As a downstream company,  Intel’s partnership with the PPA [the Alliance] has been a crucial connection to engage with in-region programs and stakeholders to allow a responsible path for mineral sourcing. We look forward to continued collaboration as we work towards our goal to responsibly source all of our critical minerals.” 

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The Public-Private Alliance for Responsible Minerals Trade has a tripartite membership from across 47 partners representing private sector, civil society, and government. Private sector members represent several sectors, including electronics and communications, automotive, aerospace and jewelry. There are 25 member companies, which include Amazon, Apple, Ford, Google, Intel, Microsoft, Signet, and Verizon. PPA’s civil society and academic members come from 16 organizations and trade groups, including Global Communities, IMPACT, IPIS, Pact, Solidaridad, and The Sentry. Government representatives include USAID, US Department of State, US Department of Labor, GIZ, and the International Conference on the Great Lakes Region. The OECD Centre for Responsible Business Conduct is an observer. 

Photo credit: Mike Loch

In November 2021 a different kind of mobile library came to Bong County, Liberia. Through funding from USAID’s Land Evidence for Economic Rights, Gender, and Equality (LEVERAGE) Activity and in partnership with Landesa, Talking Books are bringing information about the Land Rights Act, passed in 2018, to 31 rural communities in the Panta, Gahn, and Wrumah clans. Talking Books are simple, hand-held audio players that deliver audio messages in local languages to low-literacy populations in areas without consistent electricity and/or internet connection.

The passage of  the Land Rights Act marked an important milestone for land rights in Liberia. The Land Rights Act provides for the first time a nationwide process for communities to legally certify and manage their customary lands. The Land Rights Act also strengthens rural women’s legal rights to access and manage land by recognizing women as community members, mandating that each community member be allocated land for housing and agriculture, and requiring equal participation by women in community land governance bodies. However, biased gender norms, widespread lack of knowledge about women’s land rights in Liberia, and gendered barriers to accessing information and services mean that women are often left out of decisions about land and are unable to exercise their land rights.

To address these issues, USAID is partnering with the NGO, Landesa, to pilot an information campaign using Talking Books to build awareness about women’s land rights in Liberia. USAID’s LEVERAGE program is distributing Talking Books to women-headed households, ethnic minorities, women’s groups, and youth groups. Each Talking Book contains eight pre-recorded “chapters” that explain the Land Rights Act in a variety of local languages and dialects using culturally relevant concepts. The chapters cover the basics of the Land Rights Act and other topics such as the steps that communities can take to map their lands and apply for a formal land certificate, how to create by-laws and committees to manage the land as a community, alternative dispute resolution, women’s legal land and property rights, and the differences between tribal certificates and deeds. The chapters teach the importance of, and the legal requirement for, equal representation of women on all land management committees. Messages also explain women’s and men’s inheritance rights and explain women’s and men’s land rights inside and outside of formal and customary marriages, consistently emphasizing the rights of women as citizens and community members.   

Instead of attending a one-time community training session, people can listen to the messages on Talking Books at their own pace, as many times as they like, and while doing other activities. This flexibility is especially important for women who face additional constraints on their time, mobility, and access to information and public spaces. Listeners can also record their questions and comments about the messages on the Talking Books for LEVERAGE activity staff. Using Talking Books also enables women, men, and communities to continue to learn about their land rights during the COVID-19 pandemic when frequent large gatherings are not safe.

After listening to the Talking Books, communities hold a town hall meeting to discuss their questions with local land tenure experts. Town halls include separate sessions for women to raise their questions and challenges with land rights in a setting that is less public and less influenced by gendered dynamics of public speaking. Questions that community members raise during town halls and that they record on the Talking Books will inform segments of Landesa’s nationally broadcast Land Is Life radio show. The show features prominent Liberian personalities andlinks communities across the country to a national conversation on women’s land rights. 

Bringing information on women’s land rights to women, men, and youth and fostering community conversations about women’s land rights at a time when Liberia’s communities are beginning the process of formalizing land rights and establishing community land governance bodies is critical. The LEVERAGE activity aims to increase women’s participation in land governance and supports their secure and equitable access to land according to the law. 

Why Women’s Land Rights Matter

Ownership and control over assets are central to women’s economic empowerment and their ability to contribute to local, national, and global economies. For many women, the most valuable of these assets are the land and natural resources from which they earn a living, provide for their families, and invest in their communities. Through programs, partnerships, research and policy reforms, USAID is working on the ground to address  the barriers women face to accessing and controlling land, as well as the benefits that secure land and resource rights bring to women, their families, and communities.

 

Across the U.S. Government, USAID is a leader in using evidence.  Evidence-based programming is a foundation for effective development. One of INRM’s main tasks is to assist USAID’s Operating Units with the use of evidence to support integrated ENRM programming. For example, using evidence and knowledge to strengthen gender equality and social inclusion is a core focus of INRM, which is reflected across all of its activities and buy-ins. INRM deploys a combination of methods for evidence generation and synthesis, aiming to improve the utility of knowledge products to inform future programming decisions.

See below for some related updates from INRM and resources from across USAID that explore the use of evidence to support the achievement of development objectives.

In this digest:

INRM’s current evidence work

• Applying systematic approaches to fill evidence gaps for artisanal and small-scale gold mining in Colombia
• Adapting analytical solutions to efficiently gather evidence on economic well-being in Madagascar
• Using a combination of methods to investigate impacts of COVID-19 on USAID environment programming
• Using evidence to test hypotheses about the effectiveness of participatory natural resources management strategic approaches

Additional USAID resources on evidence

• USAID Draft Evidence Framework
• Strengthening Evidence-Based Development
• Evidence in Action
• Advancing Gender and the Environment

Read the full digest here.

Gender equality guidelines will motivate Zambia’s traditional leaders to champion women’s rights in land and resource management

Women in Zambia, like in most countries, have less access to land, productive resources, and opportunities than men. Due to discriminatory gender norms that view men as heads of household, men typically have more decision making power at both the household and community level. This leads women to have less of a voice in decisions about land use, income earning opportunities, household finances, and community resource distribution. 

Traditional leaders hold political, social, and cultural power in the country, and as such, can play a key role in shifting harmful gender norms and advancing gender equality. Under Zambia’s 2014 National Gender Policy, traditional leaders are required to promote gender equality in their chiefdoms. In response to this mandate, the House of Chiefs, an elected body of chiefs that provides coordination and operational support to traditional leaders throughout the country, have proven they are willing to promote gender equality advocacy campaigns, taking a proactive role in rolling out the Campaign Against Child Marriages and Gender-Based Violence and the National Action Plan on Climate Change. However, when it comes to practical action, they lack the tools to turn these national advocacy strategies into real local level reforms. 

Gender Guidelines 

In November, the House of Chiefs launched the Gender Guidelines for Traditional Leaders in the Management of Natural Resources in their Chiefdoms. The guidelines are a set of practices for strengthening women’s land and resource rights within Zambia’s 288 chiefdoms. They provide traditional leaders with tools to encourage gender equality in policies and activities at the local level. The guidelines are the result of a multi-year partnership between the United States Agency for International Development’s (USAID) Integrated Land and Resource Governance (ILRG) program and the Zambia House of Chiefs to promote women’s land rights, address harmful gender norms, and increase women’s participation in natural resource management. 

Other activities under this partnership include the Chalimbana University Diploma Course on Traditional Leadership, a masterclass specifically designed for Chiefs and traditional leaders, which includes gender equality and social inclusion in its curriculum and is now in its second year. USAID is also working with indunas, or the local advisors to chiefs, in a year-long dialogue focused on identifying and changing gender norms that hinder women’s land rights. 

The guidelines focus on strengthening gender-responsiveness in areas and practices where chiefs have legal and social power such as land, forestry, wildlife, water, agriculture, climate change, child marriage, and education. In the area of women’s access and ownership of lands, the guidelines promote the participation of women in land committees, and they ban practices that amount to land-grabs from widows, including forcing widows to marry a husband’s relative in order to access land. In forest management, the guidelines bring women into local community forest management groups and provide access to extension services. Across the guidelines, chiefs are encouraged to challenge discriminatory gender norms and champion women leaders. The guidelines also provide tools to track progress against common goals and assess how these leaders are contributing to broader national gender equality initiatives. 

Implementation 

Across Zambia, traditional leaders have a great deal of power and influence. They have jurisdiction over vast swaths of customary land and resources and control everything from land use and access to inheritance rights. In their chiefdoms, they hold decision making power, mediate disputes, and act as the liaison with government officials. As authorities on cultural practices, traditional leaders can play a key role as champions of gender equality at the local level where discriminatory gender norms drastically restrict women’s access to and control over land and resources. These guidelines are a crucial step, as national laws that protect women’s land rights and inheritance protections do not extend to customary land. 

The guidelines will first be piloted in two areas over the next year to help assess how the House of Chiefs can support their implementation across Zambia’s 288 chiefdoms. Launched by the Chair of the House of Chiefs, Senior Chief Luembe, and the Minister of Local Government and Rural Development, Gary Nkombo, the guidelines provide an example of how chiefs can create local and culturally appropriate practices that respond to government policy. Minister Nkombo highlighted the importance of chiefs in influencing customs, particularly in rural areas.

“These guidelines take us a step further in achieving our goal as a Ministry to operationalize the gender policy and achieve the developmental goals of our nation,”  Minister Nkombo said at the event.

“There is no doubt that the measures proposed in these guidelines, if well implemented, will greatly benefit our chiefdoms and help us live our mandate as gender champions,” explains His Royal Highness Chief Luembe, Chairperson, House of Chiefs.

Q&A with three rural women from Tolima about claiming their land rights and inspiring women in their communities.

This blog was originally published by Land for Prosperity. 

As part of the massive land formalization campaign in Ataco Municipality, Tolima, USAID Land for Prosperity Activity joined Colombia’s Land Restitution Unit (URT) to deliver a series of workshops to empower rural women ranging in age about property rights, land ownership, the care economy, and gender-based violence.

The women, who are involved in land restitution and formalization processes, will then replicate the knowledge with other women from their communities. In this interview, the following three women talk about their experience:

• Jimena Gutiérrez, 18, is finishing high school and works as a guard for the Mesa de Pole indigenous community.
• Laura Sanabria, 26, is a feminist and sociology student, an activist, and the leader of the Ataicamas Santiago Perez youth organization.
• Aracely Montano, 56, is a mother, housewife, and for the two years has been involved in a land restitution process.

Why do you think these empowerment workshops are only for women?

Aracely: Our gender has been abandoned, and they don’t listen to us. Because of sexism, men are always the ones who lead and make decisions.

Jimena: So that women are empowered and fight for their rights. Women’s rights are constantly being violated, and these spaces highlight how women are also capable, just as much as men.

Which do you think is the biggest obstacle that women face in their communities when it comes to expressing their rights?

Aracely: Because of sexism we have never been heard, men are always saying that they are the only ones that can work or start a project, and we can’t. They always say: “You? Who is going to listen to you? Leave it to us men.”

Laura: The biggest obstacle here is the ignorance of the population. Most institutions are centralized in the department’s capital, even though Ataco has 107 villages and most of the population lives in rural areas.

How can women begin to overcome these obstacles?

Jimena: Working together as women, because honestly, there is very little that one can achieve alone. But if we come together to fight for our rights and for ourselves, we can show people that we are capable and we can achieve what we put our mind to, we can change the law.

Laura: We need government institutions to come closer to our rural territories, to be present in the villages and reach the communities. We need strategies like this one. The government needs to reach small villages, visit the people, promote the roels and responsibilities of each entity, and tell us how we can access services related to gender and youth policies.

What benefits do you see for women who participate in these workshops?

Laura: Even though the main topic is rural property, several subjects that reach beyond land titling and restitution have emerged. These spaces have enhanced the ability of women to recognize gender-based violence, to recognize the fundamental work that they fulfill when it comes to caring for their homes and society at large; and especially to understand that the women’s work has not been valued as it should be, that women are instead invisible. The workshops have also taught us about self-care, because knowing about the dynamics of gender based violence allow us to create strategies to take care of ourselves, to decide that we do not want to experience this violence, and question certain practices that were once seen as normal.

The Land for Prosperity Activity created gender and social inclusion guidelines for the implementation of massive formalization efforts that focus on increasing the knowledge of women about land rights and the care economy. In Ataco, this includes a municipal commitment to guarantee the inclusion and participation of women, youth, and ethnic communities in all phases of land formalization.

The massive land formalization campaign, funded by USAID in partnership with the government, has reached and trained nearly 600 people in Ataco, of whom nearly half are women.

What has been the most important lesson that you have learned during the workshops?

Jimena: The workshop has highlighted our rights and taught us to fight for ourselves and support each other. There is a lot of criticism between women, but here they teach us to join forces and work together. As far as land ownership, even though we do not have the documents for the land we live on, there is a chance that it will be ours and the land title will have our names on it. We have been living there for over 10 years, this is the opportunity to have a home of our own.

 What does the term “empowered woman” mean to you?

Aracely: A woman who wants to move forward, a fighter, an entrepreneur, who starts her own projects, goes out, interacts with different people and projects, knocks on doors, asks for help, and in this way brings her village and her family forward.