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Girls Not Brides, a global partnership of more than 200 Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) committed to ending child marriage, recently featured an article on how women’s land rights can help reduce child marriage. The article describes how USAID’s Kenya Justice project has helped improve girls’ access to education by working with customary justice systems to strengthen women’s land rights in target communities.

Though Kenya’s 2010 constitution expanded women’s rights to own and inherit land, legal reform alone is often insufficient to improve women’s access to land rights in many communities. The Kenya Justice project, which is implemented by USAID’s Seattle-based partner Landesa, works with local communities to raise legal awareness and improve women’s ability to exercise their rights.

By engaging in a dialogue with local traditional authorities to increase understanding of the contributions women make to their community, the Justice project has helped to elevate the status of women. Last year, for the first time, women were elected as tribal elders. In addition to enhancing women’s ability to govern and exercise their rights, strengthening women’s land rights also empowers them economically. According to the article “when women gain joint control over their family’s land, they gain a powerful resource they can use to not only feed their children, but also generate income. And with equal control over those funds, women are earmarking family resources to pay school fees for all their children – girls included.”

According to AllAfrica.com, Liberia’s Inquirer newspaper recently honored Philomena Bloh Sayeh as 2012 Director General of the Year. Ms. Sayeh is the Director General of Liberia’s Center for National Documents and Records Agency (CNDRA) and is a key partner in USAID’s Land Policy and Institutional Support (LPIS) project. This award recognizes the ambitious reform efforts that Ms. Sayeh, with the support of USAID, has overseen at CNDRA during the past year.

According to the article, “Madam Sayeh has worked tirelessly in modernizing land records and recording systems following a 20-year civil conflict in Liberia”. Insecure rights and disputes over land played a major role in Liberia’s internal conflict, which ended in 2003 and Ms. Sayeh’s determined efforts to improve land administration systems are essential to strengthening resource governance and reducing conflict in Liberia.

USAID’s LPIS project has supported Ms. Sayeh’s efforts to modernize CNDRA since 2010. The LPIS project provided assistance to CNDRA in adopting an electronic deed registry software solution that will allow Liberia to digitize land records for the first time ever. The project also supported the rehabilitation of the CNDRA customer service center, which opened on September 17, 2012, and now employs 14 staff members trained in digitizing land records. More than 500 deeds have been scanned and registered in the two months since the center opened, compared with 806 deeds registered in all of 2011.

IFPRI has just published a new paper that considers whether or not policy changes related to gender equality and women’s empowerment in Ethiopia are, or are not, mutually reinforcing. One set of changes involves certification of land use rights at the community level. See here for a discussion of USAID’s project supporting these efforts. Certification allows husbands and wives to be listed as joint holders of the rights (these rights are inheritable by the remaining spouse when the other spouse dies). At approximately the same time, the Family Code in the country was revised to provide for the equal division of marital assets upon divorce. Using a panel dataset and seven collection rounds the paper finds that “the land registration process and the reform of the Family Code may have mutually reinforcing effects on women’s rights and welfare. While this example is obviously rooted in the Ethiopian context, it raises the possibility that similar reform efforts may be complementary in other countries as well.” This suggests that coordinated policy efforts may be particularly helpful at closing the gender asset gap: an important strategy for improving women’s agricultural productivity and the health and nutrition of children.

This article focuses on recent policy changes implemented by the Government of Tanzania. The Government has been criticized in local and international media for supporting harmful large-scale land acquisitions. In response, policy makers have placed a cap on transfer size: investors can acquire no more than 10,000 hectares for sugar production and no more than 5,000 hectares for rice production (two key agricultural commodities in the country). But will a cap stop harmful transfers? Maybe, but caps are not necessarily the “major step” that the article suggests. For one, investors may be able to apply for multiple parcels and still accumulate large holdings. For another, caps simply do not address a key concern in Tanzania: improving the process of community consultations that occur when lands are shifted from control by villages to control by investors. Improving this process so that it is more transparent, more participatory and includes clearer benefits and obligations for villagers and for investors is essential to limit conflict and improve economic opportunity for local people. Nor do caps address a somewhat technical issue under Tanzanian law: the need to develop a land use plan before villages can apply for a certificate that recognizes and secures their legitimate claim to lands. This process is time consuming and expensive so many villages lack certificates, making it easier for some investors to lease land already occupied. While capping transfers will raise the cost of acquiring rights to large parcels in Tanzania, for villagers the risk of unwanted and harmful transfers remains.

According to a recent article from Reuters AlertNet, land is the first issue on the agenda at the historic peace talks in Cuba between the Government of Colombia and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). Unequal land distribution is a factor in Colombia’s decades-long internal conflict. If the current peace negotiations are to succeed and Colombia is to achieve enduring peace and stability, land issues must be addressed.

In order to facilitate greater involvement by citizens in the peace process, the Government of Colombia has established regional peace commissions to solicit community input and a website that allows ordinary citizens to make suggestions to peace negotiators. Land restitution policies and land tenure reform are among the issues being discussed in these outreach efforts.

USAID has supported the Government of Colombia in its efforts to address conflicts involving land and rural development for the past decade. USAID provides technical assistance to the Government of Colombia to help strengthen land-related legal and policy formulation, including land restitution programs for Colombia’s Internally Displaced Persons, programs to strengthen the land rights of smallholder farmers, indigenous, and Afro-Colombian communities, as well as institutional capacity building at the regional and local levels.

Click here for more information about land tenure in Colombia.

On December 15th, USAID and the Afghanistan Ministry of Women’s Affairs (MOWA) launched a nationwide public information and awareness campaign about Afghan women’s rights to inherit and own land and property. The campaign is part of USAID’s Land Reform in Afghanistan (LARA) which works with the Government of Afghanistan to build the local capacity necessary to design and implement transparent, effective land tenure reform.

Afghanistan has a complex, overlapping and often conflicting system of land and property rights, which includes informal systems, civil law, sharia law, and state laws. The LARA project works to clarify and strengthen property rights while improving public information and awareness so that Afghans – especially vulnerable populations, such as women and minorities – can better exercise those rights.

According to USAID Afghanistan Director Dr. S. Ken Yamashita:

“The campaign we are launching today is of critical importance to the citizens of Afghanistan, men and women. Many Afghan citizens still struggle to secure their rights to land and property.”

Oxfam is running a series of blogs on the Future of Agriculture. Day 6’s discussion includes a post by Madiodio Niasse, Secretariat Director of the ILC. Mr. Niasse focuses on the importance of securing women’s rights to land tenure as a strategy to improve agricultural productivity and food security. He writes: “FAO argues that closing the gender gap in agriculture would increase average crop yields some 20–30 per cent on women’s lands, equivalent to a 2.5-4 per cent increase in domestic food production, and a 10–20 per cent decrease in the number of undernourished people worldwide (100–150 million out of 950 million people). Evidence from around the world shows that when women have more influence over economic decisions (as is the case when they have secure land rights), their families allocate more of their incomes to food, health, education, children’s clothing, and children’s nutrition.” More than this though, providing more secure land rights would help promote the voice and participation of women – a key goal of improved governance: “Addressing the gender disparities in land access would also help improve rural women’s social inclusion and identity. Having a land title often means having a physical address and thus access to birth certificates, identity cards, and voting documents, all of which are indispensable if women are to exercise their citizens’ rights and take part in debates on issues of common interest.” Mr. Niasse makes the case that protecting these rights is “smart and it’s right.” USAID works to promote women’s land and resource rights around the world, helping build economically and socially communities.

In early December 2012, the Government of the Central African Republic officially launched a land tenure reform process. This process commenced with a multi-stakeholder workshop where two inter-ministerial committees were launched by the Prime Minister. The Prime Minister indicated the government’s intent to lead a public consultation process that results in the formulation of a consolidated vision for land governance, taking into consideration international principals such as the Voluntary Guidelines for the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forests.

USAID’s PRADD project assisted with the launch of the land tenure reform workshop and will sit on the two inter-ministerial committees formed. Lessons learned from the project’s experience in documenting and recording customary property rights within artisanal diamond mining areas will be critical in informing aspects of the reform process. Media coverage of the land tenure reform launch workshop in Bangui, was broad.

On December 11th, CNN’s Fareed Zakaria featured an article on strengthening women’s land rights in Kenya. The article appears in the CNN Global Public Square blog and was written by Tim Hanstad, President of Landesa, a Seattle-based NGO and partner in several USAID Land Tenure projects. The article highlights USAID’s Kenya JUSTICE project, which works with local customary justice systems to improve women’s land rights.

As Hanstad points out, Kenya’s 2010 constitution strengthened statutory land rights for women, but legal action alone is often insufficient to firmly establish new rights. Increased awareness and greater community acceptance of those statutory rights is required to make them a reality for many women. To address this issue, the Kenya JUSTICE project works with communities to raise legal awareness and train local leaders on aspects of the new constitution. The project has also been effective at elevating women to positions of authority within key customary decision-making bodies, such as groups of tribal elders. As elected elders, women are able to govern and exert cultural influence in order to enshrine their new land rights in reality, as well as in law. For more information on the Kenya JUSTICE project see here.

Last week’s 2012 Plenary Meeting of the Kimberley Process Certification Scheme – which attempts to prevent the trafficking of conflict diamonds – featured two noteworthy achievements for USAID’s ongoing efforts to strengthen land tenure and property rights and prevent conflict. The first achievement was a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between USAID and the European Union to support the implementation of the Kimberley Process. Under this MoU, USAID and the EU will collaborate on the Property Rights and Artisanal Diamond Development (PRADD) program. The PRADD program, which currently operates in the Central African Republic, works to clarify and strengthen the property rights of artisanal miners, while increasing the benefits to mining communities through environmental rehabilitation, enhanced diamond traceability, and improved land and mining laws. USAID and the EU will co-fund the expansion of the PRADD program into Cote D’Ivoire.

This is the first time USAID and the EU have partnered on artisanal mining issues. This type of partnership allows donors to coordinate efforts and leverage resources for maximum impact, further opening the door for greater international cooperation in combating conflict diamonds and addressing other land tenure issues.

The second achievement was the adoption of the Washington Declaration, which formally incorporates development objectives into Kimberley Process implementation. The Washington Declaration – which was developed by the KP Working Group on Artisanal and Alluvial Production, with support from the U.S. Government, the Diamond Development Initiative, and others – contains several policy goals formulated under the PRADD program. The PRADD program has been instrumental in demonstrating the importance of economic development in bringing rough diamonds into legitimate chains of custody.