Land rights

I had a chance to participate in two pilot projects on property formalization conducted by Tanzania's Property and Business Formalization Programme, commonly known as MKURABITA. I was representing an NGO working with pastoralists. It was apparent from the projects that there was no framework for the security over communal lands, as was the case with individual or family property.

Communal grazing lands though set aside by village councils, albeit in inadequate sizes and relevance to the designated use, were generally considered by the village councils as reserve lands that could be open to re-allocation to other uses and users that might be considered to be more productive.

The pilot projects guidelines did not provide any framework for the security of the commons. It did not appear that the fact is much of a concern to merit investing in seeking a solution to the anomaly. The users of the commons did not have rights to the lands, even though their livelihoods depended on them. The common lands were then viewed as potentially a source of conlict. In one project, a clear disconnection between pastures and water sources for livestock was so evident, making one pastoralist joke that they needed a 'flying breed of livestock' to be able to take them over the farms to the watering points.

According to the projects, there was little or no concrete consideration to the linkages and security of cross-village-border resources used communally, such as water and seasonal pastures.

The urge grew to take advantage of a combination of various available policy, legal and administrative opportunities to raise the issue through a project such is being proposed. A disrtict land use framework plan is the ideal starting point as it concerns on resolving issues within the district that are beyond the capability and of a village council. Issues that concern about four or five villages, such as a pastoral grazing land, water catchment area or a large conservation scheme that might need to be decided at the district level.

A disrtict land use framework plan is the logical starting point to give the land stakeholders a general vision of the utilization of the district's natural resources. We need to develop a model that can be replicated and scaled up for the benefit of common property users.

Cultural Survival's involvement began when our then-executive director, Ellen Lutz, met Ngöbe community activists in a fact-finding trip to Panama. She saw their situation as a violation of their human rights as well as their land rights and agreed to support these grassroots Ngöbe communities in their long campaign for environmental, social, and land-rights justice. The Panamanian government has subsequently fought a long and unprincipled campaign of attrition and deception against the Ngöbe. Tactics include stonewalling, delaying, filing motions to dismiss, filing specious countercharges, and more, in the Panamanian courts and in the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. The IACHR found against the government and ordered the dam-building to stop, as it violated both national and international law. But the Panamanian government instead stepped up its harassment of its Indigenous People, and AES speeded up the dam-building. It's a "David and Goliath" story as the tiny unarmed Ngöbe communities attempt to resist phalanxes of bulldozers backed up by armed police. The defining moment was when we saw Isabel Becker's home bulldozed to the ground, and this kind grandmother and her family traumatized-- all due to AES, the dam, and the Panamanian government. Subsequent actions by Panama have proven the government's lack of good faith and shown that no one victory will last long without constant vigilance by the local people and better knowledge how to protect their land rights, from titling land up through navigating the international human rights court system. Our expert Board members, expert local consultants, allies in the Ngobe villages, and own experience with other Indigenous communities led us to the conclusion that local training and empowerment is the best next step, in addition to Harvard Law's pursual of the IACHR case in close partnership with Cultural Survival and our on-the-ground partners in Panama.

As a young woman living in the Festac town area of Lagos state, I witnessed an attempted disinheritance, firsthand. A lady on the street next to mine lost her husband who was a successful Medical Doctor. They were wealthy and lived in one of the best houses on their street. However, while the corpse of the deceased was still in the morgue, a large delegation from the deceased's family came calling on the widow who was grieving with her three grade school age children. We thought they came to console her, only to later discover that they had come demanding the keys to the couple's automobiles, the title documents to their matrimonial home, the deceased's cheque books and pretty much everything else of value. Their plan was to sell the house and put the woman and her little children in a rented 1 bed apartment because by their judgment, the
her matrimonial home which she had jointly built with her husband was now 'too large' for her and the children. On further inquiry, i discovered that the deceased had left no will, and had bought everything in his name, and so everything the deceased left behind was considered fair game by the extended family.

The only thing that saved the widow and her children from plunging headlong into artificial poverty was the timely intervention of some highly placed neighbors who had the assailants arrested and warned them to stay away from the property or face prosecution for stealing.A constant watch had to be kept over the family and the premises until the extended family was ready to be reasonable. During the process I discovered that the woman appeared absolutely helpless even though she was well educated and 'enlightened'. She simply had not thought about what could happen if she became widowed, and so she was totally ignorant of the existing laws, processes and everything else that was there for her protection. Not many women are lucky to have knowledgeable and influential neighbors who will come to their aid and so many lose everything they had worked for in the twinkling of an eye. I decided I had to do something about it and during the thought process, this innovation was born. Before this time, i had been using drama as a tool to sensitize Nigerians on the cultural violence visited on widows in the name of funeral rights, but this experience made me realize that we must take our intervention to the next level, and give women a fighting chance!

In 1992, while working as director of the KZN province for South African Women’s Association, it became very apparent to RWM’s director, Sizani Ngubane, that there was a large discrepancy between the public visibility of men and women. Policies and public narratives were being informed only by the experiences of men. Women’s experiences, thoughts, beliefs and customs, were not being documented and thus increasingly under or misrepresented and threatened. Unfortunately at the time, Sizani was not able to begin implementing her dream of a women-driven documentary collaboration, and the project had to wait until 2007.
Beginning 2007, RWM began experimenting with documentaries and photo voice collaborations with several allies, most notably University of California Davis. These projects centered around third party documentation of rural women’s experiences. However, these collaborations have empowered our organization to take that final step and begin planning a participatory video project that provides both sustainability and longevity in its product and support.
In May of 2010, Sizani was connected with the organization InSight Share, well known in South Africa for their successful participatory video projects. Over several meetings, the mutual beliefs of respect and community empowerment were realized between RWM and InSight Share, and Sizani’s dream began to take tangible shape.
Like RWM, when InSight Share enters a community, the organization does not come with an agenda. It is up to the community to inform and shape the project. Here is a direct quote from Neville Meyer of InSight Share during one of RWM and InSight Share's meetings: “All we do is to facilitate, we might not even end up with a film. We could just be facilitating dialogue, but this is what builds energy and momentum.”
The first several days of the project are spent experimenting with the camera, which is then followed by an in depth process of deciding what the specific subjects of the film will be. This is followed by a selection and debate process about what subjects will make the biggest impact and shift in our community.
RWM and InSight Share are incredibly excited about this proposed project and we mutually feel that this project will have long-lasting, positive impacts on the communities involved, expanding year after year and helping to empower others.

The Internet Bar Organization (IBO) is global non-profit organization founded in 2005 to further the rule of law and promote peace through projects encouraging access to education, technology, and poverty alleviation. IBO grounds its work in the effective use of technology and communication to streamline and expand the capabilities of developing communities. IBO has previously used its ability to harness technology with successful micro-commerce justice and development initiatives in several countries, including Sierra Leone, Haiti, Ghana, and Brazil. The Internet Silk Road project has been developed as an initiative to establish functional land dispute resolution mechanisms in Afghanistan.

The history of land tenure in Afghanistan is long and convoluted. Years of conflict, internal migration and displacement, and culturally unique land use have frustrated attempts at cohesive land registry. Improvement of the dysfunctional status quo will require significant support as millions of internationally displaced Afghans return to their homeland, some 1.7 million returning from Pakistan alone. As Afghanistan transforms from political and economic insecurity, establishing effective rule of law regarding land tenure will be a significant piece of the development puzzle.

Today, the situation has seen notable improvements but remains deeply flawed. Beginning in 2003, the USAID Land Titling and Economic Restructuring Activity (LTERA) program undertook a significant effort to survey land, electronically register deeds, and create a comprehensive land administration that was adopted by President Hamid Karzai in October, 2009. Unfortunately, land registry is still rife with corruption, violence, and competing claims. For example, in rural areas local elders often require a 30% fee to sign a title after a land transaction. These signatures are required for the state to register the land, but there is no guarantee that the transaction will subsequently be recognized. When disputes inevitably arise, the courts are backlogged to the point that it takes months, sometimes years to process claims, while suspicion of the formal judiciary and lack of regional security mean that verdicts may not be accepted or enforced.

Working with local implementation partners, the United States Institute for Peace (USIP) has, with some success, introduced pilot projects aimed at creating a workable and respected dispute resolution mechanism under the aegis of the provincial-level executive branch, but endemic registry issues and failure to involve the judiciary threaten the fundamental efficacy of the model. At present, the system continues to be dogged by ineffective dispute resolution at both the formal and informal level, a gap that any successful project working to address these problems must bridge. Effective documentation and record keeping, both before and after dispute resolution takes place, must be implemented to ensure that successes can be built upon, instead of being turned under by subsequent shifts in policy and implementation.

I am financial economist by profession and worked for over a decade in Asia's financial markets. I could see that poor "valuation" of assets and the lack of clarity about ownership led to a great deal of waste and inefficiency. Indeed, the global financial crisis of 2008-9 was a result of a failure of proper valuation of financial instruments and of real estate. However, the problem is even more severe when we are dealing with both natural assets and to the property rights framework faced by the world's poor. It is my view that problems like poverty and environmental degradation will only be solved when valuation and ownership is clearly defined.

There are two. The main one is after working with different projects and seeing how the different partner NGOs each worked with their locations and each project with its locations, to develop community based organizations both in the fisheries and water resource sectors. But none of them really talked with one another, and when project funding ended the community based organizations (CBOs) were left on their own. Because I was regularly in contact with many of the CBOs they would ask me for advice and information, but were unaware of what other CBOs even ones not so far away were doing. It seemed an obvious step to help CBOs network. Initial attempts at this brought interest from the CBOs, but didn’t; sustain and needed a focus. The innovation then came from seeing how several small research projects that we were involved in could fit together – taking an integrated or system view of floodplain natural resource management, an inclusive structured approach to participatory planning, and the potential gains from learning between CBOs and from peer pressure among the CBOs.

The second one is from CBOs inviting to visit Patuakhali and Barguna districts in the coastal region and seeing vast areas dry and devoid of crops in the dry season when most of the country is green with irrigated HYV rice. From what the communities said it was apparent that climate change was already affecting the area and with no suitable groundwater resources and the main rivers too saline, there was little scope for agriculture except for a risky monsoon rice crop. Consequently many poor households there depend on seasonal migration by men to towns, leaving women and families in a vulnerable situation. We had already been working with other communities to test and encourage use of low water demand crops, but here even those crops would need some water. Also some CBOs elsewhere had excavated dried up waterbodies to make fish sanctuaries. So the idea came to merge and revise this into an approach suitable there – excavating some dried up small channels to hold rainwater for crops and fish, and to help the poor organise for collective irrigation and to access land that was lying fallow. Rather than come into conflict with local elites it as better to encourage them to be champions and to offer land to lease to the landless as a win-win solution.

During the middle of the 1990s, pasture degradation was becoming evident almost everywhere in Mongolia. Herders did not know how to deal with it. The government did also not have a response. This led to deep reflection about the serious problem the country was facing. Through contacts with IDRC the opportunity arose to investigate a possible way out (via the introduction of co-management) –this served as the spark for the innovation.

When I joined SAKTI in 1987, the organization was working on helping tribal women who were deserted by non tribal men. I used to conduct counseling to these women and train them to argue their cases claiming maintenance allowance without engaging lawyer.
The maintenance cases used to take long time. Though judgment was given in favor of the women, there was a delay in getting maintenance.
During that time we realized that mobilizing women to secure property rights is only the permanent solution. In the process of identifying land we realized the techniques of understanding the data base maintained by the Govt. A comparison of information in the records with facts in the field revealed many differences. We approached the officials to resolve the discrepancies.
We started educating the women and force the officials to acquire the land distribute it to them

In East Godavari, we were dealing with individual cases. When we started working in West Godavari and Khammam Districts, we have changed our strategy to identify enough land for all the landless members in the community. Such approach from individual to community has greatest impact. This strategy was recommended by the State Govt officials to the Govt of India to provide property rights to tribal women.

In 2005, I traveled to Hambantota, Sri Lanka, where I met Shareena at her little roadside food stand, selling homemade snacks. A year after the 2004 tsunami, relief had poured in. However, signs of devastation were still everywhere: broken-down houses, boats beached on roads a mile from the shoreline, and tattered relief tents still being used as shelter.

Shareena had received a microcredit loan from a local women's organization, which was administering a U.S. aid-supported program to help women pick themselves back up. With her $50 loan, Shareena was able to rebuild her business: She bought a new stove that she made snacks on to sell near her home, supporting her son and disabled husband.

This, of course, is the kind of women's microcredit success story the world loves to hear. Women get small loans, work hard, and more than 95% of the time, they repay their loans. In fact, Women Thrive Worldwide (of which I am Co-founder and President), advocated with members of Congress to set up the post-tsunami, women-focused small-grants fund that enabled Shareena to get her loan.

However, while microcredit has earned its rightful place as a player in the global economy and as a tool to reduce poverty, I've also seen firsthand its limitations. Shareena and millions of women like her have to be more focused on repaying their debt than on investing in growing their business.

Microcredit produces micro-income, and, because of the unique barriers that women face, there's often no place beyond “micro” for women to go. For example, Shareena could never access the $5,000 loan she would need to expand her business because she doesn’t own land or any other collateral to obtain a loan.

There are more than one billion people worldwide living on a dollar a day or less, the majority of whom are women. We are not going to reach all of them with individual $100 loans. There is not enough microcredit, and microcredit is not enough.

Large-scale, sustainable change must address fundamental barriers that affect women. Because land is the most important (and often most inaccessible) asset for the world’s poor, system-changing solutions must include land and legal reform. Further, providing secure land rights to women gives women and their communities a foundation for economic growth. Investing in women’s land rights is not only the right thing to do, but also the smart thing to do.

GROOTS Kenya focuses on four program areas:
1. Women Leadership and Governance, started 1995
2. Community Responses to HIV and AIDS, started 2000
3. Women and Property Program, started 2004
4. Community Resilience to Disaster and Climate Change, started 2009

WDGs are the core of the Women and Property Program, which began in 2004 as a response to a societal problem identified by home-based caregivers working in the well established Community Responses to HIV and AIDS program. These women who were caring for widows with HIV/AIDS and orphaned children came to realize that on death of the male head of the family, the bereaved dependants were often thrown out of their homes and became destitute. Many such vulnerable, disinherited women and children had nowhere to go but into the slums, as most of the victims could not afford to engage with the formal legal system due to cost, ignorance, distance, language, procedures, and cultural values.
The main grievances were “land grabbing” by in-laws, widows being chasing away from their matrimonial homes, and orphaned children being chasing away from their parents’ home.

When the home-based caregivers reported this issue, GROOTS Kenya helped grassroots women in six regions map the extent and magnitude of cases of property stripping and disinheritance of women and vulnerable groups. The findings were documented and shared in organized forums in each of the regions. The mapping exercise revealed an escalation in harassment, disinheritance, and asset stripping of vulnerable women and orphans. The results were shocking among communities, provincial administrators, land board members, and human rights organizations working in the respective local communities.

Following dialogue sessions, the community leaders (village elders, opinion leaders, chiefs, district government representatives, and area councillors) agreed that volunteers could take up the role of community watchdogs. They were to be vigilant for potential disinheritance cases, help vulnerable community members learn about and exert their rights, and mediate disputes within their communities. And hence, the model for Community Land and Property WDGs was born, to safeguard access to property and inheritance rights for women and vulnerable groups.

We faced the problem of not actualizing our vision which is bringing quality housing to the man on the street and rural area development. We had a survey and found out that some wealthy men had 60 or more houses when many did not even have one. This became an area of concern for us. We also found out that many of the wealthy people had acquired large hectares of land for farming. They export these crops leaving the country with no food security. These trail of events became the stressor that led to the birth of our initiative.

I am a chartered Accountant, Advocate and a Company Secretary with over 50 years of Management experience. I am a committed citizen. I am a senior member of the Lions clubs International and a PAST DISTRICT GOVERNOR OF THE LIONS CLUBS. I am also committed in social service.I am interested in bringing in a change as a changemeker.

The Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe families in the project locations earn less than $23 per month. Most of these families are working as farm laborers on lands owned by absentee land lords. The women being earning members of the family occupy an important position and play a vital role. Women perform more than 70% of the agricultural activities, but are still not recognized as farmers because they are not landowners. As per the given fact, the state government implemented the policy of patta (leasing 0.5 acre of land to landless families) to enhance the socio-economic conditions of these socially excluded families. The average size of holdings is only 0.39 hectare for Scheduled Castes. However, the status of the community remains the same because the allotted land cannot produce enough to meet the immediate needs of the family. Ironically, many of these families sell the lands to meet their needs, leading to further marginalization.

Since its inception MSS has been devoting its attention to address issues that influence women and their rights. During our years of community development experiences in the regions of Indo-Nepal border areas, we learned that there is a need to provide an opportunity to the women in the form of land ownership for their socio-economic development and empowerment. MSS intervened with a program that promotes inclusive development of socially excluded women with focus on remunerative agriculture support, and effective utilization of common property resources.

When I arrived at the UN in New York City after riding there by horseback from the west coast for 382 days, I realized that I needed to make this same journey for the Akha but this time around the world.