Last week at the World Bank Conference on Land and Poverty in Washington, DC, Namati championed legal empowerment and local capacity-building as key elements of community land protection efforts. We shared our experience and research on Community Land Protection in three sessions during the conference:
1. Scaling up strategies to secure community land and resource rights
This session, co-organized by the Rights and Resources Initiative, the International Land Coalition and Oxfam, focused on strategies for scaling up community land mapping and legal empowerment in order to strengthen the recognition of community land and resource rights around the world.
Rachael Knight, Program Director for Namati’s Community Land Protection Program presented on Namati’s pioneering work with civil society organizations and communities in Uganda, Liberia, and Mozambique. The presentation emphasized that long-term, equitable protection of community lands requires community empowerment and the strengthening of intra-community mechanisms for good governance. Without these, a limited focus on mapping and titling alone can make land dealings more unjust and speed community land alienation. Therefore, Namati uses and advocates for a comprehensive approach to community land protection that explicitly includes land governance and management mechanisms.
The other presentations in this session were:
2. Reframing women’s security of tenure from a grassroots perspective
Marianna Bicchieri of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations presented a paper co-authored with Rachael Knight, Program Director for Namati’s Community Land Protection Program that emphasizes the critical importance of working at the community level to secure women’s land rights. The paper makes the case that individual land titling is an ineffective strategy for protecting women’s land rights when it runs against customary legal paradigms and ignores the cultural contexts that govern women’s familial, social, and economic relationships.
3. Mapping of community tenure
Rachael Knight, Program Director for Namati’s Community Land Protection Program also presented a paper co-authored with John Taiowa Young-Taft, from the Gulf University for Science and Technology, Kuwait which summarizes statistical analysis of data from Namati’s community land protection pilot in Liberia, Uganda, and Mozambique.