EEEGL

Public dialogue before the land tenure regularization process

As part of our work on land tenure reform near the Volcanoes National Park in Rwanda, we have compiled the findings from the public dialogue and awareness programme which we conducted in three cells of Musanze District. This task was delivered in partnership with the National Land Centre (NLC). The exercise preceded the registration of land titles of the residents in the three cells bordering the park, conducted by NLC as part of the national Land Tenure Regularization Programme (LTRP).

The overall objectives of the CARE facilitated programme were:

1. to assist and enhance capacity of local institutions in the target area involved in land awareness and land dispute /conflict management in impartial and resourceful approach; and

2. to raise public awareness about the law governing land rights and dispute/conflict resolution mechanisms.

The programme was undertaken as a pilot activity to develop and test a model of awareness raising and public dialogue on the LTRP and land rights. It was delivered in close collaboration with NLC and local authorities (District, Sector and Cells) and in partnership with a local Rwandan NGO, the Rural Environment and Development Organization (REDO).

This model included a set of events and activities to raise public awareness about the LTRP, land rights as established under the Rwandan legal framework and land dispute resolution options at grassroots level. These activities included village level meetings, the display of a documentary film, focus group discussions (FGDs) with community representatives, and radio broadcasts. A separate report covers the technical capacity building activities targeting local officials and delivered before this set of public dialogue activities.

FGDs targeted landless residents, widows, women with husbands in jail, women involved in polygamous marriages, orphans / orphans head of household, people living with disabilities, recent repatriates and historically marginalized people. Three FGD sessions involved 66 people from these categories. We also organised 25 village meetings: these were open to all residents and saw the participation of 1,951 people (ca. 20% of the adult population).

The events provided opportunities to collect views from the populations on factors affecting land rights within their local context, and to engage in dialogue about the provisions of the legal system and of the forthcoming LTRP.

The dialogues highlighted the following key issues of concern to the local residents:

• Overall land availability has been declining dramatically due to unrelenting population growth in the area.

• Land tenure discussions were dominated by the concern surrounding the fact that virtually all people who owned land in the area, do so on the basis of an out-grower scheme dating back from the ‘60s. Tenure rights under this scheme were disputed at the time of our exercise.

• Participants indicated that 80% of local conflicts are land related; and these are mostly related to inheritance.

• The issue of the recent returnees’ access to land also looks prominent with regard to the LTRP; the discussions stressed that in those cases, whenever known ancestral rights to land are not recognised (which is not always the case), these should be addressed during the registration process. If these local discussions would not yield, cases should be referred to the Abunzi.

• Land rights of women were the major issue of attention. This related to a set of issues, including the custom of polygamy, which is very common in the area. In addition: (a) most marriages are not formally registered and most participants seemed aware that if a marriage is not registered, the wife would have problems in having her share of family land recognised; (b) customary biases in favour of male children denied girls rights over an equitable share of family land; (c) lack of protection of women’s inheritance rights for old cases pre dating the 1999 Inheritance Law (d) widows from non legally recognised or polygamous marriages; (e) several case studies brought to the fore the fundamental implications of the local understanding of women rights (or lack of it) under the law, as a common cause of conflicts with relatives, especially for widows.

• Disputes or concerns associated with polygamy refer both to rights of women engaged in polygamous relationships and those of the children born from them. Women in this condition appeared well aware of their weak position with respect to rights over family land. Yet, they were often very vocal in advocating for the rights of their children. Many women were rushing or fighting for registering their marriage, ahead of the LTRP. Yet, they feared that polygamy may prevent many of them to succeed.

• Entrenched customary biases affect inheritance rights of children. Widows and women in the dialogues highlighted that when it is time to transfer land through inheritance or Umunani, fathers tend to donate land to male children.

• Orphans were particularly uncertain of their rights under the law and expressed concerns related to potential abuse of influence by family members. Uncertainties were also associated at times with their dealing with local government authorities. Orphans from couples nor formally married were also a common case of concern:

• Participants discussed manners and channels to solve land tenure disputes. They generally acknowledged that local informal solutions prevailed in all the most common situations: these involved the role of extended family relations; local officials (village or cell) and eventually the Abunzi (mediators). Few cases ever go to court and local people prefer to resolve disputes locally.

• The dialogues listed the following dispute resolution problems: poor knowledge of land rights (especially of orphans and widows) among family members; and cases of overriding influence by wealthy parties or corruption biasing the local mediators.

• Participants acknowledged the lack of avenues locally to voice their concerns with particular regard to the rights of women not legally married and/or in polygamous relationships. No advocacy channel or organisation active locally was recognised in this regard.

We have posted the report of these findings in the document section of the website.

After this public dialogue process, NLC undertook the land registration exercise, meant to provide people with their land titles. This exercise is being concluded in the three cells targeted by our preparatory work.

CARE is also undertaking a detailed study in partnership with Landesa and in collaboration with the NLC. This study will assess the immediate impact of the public awareness programme on people’s knowledge and perceptions with regard to land tenure and titling. It will also establish detailed baseline knowledge on how decisions are taken within the families with regard to land ownership.

This whole work is meant to strengthen participation in and understanding of the crucial process of land reform taking place in this densely populated landscape.

Giuseppe Daconto, Regional Programme Coordinator

Revisiting our last annual team retreat

We are sharing and revisiting here the outcome of our annual retreat held last June in Kibuyie, Rwanda. We organize this event at the end of each fiscal year to provide an opportunity for stepping back from the daily pressure of work, to take a fresh look at our progress and achievements and to share experiences and viewpoints among the colleagues of CARE and IGCP teams in Rwanda and Uganda.

This year our retreat came in the steps of the Mid Term Review of the programme: that study, conducted in October-November 2009, provided us with an external opinion on our achievements and strategy and guided us on refocusing what we shall do during the second half of the programme.

Therefore, this year we decided to focus our annual reflection on how we do things, rather than on what we do. We considered that how we do things has profound implications on the sustainability of what we do. Most of our work aims at establishing local capacity and cooperative efforts among a range of parties. In the end, the quality and sustainability of these cooperation activities will determine the programme’s impact.

At at workshop, we carefully considered those attitudes and skills, which are required to establish and raise effective collaborations with partners and beneficiaries. Assessing these aspects may be elusive:  most project monitoring deals with measuring quantitative progress towards agreed targets. On the other hand, the quality of relationships is as important as difficult to grasp in most monitoring systems.

We considered both collaboration at institutional level (i.e., with counterparts and partners) and relationships with the beneficiaries that our programme intends to target (that is the poorest and most marginalized sections of the rural population living around the parks). To structure our assessment, we specifically discussed three aspects of our work:

• Equity: how should we assess whether our activities enable real participation and involvement of stakeholders, through community empowerment, dialogue, knowledge sharing and promotion of accountability?
• Partnerships: how should we assess whether the partnerships we are working through and supporting, are solid and effective?
• Conflicts: since conflicts always exist among stakeholders or may be unintentionally created, how do we mitigate this risk in our work?

We explored our strengths and weaknesses across these three critical questions. We agreed on how to approach and  answer them and formulated a set of indicators for each. We reviewed the evidence from our past work: we confirmed the extent of adoption of these approaches thus far, across the four themes of our work (enterprise, natural resource management, community empowerment, transboundary collaboration). The indicators will also help us assess our future progress under this light.

In the end, we identified tangible steps we need to take across our activities in the next phase, to ensure that we adhere to those three principles or approaches. These adjustments will be key factors to strengthen our capacity to produce impact with our work in the remaining phase of the project.

We have posted the meeting report in our library page.

Giuseppe Daconto, EEEGL Regional Programme Coordinator

Boosting potato production around Bwindi Impenetrable National Park

While potato farming is one of the major income generating enterprises in Kabale District in Uganda, harvests are typically low due to low quality seed, inappropriate varieties and inadequate farmer knowledge and skills, coupled with weak institutional capacity of the actors involved in the sector.

Farmers typically tell us that they are often let down by the quality of seed they plant. They plant the seeds they buy from open markets and most of the time they are already infected with diseases. This can affect their production at the end of the season in a major way.

To enhance high quality productivity of potatoes in Kabale District, EEEGL and the Kachwekano Zonal Agricultural Research and Development Institute (KAZARDI) have partnered to strengthen the capacity of the Uganda National Seed Potato Producers Association (UNSPPA).

KAZARDI employs and encourages a “flush out” system whereby it avails the basic seed potato to UNSPPA and other trained farmers who then produce commercial seed that is availed for ware potato production. However, UNSPPA and the other few groups do not satisfy both the actual and potential demand for quality seed potato. Our partnership is working to build the capacity of UNSPPA to plan, implement, and manage seed potato production and distribution to potato farmers. We see this effort, jointly with UNSSPA, and the farmers group, EEEGL and KAZARDI, as a strategy to strengthen the seed potato system by building a robust and larger institutional capacity and network. This system is expected to have several spin-offs resulting in the improved livelihoods of potato farmers.

We work both on extensions services and on organizational development. At field level, the first phase of training targeted 73 farmers in four “farmer field schools” in Ikumba Sub County, Kabale District, earlier this year. The EEEGL funded training was aimed at enhancing the agronomic skills of seed potato producers. The training, which was facilitated by UNSPPA, was well received by the farmers and is widely acknowledged as one way of increasing potato production levels.

To maintain quality, KAZARDI presently assesses the seed potato produced by UNSPPA members for both field assessment and laboratory tests. Other areas earmarked for training include Kirundo and Bukimbiri in Kisoro district. At the end of the training sessions, KAZARDI conducts field visits for routine monitoring of the progress of farmer field schools run by UNSPPA trainers as they do technical backstopping. Farmer field days will be held seasonally. At the end of each of the next three seasons, an internal evaluation and feedback workshop will be held.

At the same time, we are working with UNSSPA to strengthen its management capacity. This is essential for this organization to expand its membership based (currently only 25) and to build a network of farmers or farmer groups capable of producing quality seed potatoes and in turn train other farmers. I will share our strategy on this aspect in a forthcoming post.

Helen Ninsiima, CARE UGANDA

Bringing Virunga honey to markets

The beekeeping community in Kanungu District, with support from the EEEGL project, is to launch a company to help the growth of its upcoming honey industry.

In the initial phase of our project, we conducted a mapping of enterprise development opportunities in the region, which met business, social and environmental criteria. Beekeeping is a traditional activity in this region and raised a strong interest: the Bwindi Mgahinga Conservation Area has granted a large number of people the right to grow bees within regulated zone inside the park (we shall post separately about our work on it). People also grow bees outside the park. There are a number of people with solid skills in beekeeping, including traditional honey harvesters among the Twas.

However, despite years of work and a few assistance projects targeting local honey producers, these are still constrained by limited access to inputs and markets and production volumes are low. The industry today still has a marginal economic role, despite its potential.

We carried out a range of assessments with producers and stakeholders in Kanungu District. These led to the development of a strategy based on two main components: the organization of a business entity by the beekeepers; and structured linkages between these and buyers and service providers, to improve their skills, access to inputs and markets. I will introduce the first component in this post.

After a process of consultations, the beekeepers agreed to form a company limited by shares (which they judged more suitable, when compared to an association or a company limited by guarantee). Several local producers bought shares and became members. Some of them have skills and established roles in the local honey value chain (for example some produce hives, others keep bees, and do crude honey processing). Their strategy is to build the capacity of the company (as a profit making body) to produce quality bee hives and other inputs like harvesting kits; members will be equipped with knowledge and skills on proper beekeeping methods; they will be trained in honey collection, processing and marketing. In the end, the company is expected to become both an actor in the market and a service provider to its members.

To take the first step in formation of the company, the beekeepers selected an interim committee made up of 15 founder members during a stakeholders meeting at Holy Cross Guest House in Kanungu, in December 2009. The meeting attracted beekeepers’ representatives, Kanungu District Local Government agriculture field extension workers in the target sub counties, and the head of the District’s Production Department. The meeting was also attended by two bodies, the Uganda National Apiculture Development Association and a private company, Golden Bees Ltd, with whom we have since developed a structured engagement for business and market development support (I will post later on this). The committee worked on the statute of the Company, which is now being registered. Training activities have since started.

The enterprise is promoted in the 14 frontline parishes bordering Bwindi Impenetrable National Park in Kanungu District. It is premised on the need to boost income among poor, disadvantaged groups, especially woman-headed households and the Batwa. The members presently comprise both individuals and groups, including four groups of Twas.

Like many market oriented enterprise development strategies in challenging contexts, this strategy is ambitious. Yet, the process and analysis led us and beekeepers select this path as a feasible approach to try and overcome long known bottlenecks in the sector, seeking solutions which make both business and social sense.

Helen Ninsiima, CARE UGANDA