This guide from the Land and Equity Movement in Uganda and Namati presents a step-by-step process for communities to secure stronger legal protections for common grazing lands and improve local land governance. The instructions are specifically tailored to the context of customary community grazing lands in northern Uganda, drawing upon LEMU’s experience leading community land protection efforts since 2009.
In recent years, governments across Africa, Asia and Latin America have been granting vast land concessions to foreign and domestic investors for agro-industrial enterprises and resource extraction. Often, governments make concessions with a view to furthering development and strengthening the national economy. Yet in many cases, these land concessions dispossess rural communities and deprive them of access to natural resources vital to their livelihoods and economic survival. Even when communities welcome private investment, projects are often undertaken in ways that lead to environmental degradation, human rights violations, loss of access to livelihoods, and inequity.
Communities generally have little power to contest such land grants or advocate for terms more favorable to local prosperity, particularly where they operate under customary law and do not have formal legal title to their lands. In this context, communities need strong legal protections for their lands and natural resources, as well as expedient government implementation of clear, simple, and easy-to-follow legal procedures for the documentation of customary land rights.
Various nations have passed laws that make it possible for rural communities to register their lands as a single legal entity and act as decentralized land administration and management bodies (referred to herein as “community land titling” or “community land documentation”). These laws have the power to protect community lands according to customary paradigms and boundaries — including all family land, forests, grazing lands, water bodies, and other common areas critical to community survival. However, due to various political, financial and capacity constraints, these laws are often not widely or successfully implemented.
To investigate how to best support implementation of such laws, the International Development Law Organization (IDLO) launched a randomized controlled trial in Liberia, Uganda and Mozambique from 2009 to 2011, entitled the “Community Land Titing Initiative.” Together with the Sustainable Development Institute (SDI) in Liberia, the Land and Equity Movement in Uganda (LEMU) in Uganda, and Centro Terra Viva (CTV) in Mozambique, IDLO supported communities to follow their nation’s community land registration laws, taking note of the challenges and successes that transpired in the course of these efforts. The first study of its kind worldwide, the intervention’s goal was to better understand both the type and level of support that communities require to successfully complete community land documentation processes as well as how to best facilitate intracommunity protections for the land rights of vulnerable groups.
The study’s primary objectives were to:
1. Facilitate the documentation and protection of customarily held community lands through legally established community land titling processes;
2. Understand how to best and most efficiently support communities to successfully protect their lands and determine the types and level of support required to support communities in these processes; and
3. Devise and pilot strategies to guard against intra-community injustice and discrimination during community land titling processes, and to protect the land interests of vulnerable groups.
Findings and Recommendations:
This report details the communities’ various experiences undertaking the land documentation activities and summarizes the initial impacts of these efforts under the following subject headings: conflict resolution and prevention (encompassing boundary harmonization and demarcation); intra-community governance (encompassing by-laws/constitution drafting); and conservation and sustainable natural resources management (encompassing land and natural resource management plan drafting). It then briefly reviews the obstacles confronted relative to the administrative components of the process.
The report next outlines findings relative to the optimal level of legal intervention necessary to support communities’ successful completion of community land documentation processes as well as what endogenous factors may impact a community’s success. The report then details findings concerning how best to facilitate intra-community protections for the rights of women and other vulnerable groups during the land documentation process. It concludes by setting forth findings and recommendations intended to inform policy dialogue, help nations to refine and improve the implementation of existing community land documentation processes, and provide useful insights for countries seeking to develop laws and policies for community land documentation.
The report also concludes that community land documentation may be a more efficient method of land protection than individual and family titling, and should be prioritized in the short term.
ISBN: 978-0-9858151-0-3
The Kamukunji Community Legal Empowerment Centre is an equipped community-based and community managed legal aid and community legal resource centre based at Kamukunji Constituency, Nairobi County. It is a creative way of decentralizing legal empowerment initiative to enhance its access to justice in the community. Its mission is to empower the poor and the marginalized communities to access justice. Some of the services offered in the centre includes; legal clinics, referrals, capacity building on self representation, legal and human rights awareness, training of community paralegals, training of community human rights monitors, training on Alternative Dispute Resolution and legal and human rights resource centre.
The Community Empowerment Project, initiated by the Open Society
Foundations in Jordan, builds on and complements existing refugee
response efforts through legal empowerment and community-based
justice services. The project supports both Syrian refugees and host
communities in Jordan to understand and use legal and administrative
systems to find concrete solutions to justice problems. In the pilot phase
of the project, three Jordanian organizations coordinated to incorporate a community facilitator approach into their existing legal aid programs. Community facilitators (CFs) are frontline justice workers recruited from within the communities where they work and supported by a team of project staff and lawyers. Community facilitators use basic knowledge of the law and administrative procedures and a range of skills to take on many roles that help beneficiaries gain access to justice, including conducting community outreach, providing information, accompanying beneficiaries to certain government offices, referring cases to lawyers and other service providers, and collecting information on beneficiaries and their grievances to support evidence-based advocacy efforts. CFs can address justice issues in various thematic areas.
In this project, each partner chose to focus on justice issues that were urgent needs of the target communities and that fit within the mandate of the organization. Partners recruited both Jordanians and Syrians as community facilitators.
During the pilot, Arab Renaissance for Democracy and Development (ARDD), Justice Center for Legal Aid (JCLA), and Tamkeen developed their community facilitator projects around some agreed commonalities, such as the role of the CF and basic training modules, while also leaving room for experimentation and adjustments based on their thematic areas of focus and organizational structures. Namati played a support role through sharing experiences and tools from the legal empowerment field, informing the planning process,and facilitating cross-partner learning.
The following brief offer reflections on the recruitment, training, and data collection methods that these partner organizations used during the pilot phase of the community facilitator project.
This resource is also available Arabic.
This toolkit is designed to help CSOs, government, and other stakeholders to raise awareness about the law and help people understand what they need to do to register their community land. The toolkit will support anyone carrying out awareness campaigns on the law to understand what types of messages are most effective in communicating to communities. Namati tested messages on eight different themes: identity, development, colonialism, opposition, faith, comparison, democracy, and ‘take a chance’. Namati then got feedback on which messages people thought would be most effective. Eight focus groups and 10 interviews were conducted. Namati spoke to 61 people, including male and female community members, youth, and local leaders from a range of communities. The messages included in this toolkit were the ones that were best received by participants during our research.
Namati has also created:
This research brief is part of a series that reviews the nature of the work undertaken by community paralegals, and the extent to which that work is recognized or funded by government. In Kenya, community paralegals are recognized in the Legal Aid Act of 2016. They are referred to formally as “paralegals.”
The first briefs published for this series focus on the types of community paralegals who have been formally recognized either in law or policy. We acknowledge that this is just a small part of a much larger picture. Beyond the government-recognized paralegals discussed in these briefs, a broader, dynamic ecosystem of community paralegals operates effectively without state recognition in many countries. We aim to one day expand our research to offer a more comprehensive analysis of this larger universe. For now, however, our research briefs are limited to offering summary information and illustrative examples of the community paralegals who have been formally recognized by law or policy.
Each of these briefs is a living document– if you have an update, addition, or a correction, please contact us at community@namati.org.
This research brief is part of a broader resource guide on community paralegal recognition and financing that includes additional community paralegal research briefs, a list of supplemental laws and resources for each country, and other supporting materials on the subject.
A chapter from the Guide that provides a short introduction to the global context for community land protection and the history of how Namati developed its community land protection approach.
______
This resource is one chapter from Namati’s Community Land Protection Facilitators Guide, which can be accessed here. To view all the individual chapters and supporting resources, refer to the interactive online version of the Community Land Protection Facilitators Guide here.
This is a 4-page informational resource on the basics of community paralegals, including an introductory description of what community paralegals are, how they work, and advantages of the community paralegal approach. This is followed by 3 brief case studies of community paralegals at work in Sierra Leone, Kenya and Indonesia.
Namati and the Sustainable Development Institute in Liberia (SDI), have worked with the community of Duah for over 3 years to document the community’s land and establish an inclusive local governance system for land and natural resources. In the spring of 2013, Duah faced a serious challenge: Clan elders agreed to a large land deal with a local palm oil investor without the involvement of the community or its new Land Governance Council. This Lesson from the Field describes how, with support from SDI, Duah community members held their leaders accountable to their newly adopted community by-laws and successfully reversed the land deal. The case of Duah highlights some of the challenges faced when promoting inclusive, participatory, and accountable community land management in rural Liberia.
In 2016 Kenya signed into law the Community Land Act (CLA), a progressive piece of legislation that gave life to Article 63 of the Constitution of Kenya.
The CLA presents an unprecedented opportunity for communities to legally claim rights to their land and have complete decision-making power about how their land is used and managed. It is in light of this that the Facilitator’s Guide was published.
This guide is a toolkit for community facilitators, paralegals, county government officials, and staff of grassroots’ organizations working with communities to claim legal recognition of their land rights. It covers different activities that the facilitator should guide the communities through, including but not limited to:
The guide emphasizes the need for participation by women, youth and the elderly to ensure that the community’s governance structure is strengthened and a reflection of the community as a whole.
The guide was officially launched on 27th February 2020 at Four Points by Sheraton in Nairobi, by the FAO Country Representative, Dr. Tobias Takavarasha; Secretary Lands & Director Lands Adjudication Ministry of Lands, Esther Ogega; and Chair of the National Land Commission, Gershom Otachi.
Namati has also created: