Creating Awareness on the Formalization of Land Resource

Land as natural resource is a vital basic developmental tool enshrined in several international and national protocols, conventions and treaties and needs to be observed and exercised with utmost commitment. The overall objective of the project is to facilitate formalization of property and business assets in the extra-legal sector, into legally held and formally operated entities in the formal sector of the economy. The ultimate goal is to economically empower property and business owners in the informal sector whose entry into the formal market economy will enhance their opportunities in using their assets to access capital and thus improve national economic growth and reduce individual household poverty with the specific objectives Increasing transparency, awareness and profits driven from big invested farms which aiming to make profit share among the community members in charge.

Organisational Background Capacity

XX was formed in Kilombero District to help all emergency and prior problems faced human being that develop opportunities for environment and rulal development abound under Land use systerm, yet majority of the rural communities lack development due to their inability to utilize them. With over 10 years of community service, the organization has grown as non-profit NGO, operating in the thematic areas of natural resources, environment and development.  It seeks to create a future of hope for under-served poor communities, women and their properties by helping them to build their skills and resources to reduce their vulnerability in a sustainable way.

Background and Project Focus

In Tanzania, like in many other African countries, the Land conflict is still the burning issue not only because of its social, political, cultural and economic significance but also because of the challenges of achieving sustainable development.

According to the 2012 population census, about 75% of people in Tanzania live in the rural areas and their source of livelihood is agriculture. The Government of Tanzania has implemented many programs include Agricultural Sector Development Program (ASDP), Participatory Agricultural Development Program (PADEP), District Agricultural Sector Investment Project (DASIP), Sustainable Agricultural and Food Security Program (SAFSP), Global Agricultural and Food Security Project (GAFSP), Tanzania-G8 Land Transparency Partnership (TLTP) just to mention few. The main problem facing smallholder farmers is capital; they invest a very small amount of money in their farming activities. Low capital leads to low productivity, lower food surplus, and low savings so correctively leads to unsustainable use of land resource in which conflict arise on this way.

Tanzania has implemented a series of structural reforms, reforms that create macroeconomic stability and lay the groundwork for economic growth. Yet these changes do not necessarily improve the lives of the poor. Consequently, the poor look for alternative ways of improving their living conditions outside the formal system. The end-result is that two parallel economies (formal and informal) operate simultaneously in the country. The time factor and managerial status didn’t involve the participation of the under-log persons who are the direct beneficiaries of this project.

XXXX was established for the purpose of bringing the two economies into one inclusive system that will permit all Tanzanian citizens to enjoy the standards of living that technology and economic development offer and create wealth. The key concept of XXXX is transformation of the informally held assets (Dead Capital) to formal legally held entities that are operated and managed within the confines of the law and subsequently facilitating the owners to use them as means of accessing economic benefits that the formal market offers. The underlying principle of XXXX is building from the existing social capital towards a modernized and more comprehensive growth framework (inclusive economic development framework)

XXXX also aims to achieve a formalization of what people possess by registering the wealth of people leading to recognition of their assets. Almost 95% of property in Tanzania is informal property. That means the broad majority of Tanzanians face disadvantages applying for credits and loans as their assets are not officially recognised. Registered assets, however, can be accounted for as collateral assets when applying for micro-credits and loans.

Again, the government under The Land Tenure Support Programme support the Government of Tanzania, through the Ministry of Land Housing and Human Settlements Development (MLHHSD), to make information on land records and processes of land allocation publicly available, and clarify and address current constraints to protecting legitimate land claims. Ultimately, these measures are expected to strengthen security of tenure, contributing to growth in agricultural production and more and better-planned investment in urban infrastructure, including housing.

The G8-Tanzania Land Transparency Partnership initiative from June 2013 acknowledges the need for a more transparent, efficient and better-resourced land sector to ensure that current and future demand for land leads to beneficial and equitable outcomes for rural population, and which can attract and support high quality investments.

XX aims to spread this process at local levels like Villages, streets and per individual participation. XX will stand as main pilot to three districts such as Kilombero, Malinyi and Ulanga. So, XX will be acting as the bridge between Government and Local level citizens to accomplish this mission. 

Project Problem Statement

Land ownership to the community members is not the easy duty as planned to help in involvement of formalization as asset for accessing economic benefits for financial support. Firstly, the elders are only the land owners in any community before death, and after death the land is divided to the relatives remained especially for the men with exclusively widows, women householders, less privilege people, youths and people with disabilities.

Secondly, the formalization of land is not involving the individuals because of the participatory method used before which team up only the higher governmental leaders (national and regional leaders), the government simplifies the process by not taking community members who direct depend on that land into course of action.

Short Description of the Project (Rationale)

The poor majorities in Tanzania who own property and business assets and exchange them outside the legal framework are severely constrained and cannot use their holdings to create sufficient wealth. Their property and business entities are mainly based on the informal community systems that give rise to rights which are neither incorporated in the legal property titles nor registered in official registers. This provides them with limited access to capital and cannot realize their potential for economic empowerment and self-improvement. MKURABITA is thus, designed to address these economic and legal imbalances and develop a property rights and capital formation system that is tailored to circumstances of the disadvantaged. With group effort of the XX will ensure the challenges are phased-out by making implementation within three districts as pointed direction to the whole country. 

Project Objectives And Results 

• Overall Objective:
  • To facilitate formalization of property and business assets in the extralegal sector, into legally held and formally operated entities in the formal sector of the economy. The ultimate goal is to economically empower property and business owners in the informal sector whose entry into the formal market economy will enhance their opportunities in using their assets to access capital and thus improve national economic growth and reduce individual household poverty. 
• Specific Objectives:
  • The Specific objectives of the Project are to:-
    • Increasing transparency, awareness and profits driven from big invested farms which aiming to make profit share among the community members in charge.
    • Build good governance on national and institutional mission and policy on understanding of Land formalization to avoid unnecessary land conflicts among farmers and pastoralists.
    • Ensure the benefits from this process are shared to all citizens of Tanzania.
    • Ensure understanding on the assets of the poor which can be held and exchanged outside the existing legal system, are adequately documented and standardized into universally accepted property records that can be used to create liquidity.
    • The prepared project manual as Tools for knowledge for other future projects. The experiences, challenges and results observed on this project will be used as Tools for knowledge for other projects of alike.  
• Intended Results:
  • The Programme specifically targets individuals and groups in the informal sector, whose entry into the formal market economy will enhance their opportunities in using their assets to access capital and thus improve national economic growth and reduce individual household poverty.
    • Well trained community to avoid lands conflicts with neighboring villages and boundaries among individuals of the same village.
    • Availability of Good planned map for infrastructure in place for the Village Land Registry.
    • Increased understandings on how to resolve conflicts between farmers and livestock keepers.
    • Created awareness in natural resources conservation like land as source of poverty reduction.

Justification And Significance:

Land as natural resource is a vital basic developmental tool enshrined in several international and national protocols, conventions and treaties and needs to be observed and exercised with utmost commitment. The efforts being made by the government of Tanzania to ensure universal basic programmes are enormous, but a lot more still needs to be done to reduce poverty through sustainable natural resources use like land and to  ensure sustainable use for all for achieving the SDG 1 and SDG 16 particularly to Promote just,piece and inclusive society goals. The introduction of the capitation grant, the land planning programme, the land policy, Sustainable utilization of Natural resources for all and others are all initiatives towards the realization of this drive. At this juncture XX takes this opportunity to make sure that the goal and planned efforts of the government through MKURABITA are going to be fullfiled within three district which are kilombero, Malinyi and Ulanga as pioneer to other areas of Tanzania mainland by doing the following, In actual view the Land owners are Men only. It is not used for neither women nor youths according to African cultures as well as Tanzania practises. Basing to this,XX will change mind-set of the community to assure that education is provided to the societies in order to introduce new ideas on how to  own land as individual, group or campany for advanced production for all as discussed  “LAND TENURE SUPORT PROGRAMME.

Project Activities

• Workshop for land experts and other stakeholders.
  • The workshop of the land management team at the district level in land laws, land dispute settlement, the use of hand-held GPS, land use planning and the awareness of the property formalization process is done so as to build the capacity of the team members, to build a team of district trainers at the district level. This workshop is given by the regional technical team for 1 week within three districts. 
• Trainings and expert’s mobilization.
  • IECDO will make special arrangement for the training of; –
  • Training of Village council, village assembly and hamlets, the village council is trained because it manages the village land on behalf of the villagers. But also, it is trained so that it can participate in creating awareness of the property formalization activities, recommend members of the village land adjudication team to the village assembly, among others.
  • Training of ward extension officers, 5 Ward extension officers are trained in an effort to decentralize the property formalization process. Also, three youths and women from each village are selected by the village council and approved by the village assembly to become village survey assistants (VSA).
  • Training the religious leaders, traditional leaders and other individuals to the following strategic plans; –
  • To ensure the good means, this will be adopted to avoid land conflicts.
  • The activity involved awareness raising and training on the importance of business formalization i.e. registration, maintenance of records, submission of returns, formal closing of business, accessing credit and other opportunities and services in the formal economy.
  • Political will and commitment from the leadership at both the national and grass-root level will highly considered.
  • Capacity building for small business owners who also illegal own the land.
  • Ensure huge participation and assess the extent to which the reform proposal has addressed empowerment of the poor and vulnerable groups
  • Confiscating and elimination of the mind-set stagnancy of the community on the investing and huge production under transparence of land ownership processes.
• Training and seminar provision on the Land resource.
  • The training will base all aspects of Land including: –
  • Land use system, Land planning system, Land laws and policy, Land ownership systems, National strategic plans on land
  • Human rights and Good governance in land resources.
  • Land act and Village Land act
  • MKURABITA, Land Tenure Support Programme (LTSP) and Land formalization process.
  • Importance of Gender Equity and equality in streaming in development.
  • Public meetings
  • The really implementation of this project will be accomplished by presence of public meetings to villages. Apart from the meetings provided, the cinema shows will be available to ensure higher understanding on the issue of Land resource and its sustainable use to ensure peace and security to all.
  • Distribution of bronchus, radio advertisements and displaying video recorded to different TVs.
  • Training on Capital Formation through empowering owners of formalized assets to access capital and other opportunities in the economy.
  • Public dialogues

Gender Consideration For The Project

This proposed project acknowledges the role that men and women play to influencing the project performance. It also understands that women are always victim when it comes to sharing resources and so is performance to the project. To ensure that women are put in front and that are the ones driving the promise, IECDO will use a ratio of 60:40 for women and men respectively. This is important because in a rural setting, women are the ones responsible to ensuring that people eat on table comfortably and therefore promoting them will be an advantage to the project.

Expected Benefits For Targeted Area

In Tanzania, the following benefits are expected from implementation of the Program

• Improved business environment
• Higher understand on land conflict resolving techniques.
• Community mind-set changed on land use system
• Increased knowledge on legal ownership of property and access to capital by property owners.
• Expansion of the legal economic sector by reducing the size of the extralegal sector through empowerment of its stakeholders to use their assets to accumulate capital and participate fully in the expanded formal market economy, both locally and internationally.
•   Good governance through provision of reliable information about market behavior, property status and the extent of the rule of law.
• Ongoing National Initiatives That Support This Project In Tanzania

Tanzania’s Development Vision 2025 aims to transform Tanzania into a middle-income country by 2015. But the combination of population growth, rising global demand for agricultural commodities, urban expansion, the growing wealth of urban Tanzanians, East African regional integration and the rising number of international investors in agriculture has increased pressure on land in recent years. If these go unchecked, it could undermine the security of legitimate tenure rights holders with consequent loss of access to significant livelihoods resources and threats to local food security. XXXX and XX are national strategies geared at economic growth and reduction of poverty. In the context of the two strategies, XXXX portrays important mechanisms for delivering the targeted outcomes. A conservative review of XXXX’s relation to the goals and outcomes of XXXX and XX shows that implementation of the core activities of the Formalization Program as well as the complimentary or realization of XXXX’s and XX’s outcomes. Foristance,the empowerment of  entrepreneurs especially widows,womeh householders and youths in the small and medium enterprises segment of the private sector is clearly identified as a priority area in promoting growth and reduction of poverty particularly income poverty. XXXX will be implemented though the existing government structure particularly in the Local Government system. The foreseen changes in the institutional arrangement will therefore sufficiently relate to the Local Government Reform Program.

The implementation of XXXX’s specific interventions will be linked into important sectoral programs such as the Agriculture Sector Development Program, Small and Medium Scale Enterprises Development Program, Legal Sector Reforms Program, Financial Sector Development initiatives and several other community driven development initiatives.

Private Sector Development as a means of attaining the SDG target of reducing abject income poverty will obviously benefit from secure properties legal regime and the expansion of the entrepreneur’s base in the country.

Empowerment Of Poor And Vulnerable Groups

The development objective of the project to ensure the full participation of the citizens in which every person will involve on this progression so as to avoid unnecessary conflict during the implementation.  IECDO also will convince the poor in the informal sector to use their properties and business assets in the modern economy in order to raise their incomes and reduce poverty. The idea is that legally recognized property and business assets give access to financial markets that are essential for modernization and growth. In this section IECDO discuss the extent to which the development objective of NATION and XXXX are achievable in the context of Tanzania, especially in the rural areas where the majority of the poor and much of the informal sector are located. The ultimate objective of the Programmer is to reduce poverty by raising incomes of the poor through formalization of property and business. Formalization of property and business would raise security of both the asset holder and the lender and improve enabling environment for business transactions. In the following, the discussion of the two assets is made separately because the issues and level of sensitivity are different.

Property (Land) Formalization

We can identify three benefits to land formalization, namely increased security, increased incomes and poverty reduction by land becoming a tradable commodity, and enhanced knowledge and information. Although they are interdependent, we shall discuss each of them separately. These are linked to the issues of reduction in land-related disputes, improvement of land markets, especially rental markets which would imply that land may be reallocated to more productive users, and increased investment on land and better land management due to higher tenure security. However, the extent to which these materialize is an empirical issue that has to be assessed in each case.

Implimentation Strategies

This will mostly run concurrently with the implementation time. Its main components are assets capitalization and good governance. The activities in this phase will involve formulation and implementation of recommendations for connecting the newly formalized properties to national, regional and international markets, and allowing property to be leveraged to create capital and generate more wealth.

The process will entail setting up of credit and mortgage systems, and collection systems for credit, rates and taxes; provision of housing and infrastructure; provision of insurance and information services, development of individual identification system; and use of property to enhance accountability.

Apart from digging up information, the ambiguities from different institutional settings will be helpful to be displayed to the people e.g. the meaning of “ownership system” differs from one corner to another. The religious leaders, chief-system leaders, government leaders all should be with unified understanding on the issue of land ownership system.

The recommendations will facilitate good governance by providing reliable information about market behaviors, property status and the extent of the rule of law; all of which are necessary conditions for sustainable development.

Overview Of Administrative Procedures

Simplification of administrative procedures will be implemented though the decentralized systems to reduce “red tape” in matters of property and business formalization and to improve documentation at the local level in order to entrench the culture of transparency and accountability through the use of formal communication channel.

The whole process will be announced three days per week in different Radios around Kilombero, Ulanga and Malinyi districts. These radios are Pambazuko Fm Radio, Ulanga Fm Radio and Kilombero Fm Radio. Each radio will have single day to promote this project per week.

A project in charge, Project Manager (coordinator), a project accountant, Field staff (project clerks) and a driver will be involved for the project implementation. The Executive Secretary will be the in charge of all IECDO operations and is the one who will ensure quality of all outputs. The project Manager will bear the main responsibility for project management and will make sure in close cooperation with FOUNDATION FOR CIVIL SOCIETY and that all the activities are implemented as planned and that the guidelines of the donor are respected. The project coordinator will ensure good and smooth coordination of the activities and of all the project participants and will be responsible for external representation of the project. The project accountant will be responsible for accounting and maintaining the financial systems.

 Monitoring And Evaluation Plan

This project is expected be monitored very closely by ensuring continuously participation of community members from the inception of the project. The project will involve the community and other stakeholders in tracking progress of implemented activities. Given the short duration of the project, engaging the local community is important to foster ownership of the project and the processes it involves. Communities will be trained to monitor and evaluate their own progress through participatory methodologies. This will ensure that the project outcomes and benefits are maintained and continually monitored beyond the project period and thus contribute to empowerment of communities and sustainability of the processes. Since the project is an action oriented one, IECDO expect community members to be free to express their feeling and contribute directly to ensuring that all key deliverables are implemented as planned.

Aligning Formalization To The Agenda On Legal Empowerment Of The Poor

The permission of the Agenda on Legal Empowerment of the Poor is to explore how nations can reduce poverty through reforms that expand access to legal protection and economic opportunities for all.

XX will ensure the project expands to the extent that all the mitigation put by the previous reforms are clearly understood by targeted communities. To that end the Program will, while borrowing healingly forms the Legal Empowerment Concepts, develop targeted initiatives that use formal assets to improve earnings of the owners.