As Cadasta grows our work to more than 100 partners worldwide, we have expanded and diversified our funding base to include several large donors in the land sector. In the past six months, we have begun projects funded by the World Bank, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and the Millenium Challenge Corporation (MCC). These projects are designed to support government-led efforts to capture and manage land tenure data and improve community land management.
Upon conclusion of our inception partnerships with the Omidyar Network and the UK Government’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, we successfully shifted our business model to ensure the financial and operational sustainability of Cadasta. This has included focusing on larger partnerships and bilateral and multilateral donors working in the land sector and land-adjacent sectors such as food systems, conservation and climate, sustainable land use, and sustainable urban development.
Short summaries of these new projects are highlighted below.
This project focused on understanding the successes and challenges of government and community implementation of the 2016 Community Land Act, a law that established a process and recognition for community land ownership and management in the country. Cadasta designed, conducted, and analyzed extensive qualitative field research that included interviews with government bodies and representatives, community leaders, and focus groups across five Kenyan counties during an intensive, four-month period. The World Bank commissioned our research and analysis to support the Kenyan Government, and it is intended that the Government will use the well-received report and findings to improve and expand community land registration beginning this Fall.
This project aims to help national governments understand the current state and track progress made to increase land tenure security for its citizens. Cadasta is developing a set of key indicators for five aspects of land ownership, as well as the tools to collect, analyze, and display the indicator data in a progress dashboard with graphs and maps. We will also conduct a key stakeholder workshop to present the indices, validate the results, and develop a technical manual to ensure continued data collection and monitoring. Cadasta has been contracted by FAO to develop the indicators and progress tracking for the Tanzanian Ministry of Lands, Housing, and Human Settlements Development through the end of 2022.
This large and multifaceted project is focused on providing land titles in selected municipalities, improving land governance for rural households and responding to the country’s 2016 peace accord commitments. Cadasta’s role in the project—through our long-standing bilateral services agreement with Global Land Alliance—is focused on analyzing current processes for collecting and managing the project’s geospatially-enabled data to improve quality control and integration of data sets from multiple field data operations. Specifically, we will provide recommendations to streamline the pre- and post-data collection processes to create efficiencies through the end of 2022. This work is part of the five-year USAID Land for Prosperity project, led by Tetra Tech ARD to provide institutional capacity to the Colombian Government.
This project is centered on establishing a cost-effective way to secure land rights in rural areas for increased agricultural production and support four government ministries’ goals. The Cadasta project team will develop and field test two to four technical approaches to secure rural property rights and present the results to the government. The project, supported by MCC in Togo through VNG International, kicked off in August 2022 and has option year periods extending to 2024.
This project focuses on providing analysis and preparatory work to support the Compact development and implementation of the MCC Malawi Land Productivity Project. The Compact will include both support to increase land productivity through better-functioning land markets and increased land investment. To ensure a strong Compact design, Cadasta will identify and assess the root causes constraining investment in land and the overall functioning of land markets and revenue activities within both the estate and customary land sectors. Our approach leverages a consortium of organizations with deep expertise in the sector and in Malawi, and existing positive relationships with relevant stakeholders in the Malawi Government.
We look forward to additional work from these and other donor partners in the near future.