In the early 2000s, Tanzania struggled to protect the land rights of the 75% of its citizens who lived in rural areas. Rapid population growth and rising investment in commercial agriculture had increased land scarcity and created the potential for violent conflict in parts of the country. In accordance with the provisions of a new law, the national lands ministry launched a pilot project in 2004 to title 158 villages and more than 1,000 individual parcels. Building on lessons from the project, the government passed a new land-use planning act, created a new implementation program, and drew up a strategic plan to title rural land throughout the country. Starting in 2008, the lands ministry worked with community leaders to grant villages and their residents title documents that protected them from land grabbing. Villages also decided how they would use communal land and how they would set up committees to resolve boundary disputes. Officials constructed registry buildings in villages and districts to house title documents before surveying individual land parcels and handing over titles to village residents. By 2017, more than 11,000 of Tanzania’s approximately 12,500 villages had mapped their outer limits, and about 13% of villages had also adopted land-use plans. Of the approximately 6 million households located within rural villages, about 400,000 also had obtained individual title documents.

Leon Schreiber drafted this case study based on interviews conducted in Dar es Salaam and Arusha, Tanzania, in April 2017. The British Academy-Department for International Development Anti-Corruption Evidence (ACE) Program funded the development of this case study. Case published June 2017.

A 2017 workshop, Driving Change, Securing Tenure, profiled recent initiatives to strengthen tenure security and reform land registration systems in seven countries: South Africa, Canada, Jamaica, Kyrgyzstan, Mozambique, Australia and Tanzania.

Watch the video of Seraphia Robert Mgembe - Program Coordinator, MKURABITA

In April 2006, six international donor agencies established a program to help Mozambique’s government register community land rights and improve tenure security for rural residents. Under Mozambique’s constitution, the state owned all land. A 1997 law, adopted after a 15-year civil war, sought to recognize rural communities’ customary tenure rights while encouraging commercial investment through the issuance of 50-year leaseholds. But many communities failed to register their holdings with the central government, leaving their rights vulnerable to powerful state and corporate interests. To address the problem, the donor group established the Community Land Initiative (iniciativa para Terras Comunitárias, or iTC), a program to register community parcels in the government cadastre and empower communities to negotiate with potential investors. The iTC coordinated with national and local governments as well as nongovernmental organizations to map the borders of community lands. The program informed community members about their land rights and how to use and protect them. It also established natural resource committees, which enabled communities to receive shares of the natural resource taxes paid by commercial investors working on communal lands. The iTC further created producer associations to support budding commercial farmers, resolved boundary disputes, and worked with provincial cadastral offices to issue certificates that specified property boundaries. By mid 2016, the program had registered 655 communities in the government cadastre—nearly four times the estimated 171 community registrations carried out before the iTC was established. The registrations covered 6.9 million hectares and 10% of the country’s rural population.

Leon Schreiber drafted this case study based on interviews conducted in Maputo and Xai-Xai, Mozambique, in November 2016. The British Academy-Department for International Development Anti-Corruption Evidence (ACE) Program funded the development of this case study. Case published February 2017.  

A 2017 workshop, Driving Change, Securing Tenure, profiled recent initiatives to strengthen tenure security and reform land registration systems in seven countries: South Africa, Canada, Jamaica, Kyrgyzstan, Mozambique, Australia and Tanzania.

Watch the video of Emidio de Oliveira - Director, iniciativa para Terras Comunitárias.