Community sourced land information influencing national upgrading projects in Colombia, Kenya, Philippines and Uganda: Evidences where the top-down and bottom-up approaches meet

In Rwanda, two factors make land a highly important and contested issue. First,
Rwanda has the highest person-to-land ratio in Africa. This creates tremendous
pressure on land in a country where most of the population lives in rural areas, and
where agriculture remains the central economic activity. Second, Rwanda is recovering
from massive population shifts caused by decades of ethnic strife and the 1994 civil war
and genocide, which resulted in displaced populations and overlapping land claims.

The FFP approach provides a new, innovative and pragmatic solution to land administration focused on developing countries, where current land administration solutions are not delivering.

Land administration is defined as the acquisition, maintenance and dissemination of information on the ownership, value and use of land. This information is necessary to support land policy implementation. Besides being complete and current, land administration systems – including the information contained within the systems and the processes used for their establishment and maintenance - should ideally be transparent, accessible, simple and low-cost to efficiently and effectively allocate land fairly to citizens.

La industrialización agrícola en el sigo XX provocó una transformación en los procesos del sistema agroalimentario, que trajo consigo la desconexión del productor con el consumidor. En la actualidad, mientras que la mayoría de los consumidores sólo optan por la adquisición de alimentos para satisfacer las necesidades básicas de nutrición; otros consumidores empiezan a interesarse por la dimensión social, ambiental, cultural, territorial y de salud que engloba el hecho alimentario.

The following document provides an overview of the land issues in Rwanda and the new Land
Policy and Land Law and identifies some of the key challenges for implementation, from the
perspective of the DFID appointed Land Policy Specialist to MINITERE.

This policy research brief on land tenure reform and government revenue aims primarily to examine the effects of land tenure reforms on land-based revenue and to provide policy recommendations that would build on existing efforts developed to ease the process of paying and collecting various land revenue. The research topic was suggested by land sector stakeholders among other topics during the LAND Project’s Year 3 Work Planning Meeting, and was endorsed by the Rwanda Natural Resources Authority and LAND Project as an important research area.

Over the last decade, the Government of Rwanda (GoR) has engaged in reforming the land sector through formulation and enactment of an enabling legal framework, establishment of land administration institutions, and land tenure regularization. In 2008, the GoR initiated the Land Tenure Regularization Program (LTRP) with two main objectives: (1) to ensure secure forms of land tenure for citizens and (2) to ensure efficient management and administration of land.

The new Rwandan land policy consider appropriate land administration as a platform of land management and an ideal channel to provide security of livelhood to the people by securing land tenure system for their profit.
At present Rwanda carries out limited land registration on a centralised manual system on a demand led basis in rural and urban areas. Currently approximately 20,000 land applications are in process, mainly in urban areas.

A survey of some 3,500 households in and adjacent to land tenure regularization (LTR) pilot cells was undertaken some 2.5 years after completion of the LTR pilot. The results of the survey provide evidence on the fairness and gender inclusiveness of the regularization process, households’ knowledge of the law, and initial investment impacts. A large majority of those asked perceived the process as very fair and transparent. It was, however, more thorough and inclusive in rural than in urban areas, where more than 11 percent of certificates could not be issued because of a pending conflict.

This paper contains a preliminary summary of key issues and findings from a desk review of
the literature on land titling projects and programmes in urban and peri-urban areas of
developing countries. It draws on a large number of documents, not all of which have been
incorporated into the review at the time of writing. The present bibliography will be
expanded in the final text of the review which is to be completed by early December 2006.