Resource information
Ratings convey a satisfactory project outcome, likely sustainability, and modest institutional development impacts. Lessons within an overall context indicate that although successful in reaching project development objectives, the project - and the Land Fund in general - was able to respond to only a fraction of beneficiaries demand. In fact, except for a FONTIERRAS program on land regularization, the Land Fund became de facto the main instrument of land access facilitation in Guatemala; however, this was not its initial aim. Willing-seller/willing-buyer transactions are only one of a number of policy instruments that should be pursued in addressing problems of inequity in land access, such as in Guatemala. Ideally, conditions should also exist to implement complementary policies, such as regularization of land ownership, land taxation, and similar interventions that would also promote the creation of a dynamic market for land in the country. Concerning the land-access instrument, lessons reinforce that governance and sustainability of participatory "willing-buyer/willing-seller" schemes for land access, would benefit from the application of the following principles: a) credit for land purchase is insufficient to increase beneficiaries' incomes and must be complemented with assistance to increase land productivity and, b) beneficiaries should receive a fixed amount of assistance - which could be set on a regional or sub-regional basis. Further lessons focus on Farm-level issues, addressing land distribution and land use systems, on financial management issues, and the need for a computerized Financial Management (FM) system, and at the absence of monitoring and evaluation (M&E), namely, there was no systematic method to assess project impacts.
