Assessing livelihood and environmental impacts of secure access to land for landless youth under the Ethiopia sustainable land management program
Shewakena Abab, Daniel Monchuk
An innovative land tenure intervention being piloted under the World Bank supported Sustainable Land Management Project II provides landless youth with secure access to land. Under this initiative, degraded communal land is allocated to landless youth who undertake soil and water conservation measures to halt the degradation process and return the land to a productive state. Early evidence from field reports, interviews, and anecdotal accounts have been positive, reducing youth unemployment and migration, increasing stewardship, while boosting climate resilience and carbon storage. However, sound empirical evidence is lacking and further analysis is necessary to justify scaling up. To address this we review recently collected information on the status of the landless youth intervention activity collected during a series of recent field visits conducted in late 2017. While the information collected during these field visits were informative, more nuanced information on the specifics of the tenure arrangements and livelihood information was unfortunately not collected. To help fill the information gap necessary before making a recommendation on the appropriateness of scaling up this activity, a more structured approach to evaluate the impact of the intervention is needed.
Event: Land Governance in an Interconnected World_Annual World Bank Conference on Land and Poverty_2018
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