Innovations for securing tenure rights on customary lands through traditional authorities: Experiences from Chamuka Chiefdom, Zambia
Morgan Kumwenda, Solomon Mkumbwa, Fairai Shumba, Helen Nyamweru Ndungu, Oumar Sylla, Danilo Antonio
Ensuring secure access to land is a key element of protecting the human rights of rural populations that depend on agriculture for their livelihoods. Insecurity of land tenure and property rights is a precipitating, if not primary, cause of contemporary global poverty and inequality. In most developing nations, women’s rights to land and property are very limited and often depend on their marital status. This paper is an attempt to show how best to recognize and protect the land rights of the rural poor, including women, living on customary lands. It is founded upon the current practice by many governments in Africa that are passing laws that elevate existing customary land claims of the rural populations into nations' formal legal frameworks thus making customary land rights equal in weight and validity to documented land claims. The paper describes the efficacy of the Social Tenure Domain Model, a pro-poor participatory land documentation tool which was successfully implemented in Chamuka Chiefdom, Zambia.
Event: Land Governance in an Interconnected World_Annual World Bank Conference on Land and Poverty_2018
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