Land Affairs

Decoupled Land Reform Implementation in Tanzania

This week I published an article in the Journal of Development Studies. It analyses the slow and eneven implementation of Tanzania’s of new-wave land reform today, more than ten years after its introduction in 1999. I argue that implementation is characterised by decoupling, involving a lack of coherence and of mechanisms of enforcement. It can be observed at all levels within the land administration structure. If Tanzania is to implement the reform on a larger scale, the country has to put greater emphasis on national initiatives to couple administrative layers. More money alone will not solve the problem.

Because of their novelty, our knowledge about current new-wave land reforms in sub-Saharan Africa has hitherto been limited. In the early 2000s land reforms were underway in more than 20 countries. Decentralisation of responsibility for land management has been an important intention in most reforms. How that spelled out in practice, however, remained unclear. Through implementation analyses conducted in rural areas in mainland Tanzania, the article analyses how a new-wave land reform is being implemented at the local level.

Read the article: Decoupled Implementation of New-Wave Land Reforms: Decentralisation and Local Governance of Land in Tanzania. In
Journal of Development Studies, Volume 48, Issue 2, 2012.



Land Law Reforms as Cover-Ups for Land Grabbing? (2) Reflexions on Tanzania

Were the new wave land reforms introduced only to enable the elites in sub-Saharan African countries to legalise the grabbing of land? Based on my impressions from Uganda, I discussed the question in a previous blog post. I concluded that it could be the case. Otherwise, it is hard to explain why so little effort is put into making the new land administration services, prescribed by the law, available to the majority of the population.

In Tanzania, which I know better because this is where I did most of my field research, the situation is, in some ways, less clear. The issue of land grabbing is not really part of my PhD project (which is more about land administration). However, since a titling project had been carried out in one of the districts I have studied, I could not avoid digging into it. I have focused on the choice of pilot implementation districts. Here comes my reflexions.

Four larger pilot projects have been carried out in Tanzania. I have described some of the initial experiences in the Working Paper Tanzania’s Land Law Reform: The Implementation Challenge. I do not all of them in detail and I do not know a lot about all of the districts in which they were implemented. However, there seems to be a pattern in the choice of pilot districts. There seems to have been pre-existing commercial interests in the land in the chosen districts.

The first major project was carried out in Mbozi District by the Ministry of Lands. The official explanation that I have come across for the choice of Mbozi as a pilot project district is the district’s ‘commercial farming potential’. In Mbozi District, according to the report The State of the Then NAFCO, NARCO and Absentee Landlords’ Farms/Ranches in Tanzania by Chambi Chachage, there is a large, formerly state-owned, maize farm in the waiting to be privatised. There are also a number of coffee farms owned by the Mbozi District Council. Furthermore, according to Andrew Kiondo, in the book Agrarian Economy, State and Society in Contemporary Tanzania from 1999, there were reports of illegal land sales in that area in the 1980s (p. 48).Mzeri Village. The ranch is in the hills behind the village.

The second pilot was MKURABITA’s project in Handeni District It is a project I have researched quite a bit. The official explanation for the choice of Handeni District, according to Kosyando’s report Mkurabita and the Implementation of the Village land Law was that the district, due to a previous land use planning and forestry project funded by a German aid agency, had the equipment and knowhow to implement a pilot project.

I thought of a less noble explanation when I was there. The huge Mzeri cattle ranch (41,246 hectares) was being privatised - or subleased according to Chachage’s report - in the period. The then Prime Minister Lowassa (who was later fired because of corruption) got a big chunk of land there. So did the local MP. Accidentally, one of the pilot villages is situated right next to the ranch (see the map: the green area indicates the ranch, the blue area indicates the village) and people were evicted during the survey, when they were found to be living on land that had been allocated to the farm in the 1970s. When I asked, nobody in Handeni would confirm that the pilot had to do with the privatisation of the farm. Still, I found the correlation between pilot project implementation and privatisation remarkable.

The third pilot was carried out in Bagamoyo District. With its proximity to Dar es Salaam it is a much more urban setting and there is a pressure on the land because of the expansion of the city, but also because ‘it is an easy target for land based investments, such as biofuels’ (Kosyando’s Bagamoyo report p. 5). Apparently, there is no relationship between the pilot project and land privatisation. But again, there is a remarkable correlation in time between the MKURABITA project, carried out from September 2007 to February 2008 and a large Biofuels project in the district starting from January 2008. The biofuel project, thoroughly described in Kjell Havnevik’s chapter in the book Biofuels, Land Grabbing and Food Security in Africa and Chachage’s report Acquisition and Accumulation in Tanzania, had a Swedish investor and was to be carried out on 22,000 hectares of a large, idle, cattle ranch belonging to the Government of Zanzibar.  Havnevik describes how there was a ‘great confusion’ over what the project area entailed and that pastoralists and neighboring villagers used the land. Chachage also describes a number of smaller state farms in Bagamoyo which were to be privatized in the period from 2005 onwards.

The fourth – and by far the biggest – pilot project has been carried out in Babati and Bariadi Districts by the Ministry of Lands. I do not know much about these two districts. But again, there is a correlation between project and the privation of a farm, although it is not as clear as in Bagamoyo. The pilot was carried out from 2008 to 2010, whereas the Setchet Farm was privatized in 2005. I have also noticed the recent newspaper reports on tensions over the land. According to the Citizen’s article Envoy’s Fear on Babati Clashes 30 January, much of the land had allocated to settlers during colonial times, but was left idle, sold or taken over by the state after independence. Is this the land now being resurveyed as part of the pilot project and is that giving rise to the clashes in the area? I do not know. But the commercial interests in the land seem be the same in Babati as in the other pilot districts.

My conclusion on this? My conclusion, so far, is that the 1999 land law reform may result in Tanzania’s elite legalizing the land they have grabbed, but it is not the only purpose of it. There are other elements of the reform, for instance the land court system, which has greatly helped a lot of people in the country. The land use planning requirements also have some potential. And most of the pilot project outputs actually benefitted non-elites. The people I talked to who had received a customary title deed – a CCRO – were happy about having it.

Still, when it comes to the choice of pilot implementation districts, there is a remarkable correlation between the choice of pilot project sites and commercial interests in land, in particular linked to the privatisation of former state farms and ranches. A similar focus on the sale of former state farms to investors, by the way, can be found in the Tanzanian government’s prestigious SAGCOT agricultural growth corridor. Is it land grabbing? I am not sure. Some would argue that the transactions are illegitimate and that the land, when not used by the state, should be returned to the communities it was taken from. From their point of view it is land grabbing. From a strictly legal point of view, however, I guess there is nothing wrong with the re-surveying old boundaries and the selling of the land. What do you think?

Land Law Reforms as Cover-Ups for Land Grabbing? Impressions from Uganda

Surveying on a shoestring.

Ever since I started writing my PhD on land in Tanzania, I have encountered a particular, cynical interpretation of land affairs in the Sub-Saharan African countries. The new wave of land reforms passed in the last couple of decades (read about some of the reforms here), so the story goes, is a scam. According to some scholars, reform efforts are merely a way for the elites to legalise the land they have grabbed. The article Tanzania: Spreading Power or Spreading Poverty, for instance, refers to the reform as the formalisation of villagers’ dispossession (page 230).

I have always rejected the story as a conspiracy. Primarily because I did not, in Tanzania, find unambiguous evidence that supported it. Sometimes, however, I begin to doubt. It happened to me, again, last week while carrying out research in Uganda.

Uganda got its land reform with the 1998 Land Act. Like most other reforms of the late 1990s and later, it recognises existing rights to land and makes registration of customary rights to land possible. The latter is a new land law feature. Until recently, most countries had two parallel systems for the administration of land. On the one hand, they had a bureaucratic system where the white minorities had lived, typically in the cities and in settler areas. It was modelled on western land administration systems with title deeds and land registers. In other areas, they had ‘customary’ systems, which were a very diverse set of practices to handle land in ‘native’ areas. Typically, rights to land in these areas were not written down; they were witnessed by local leaders and demarcated with natural marks like stones, trees and the like. Often, state authorities did not respect the customary rights. During colonial times, land was regularly expropriated for settler agriculture. After independence, land was often expropriated for ‘development’ purposes, usually without compensation.

It was, therefore, not merely empty words when the new land reforms recognised existing rights to land. It was a signal that people had the right to the land they were living on. In Uganda, the recognition of customary rights in the 1998 Land Act meant that people could now apply for a Certificate of Customary Ownership. Unlike traditional title deeds customary certificates can largely be produced by local level authorities. Unlike the traditional title deeds, which require surveying which is prohibitively expensive for most people, a customary certificate requires a hand-drawn map of the boundaries and the acceptance and signatures of the neighbours. That is, in theory, how it was supposed to be. In practice, however, the situation is very different.

After having visited several districts, it is now clear to me that the certificates of customary ownership do not exist. They were never designed in the ministry of Lands. Subsequently, the Ministry has confirmed this. That is the reason why I start wondering whether the land reform was a scam. How else would you explain that the thing that could be of most use to the majority of poor people in the country – the customary certificates - is still not available 14 years after the passing of the Land Act? And that the government, in the meanwhile, keeps supporting expensive surveying and titling projects in geographically limited areas?

Brief on Tanzania’s Land Reform out now

I have published the Policy Brief The Forgotten Villages. Land Reform in Tanzania. Click here to download it free of charge.

Tanzania's 1999 land reform has decentralised land administration to the rural local village governments, but implementation so far has been slow and uneven. The local authorities rarely get the support they need to make it work. As a consequence, the benefits promised by the reform - economic growth and improved tenure security - do not happen.

There has already been an abundance of donor driven projects to implement the reform, but they have been short-sighted and have tended to forget the local authorities that carry out the actual implementation. Much could be achieved if higher level authorities and NGOs systematically strengthened the village authorities and enabled them to deliver their services. This would be a long-term process and more money alone would not solve the problem. But as long as this level of administration is forgotten, the land reform will not work in practice.

Corruption or Trust. Land Administrations in East Africa

How about a little survey?

I am currently in Uganda, working on a report about land. I have met quite a few people working within the land sector here - public officials, scholars and donors alike - who complain about people’s ignorance and lack of trust in the government and in public authorities. The lack of trust, they say, is the reason why people at the local level often shun land surveyors and fight titling, which they see as a government scheme to take land. These people, so the argument goes, fight ‘development’. Interestingly, I have encountered the same complaints from land officials in Tanzania.

Now, today, I read an article in the Ugandan Daily Monitor, that the Ugandan Ministry of Lands is perceived as one of the most corrupt institutions in East Africa. The funny thing is that the same goes for the land institutions in Tanzania. Every year, when Transparency International publishes its corruption index for Tanzania, the land administration institutions top the list as some of the most corrupt.

That makes me wonder whether ‘lack of trust’ is the right way to phrase the problem. I tend to see the people’s behaviour, when they shun land officials and land projects, as perfectly rational. The real problem, then, is corruption. Corruption, after all, undermines trust.

Land Reforms are Political Projects

The term ‘land reform' denotes a host of very different projects. The nationalisation of land in many African countries in the 1960s and 1970s was one type of land reform. The current redistribution of land in Zimbabwe and South Africa is another. It is pretty obvious that these reforms, which change the ownership of land, are inherently political.

There are also the new wave land reforms which have been initiated in a number of countries in Sub-Saharan the last two decades. Often they aim at recognising existing rights, and sometimes at facilitating registration and titling. There is a tendency to see these reforms as apolitical, technical exercises. They are not. They, too, are extremely political.

I have just read about the Russian land reforms which were carried out 1906-1910, ie. before the Russian Revolution, in a book about Danish-Russian relations during 500 years. The chapter about the land reforms analyses the role of C. A. Koefoed, a Danish farmer and agronomist, in these reforms. They were named the Stolypin Reforms after the then Russian Prime Minister, who was their main architect. Koefoed was made head of the implementation. The land reform exercise gained momentum after peasant uprisings in 1905 and it was meant to de-radicalise the peasant.

By then land was owned as common property. Families had individual use rights, usually for limited time periods. There were also communal grazing areas in the villages. It was Stolypin’s hope that by giving peasant private ownership over land they would become more engaged in optimising their farms and less engaged in revolutionary politics.

Koefoed had campaigned for this type of reform for almost 25 years. He had lived in Russia since 1878 and it had become his new fatherland. Based on his knowledge about Danish land reforms a hundred years earlier, he knew that productivity could be raised significantly when farming land was individualised. In the first years, his points of view were not welcome in Russia. The common property character of peasant land was seen as a valuable, egalitarian, Russian institution. Koefoed therefore started looking for areas where peasant themselves had managed to divide the land. He analysed the areas and publicised findings, which showed the advantages of private property.

The Stolypin reforms gave the peasants the same rights as other people in Russia. After the reforms, a peasant could demand to get a piece of land and a title deed. The common grazing areas were also divided into individual plots. Furthermore, peasants got the right to sell their land and leave the villages. The flip side of this development was that the weaker peasants could loose out. If a farmer sold his land, his family risked having no other means to make a living. Proletarisation would ensue.

In Tanzania there were similar discussions before the 1999 land law reform was passed. The recommendations by the Presidential Land Commission in 1992 aimed at making it extremely difficult to sell land. It was meant as a safeguard against land grabbing, which was already flourishing by then. But these restraints also limited the individual farmers’ right to sell his land and, thus, his or her ability to move. Not all of the recommendations became law. Some did, however, and today there are several regulations which restrict land sales (see for instance page 45-46 in Liz Alden Wily’s Community-based Land Tenure Management).

There seems to be a trade-off between the dynamics created by individual land ownership and social equity. There are, thus, good reasons why land reforms are so heatedly debated. Reforms are not mere technical exercises. The reform design matters and restrictions to protect the rights of vulnerable groups may be required. Even impeccable land laws are likely to produce winners and losers. Land reforms are political projects with profound political implications.

NB: The implementation of the Stolypin reforms stopped with the Russian Revolution in 1917. From 1929 land was collectivised and the peasants lost the control over it. Many of the farmers, who had received individual titles, were declared kulaks. Subsequently, they were harassed and often deported. Millions died.

Poster from: Seventeen Moments in Soviet History.

Demand-driven or Donor-driven Land Reform? (2)

About a month ago, I posted a blog post which caused some debate about whether the Tanzanian land law reform was donor-driven or not. I wrote about the topic because I had met people who claimed that the two land acts were the result of a foreign scheme. The alleged foreign involvement was used as an explanation for why the reform from 1999 had not been implemented. Tanzanian ownership was lacking, so was the argument.

By then, however, I had seen any empirical evidence which sustained the claim that the policy formulation had been initiated by donors. But I had to acknowledge that the subsequent implementation efforts were donor driven to some extent.

I have now come across some other pieces of evidence which shed new light on the origins of the land reform. It is older and thus closer to the events. It, too, places the major part of responsibility for the new land reform policies on the Tanzanian decision makers of the early 1980s. I found the first piece of evidence in an article from 1993 by C. S. L. Chachage in the book Social Change and Economic Reform in Africa. It describes how private land ownership, which was institutionalised with the land reform, was introduced as part of Tanzania’s homegrown Structural Adjustment Programme in the early 1980s:

From 1982-83 the government initiated cost-cutting exercises in budget allocations, and started removing food subsidies, while 15000 government employees were axed as a retrenchment measure.  Accompanying SAP was the introduction of the 1982 National Agricultural Policy. This policy recommended liberalisation in the countryside, including encouragement of private ownership of land (Chachage in Gibbon 1993; p. 225).

These new policies were not imposed on Tanzania by donors. The reforms were the responsibility of the Tanzanian government. They were enacted after the negotiations in the early 1980s between the Tanzanian government, under the leadership of President Nyerere, and the international financial institutions had broken down. The former Tanzanian Minister of Finance, Edwin Mtei, in his exciting autobiography From Goatherd to Governor, explains that the negotiations failed because of disagreement over the exchange rate between IMF and Nyerere. As an IMF representative, Mtei later came to negotiate an Economic Recovery Programme with Tanzania. The negotiations started in 1985 and finished in 1986, i.e. after the private land ownership had been encouraged. The programme did not, to my knowledge, include a land reform.

Whereas the seeds to the land reform process were sown before the Tanzanian government had come to terms with the financial institutions and donors, the land reform policy formulation process was initiated afterwards. Furthermore, the World Bank, in the report ‘Sub Saharan Africa, From Crisis to Sustainable Growth’ from 1989, for the first time recommended changes in land law. That is also before the Tanzanian reform process started for real. That could leave room for foreign influence. The scholars, however, describe the process as a Tanzanian affair.

Gibbon, Havnevik and Hermele in A Blighted Harves. The World Bank and the African Agriculture in the 1980s from 1993 (p. 66) describe the establishment of the Commission of Inquiry into Land Matters as a response to an increase in the number of land conflicts caused by the land market and a wish to promote investments. So does C. S. L. Chachage:

On the basis of constant public complaints arising from similar cases up and down the country, President Mwinyi was in 1990-91 compelled to form a commission to investigate land problems in the country (Chachage in Gibbon 1993; p. 239).

The descriptions do not, of course, rule out the possibility that the World Bank and IMF influenced Mwinyi’s decision to establish the Commission or directed the work being done by the Ministry of Lands. As UDADISI remarked in a comment to my previous post, access to the persons involved in the decisions back then and to their documents and diaries would be required to rule out that possibility completely. The analyses I refer to above, however, do not indicate that the reform process should have been orchestrated by foreigners.

Maybe this debate about the origins of the Tanzanian land laws appears a bit outdated. But I do not think that history should be used an excuse for not implementing the laws. The Land Act and the Village Land Act do after all, if implemented, provide some tools which people can use to protect their rights to land.

Christiania - The Anthropologist’s Dream

Sitting in my office every day, reading and writing, I tend to forget that my own town, Copenhagen, can be as exotic and fascinating as can the Tanzanian countryside. Almost. Big was my surprise the other day when I arrived at work, opened my computer, and found an email from a colleague in my inbox asking me for the names and contact addresses of anthropologists researching Copenhagen land affairs. Not being an anthropologist myself, I do not know that many anthropologists. And I am not sure that I would refer to an anthropologist, if I knew one. Anthropologists, as I see them, make the world larger, but they rarely make things clearer. But I am digressing...

I do not know of anyone researching land issues in Copenhagen. I did not even think of land issues as a research topic in this orderly capital of Denmark. Land affairs here got institutionalised centuries ago. Actually, I just read an old book which describes how the king gradually got more and more control over land back in the 16th century. He made sure that all land in the realm got registered in jordebøger (land books) in order to collect his land rents from the nobility. Anthropologists back then, had they existed, would probably have engaged in lengthy academic discussions about the pros and cons of registering land in that particular way. Most anthropologists, had they existed, would spend years on the Danish countryside doing fieldwork, describing the traditional, and therefore superior, systems for handling land (these systems, by the way, had been invented by the nobility not that long before to make sure that they got their taxes from the farmers. But I am digressing....).

I did not, in other words, understand why my colleague asked for anthropologists. But now, after having read some newspaper articles about the latest developments in the ongoing conflict between Christiania and the Danish government, I understand why. Christiania is a semiautonomous part of Copenhagen, a former military area, which was occupied by the hippies when the military left in 1971. They founded a ‘fristad’ – a freetown – beyond the control of the Danish state.

The centre-left parties, which made up the majority in the Danish parliament in most of the 1970s, accepted Christiania as a social experiment. But the right wing parties never really liked the phenomenon. First, the right-wingers found, one should not accept that the Christianits never paid for the property they occupied. Second, the right-wingers never came to appreciate the alternative lifestyle in this liberated zone. The direct democracy, the lack of formal decision making structures, and the common ownership were appalling features, they thought, in the middle of the country’s capital (not to speak of cannabis, free love, and the breakdown of respect for authorities...actually I sometimes wonder if the right-wingers ever came to like the 1970s? But I am digressing…).

In fact, no right wing party in this part of the world can encounter a common pool resource (as this kind of communal property is termed academically) without wanting to privatise it. And that is, exactly what Denmark’s current right wing government has been trying to do the last decade. First it aimed at normalising Christiania by making it obey to the same rules and regulations for land use plans, buildings, roads, etc., which apply for the rest of the country. Then, the government suggested selling the area. Now, according to an article in the Danish daily, Politiken, the people living in this green oasis, around a thousand persons in total, have decided to buy the area, which they have occupied for free during the last 40 years, from the state.

According to another Politiken article, however, the Christianits set certain conditions for buying the place. One contentious issue, of course, is the price. Another even more contentious issue is whether Christiania should be able to deny people from outside Christiania the right to move in. The Christianits, seemingly, aim at keeping some kind of communal ownership of the area. But they wish to have a word to say over who can move in. It would not make sense, their lawyer says, that some political hothead, who is against the existence of Christiania, can move in and thereby work against the social, cultural and economical structures we all care about.

The conflict about the ability to exclude outsiders reflects a classic debate within natural resource management studies. In 1968 Garrett Hardin published an article, The Tragedy of the Common, in which he argued that open access to resources, for instance a grazing area in Africa, would inevitably lead to depletion of resources. The solution to the problem, he argued, was either privatisation or state control. The American political economist and Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom has subsequently spent most of her academic life pointing out that Hardin and consorts are wrong. There is a third option, she argues, namely that of common property. It is far more common than we tend to believe. And for some resources, for instance the oceans, forests, and inhospitable desert areas, some kind of common property regime may be more effective in managing resources than the market or the state.

Anthropologists really like Ostrom. Inspired by her, anthropologists have identified numerous tribes in developing countries who manage natural resources through a common property regime. These traditional, common property regimes, they claim, are much more effective than other types of regimes (irrespective of the fact that the native communities appear to be gradually loosing their access to resources most places. But I am digressing...).

I am certain that the anthropologists will also like Christiania. The Christianits, however, should see that as a warning sign. Anthropologists typically prefer tribes, whose traditional lifestyles are threatened by the development. Christiania, for sure, is much more exotic now, in all its anarchy, than it will be if the community gets a title deed and the right to fence off the entire area.

(Photo1: Bent Næsby. Photo2: Nicolai Perjesi. With permission from VisitDenmark)

Land, Power and Party Politics

Researching a highly politicised topic – land in Tanzania - I regularly have to remind myself of a proverb I learned during my first years of studies, when I struggled to understand French post-structuralist thinkers: Though everything in society, from a certain perspective, may involve power, it does not imply that everything is about power.

Translated into the language of land affairs the proverb means that whereas theories about the abuse of power - corruption, elite or donor capture – may apply for parts of the administration of land in Tanzania, they are not likely to apply for all of it. Some of the people working with land actually spend a great deal of their time taking care of their regular work tasks. Such regular day-to-day workings can not be explained by conspiracy theories about the use and abuse of power.

But then, sometimes, I come across stories which make me doubt the wisdom of the proverb. It happened to me last week when I found an article in the Citizen about a dispute over land in Moshi, a major town and an opposition stronghold in the northern part of in Tanzania.

According to one story, councillors from Chadema, the main opposition party in Tanzania, try to ensure that all public property in Moshi stays public. That also includes two plots used by the ruling party, CCM, one plot for its headquarters and another for its youth wing.

CCM, on the other hand, has threatened to take legal actions to get the title deeds it feels it is entitled to. According to the second news story, CCM claims that it has acquired the plots legally.

From the outside it is extremely difficult to find out what is up and what is down in this story. It is definitely about power. But is it also about abuse of power? Personally, I would like to know how and when these plots were acquired. According to the excellent book, Why Planning does not Work?, by Tumsifu Jonas Nnkya, the administration of land in Moshi has previously been marred by irregularities, top-down management, and misuse of power.

Land and microcredit as vehicles for poverty reduction?

A title deed or a microcredit loan?

A heated debate about the merits of microcredit in developing countries has been going on for a couple of months now. For long, microfinance was hailed as the ultimate answer to poverty and underdevelopment. New findings question the positive effects of providing loans to the poor. The debate reminds me of the equally politicised debates about land titling. I find both debates relevant. But I usually disagree with the alternatives presented by the critics.

The microcredit controversy started towards the end of 2010, when evidence about the microcredit sector in India came out and a critical documentary about microcredit in Bangladesh was broadcast simultaneously. The latter was aired in Norway, but soon caused uproar in Bangladesh. It shows how some borrowers got caught in indebtedness. New loans were taken out to repay old ones, often at sky-high interest rates. Thus, those meant to benefit from microcredit could end up in a worse situation than the one they were in from the outset.

Should the microcredit system be abandoned from the development agenda, then? Yes, say some scholars, who see microcredit as a part of a global neoliberal conspiracy.

Similar controversies can be found in debates about land titling in Sub-Saharan Africa. In the 1970s and 1980s titling was encouraged by the World Bank as a means to enhance economic growth. But empirical research showed that titling did not necessarily generate growth. On the opposite, it turned out, that titling was potentially damaging to the livelihoods of poor and vulnerably groups. Research from Kenya, where titling was carried out in the 1970s and 1980s, showed that titling did not necessarily give access to credit. On the opposite, titling could have negative distributional consequences, especially for women, whose rights were often not registered. Among some researchers, in particular among left-leaning anthropologists, a new orthodoxy evolved, which consistently claimed that titling was a threat to poor and vulnerable groups.

I find the critique highly relevant, though I disagree with the conclusions drawn by some of the critics. Hopes about the poverty alleviating effects of microcredit and land titling have been raised too high. But rather than outright abolishing these approaches, expectations should be adjusted to more realistic levels. The interventions should not be seen as quick shortcuts to poverty reduction. Still, significant benefits could be reaped. Recent empirical findings support this.

A new systematic review of the available evidence of microfinance shows, that microcredit has a positive impact on poor people’s savings and on health and food security. But it also shows that microcredit has the potential to do harm. Setbacks are found on education (to repay loans quickly children are taken out of school, thus saving school fees). Indebtedness, for those unable to repay their loans, was also a reported consequence. A mixed picture, in other words.

A similar mixed picture appears from recent evidence from land titling. In the article Property Rights for the Poor: Effects of Land Titling it is acknowledged, that titles may not give access to credit (as claimed by many). But it also shows that people are more likely to invest in their land, their houses, and their children’s education, if they have a title deed. The findings are based on comparative case studies conducted in a squatter area in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where some people had received titles in the early 1980s, and other’s had not. Furthermore, I find that titles may provide people with at least a little bit of security against the endemic land grabbing observed in many countries.

Microcredit and land titling are complicated issues. Outcomes vary from one place to another.In some contexts programmes should be avoided. We may experience outright failures. Still, to abolish these approaches totally would be a mistake. We may not be able to eradicate poverty using them, but we can improve many people’s livelihoods and quality of life. The key question is how to achieve the benefits without putting too many people’s livelihoods at risk because of the dynamics they set free. There is a balance to strike there.

A title deed or a microcredit loan?

Tanzania’s Land Law Reform - Slow and uneven Progress

NGOs and the Ministry of Lands, Housing and Human Settlement Development are involved in a significant number of projects to implement Tanzania’s land law reform from 1999. Still, implementation in rural areas is slow and uneven. That is my conclusion in the working paper I published this month. You can download the working paper free of charge here.

If you have comments to the working paper, please, feel free to write to me here or on my E-mail address, which you find here.