COP15: Securing land rights is crucial to land restoration in Africa

Human rights-based land governance on the African continent is the best way to rehabilitate land and prevent its degradation, according to a number of groups presenting at the COP15 Desertification and Land Rights conference in Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire. 

Pastoralists at work in Kenya © WikimediaCommons/CC/Loisa Kitakaya

One key example offered is of the nomadic pastoralists in Kenya, who come from different ethnic communities and who are often marginalized as they move their cattle around to graze. 

The rangelands they move around in have been badly degraded because of climate change and overuse.  

To start the process of improving the land, those who are most impacted should be involved in decision-making about that land, says Audace Kubwimana, Africa regional coordinator of International Land Coalition (ILC), a global alliance of civil society and farmers' organizations, NGOs and United Nation's agencies. 

In East Africa, the Pastoralists’ Participatory Rangelands Management Project (PRM), funded by the European Union, enabled pastoralists to map the resources available across the rangelands.  

In order to encourage improvement of the land, those who are affected must be involved in decision-making, says Audace Kubwimana, Africa regional coordinator of International Land Coalition (ILC).

The RMP called on the governments to provide a Certificate of Customary Rights of Occupancy (CCROs), which officially gives them the right to have their cattle graze on the land.

“For those communities, they feel stable, and they feel that it’s theirs and they can take care of it,” says Kubwimana on the sidelines of the conference.  

They also lead the process and feel included. As a result, they are likely to continue participating in this project and even get involved in others.  

“That is proof that when you provide space to pastoralists, to local communities, they can themselves achieve what is needed,” he added.

“People’s organizations drive the strategy and that’s exactly what we’re doing with pastoralists.”  

Limiting land degradation

In the case of Malawi, the degradation is the result of local communities overusing the land to make a living.  

“In Malawi, most of the resources are depleted and the land  belongs to the government. That means that the communities surrounding these areas do not have a sense of ownership,” says Teddie Kamoto, Malawi’s deputy director of forestry.  

He says the government needs to begin to recognise the needs of the communities, because nothing can be done to improve the land if they are not involved.

Kamoto adds that the co-management policy that has been put in place offers management of the land by the people that use it in partnership with the government. However, this is still in its early stages.  

“We should begin to engage with the communities, try to understand the tenured arrangements that are there, the barriers that are there, so that we begin to address those,” says Kamoto.  

“We need to start listening to the people, the communities themselves, and stop being academic. Because if we are to have the areas restored, it is not the people in office who will restore the land, or the people with degrees. It is the people in the village.”  

Kamoto also spoke at a COP15 side-panel on strengthening human rights-based land governance hosted by the TMG Research Think Tank for Sustainability.

Based on the earlier COP14 decision on land tenure, the group offers a country-level view of Madagascar, Malawi, Kenya and Benin to see how land tenure is working.  

Created 10 years ago by the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), voluntary guidelines for land tenure rights provide the basis for discussion on the issue.  

However, Jes Weigelt, head of programmes for the TMG think-tank says that these guidelines are still only being defined and  have yet to be adapted in several countries.  

“When we say from our point of view - and it is really an eagle-eyed perspective - that these communities that we work with have legitimate land tenure rights, it is because they have occupied these lands for between 10 and 30 years. They use these lands to generate their livelihoods,” says Weigelt.  

“This is our basis for acknowledging that these rights are legitimate. In all cases, they are not officially recognized."  

Pan-African pastoralist activism

Meanwhile, a pan-African pastoralist movement is being created by Rangelands Initiative Africa with support from the ILC.

East African pastoralists have already been mobilized and are speaking to pastoralists in Central and West Africa this week to create a pan-African rangelands strategy.  

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All the regional groups will be meeting in Jordan on 23 May to create the movement officially and agree on a way forward.  

ILC is offering technical support as well as some seed funding to help them access bigger donors.  

“We’ll supply them with resources that can take them to donors and explain to donors what they want to do in terms of rangeland management, in terms of making pastoralism professional at a grassroots level,” says Kubwimana. 

Kubwimana calls rangelands management a human rights issue, and a survival issue at its core.

“We also need to look at it from a livelihoods perspective—these spaces are a source of income for millions of people, and if we look at it from this angle, we’ll be encouraged to act.

“You cannot manage rangelands without having pastoralists at the center of this process.”