 And this is, as Christine says, a systematic review on the relationship, just to get into a little more detail at the beginning, of land rights certification, registration, or titling. In other words, some kind of typically state-led effort to certify in law and in records a family's rights to a discrete area of land. Now, a lot of us who may come from, you know, the U.S. or Europe sort of assume, well, that's sort of an important attribute of any kind of land tenure or property rights system, certified registered land rights. Because we associate that attribute with a key element of what we think is important to agricultural development, which is land tenure security. It's a very simple notion found in neoclassical economics and with common sense, and those two don't always correspond, that, you know, if a family is going to invest in their property, they need to have a clear expectation that far into the future, the kinds of sacrifices, investments of labor, capital, materials into that land, and the benefits that come from those investments will accrue to them. So the relationship, very simple relationship between land tenure security, property rights security, and investment. So good outcomes happen in theory and often in observed practice where people have clear tenure security. Now in many developing countries, the kind of formal certification systems or property rights systems, titling systems that we are familiar with, maybe in the wealthy countries, are not present. A lot of farmers farm on land owned by the state. In Africa particularly, a lot of farming, in fact, maybe 80 to 90% of all farming is done on land that's held under customary tenure regimes where land rights are not certified formally. People gain access to land through different principles. And so DFID asked a group of scholars in, I guess it was 2013, and there were four of us. Myself, I was at the Kennedy School at the time, another colleague, Sierra Sammy, a political scientist at NYU, a colleague Ruth Hall at the program in land and agrarian studies at the University of Western Cape in Cape Town, South Africa, and Aaron Leopold who was at the time at the Global Governance Institute in Brussels. Asked us to pull together a team of other researchers, graduate students to do a systematic review on the relationship between investments in land rights certification or titling in the developing world. And, of course, part of the development discourse over the last 30 or 40 years has been African agriculture will not take off unless people have clear tenure security. And there's this underlying assumption that that is delivered through land rights certification or titling. The same in Latin America and parts of Asia. So in light of the fact that over the last 30 to 40 years there have been a number of efforts to actually convert non-formally tenured regimes into formally tenured regimes based on certification by the state. The question that DFID asked us to look into, well, what have been the effects with respect to the expected increases following land rights certification in investment, in productivity, in farmer incomes, in, for instance, flow of credit. Because another part of the theory is with a title, you can take it to the bank and get credit. And so that was our, that was the topic of our systematic review. Being an evidence-based institution that's committed a lot of resources to doing systematic reviews, you understand what they involve, so I don't have to go into that. But, you know, our, basically, you know, our inclusion criteria, a familiar term for many of you, was limited to studies that were based on randomized control trials. In other words, randomized samples of farming households in an area that had received a treatment, which was, say, land rights certification. In comparison to a community where we were able to control all of the factors apart from the fact that that community had not received land rights certification. To look at, empirically, the effects of the certification intervention on investment, productivity of agriculture, farmer family incomes, and access to credit. And so what were our results? Let me just say briefly that we, those of you who have done systematic reviews know the pain, but our mainly graduate students looked at 25,000 titles on the subject. They reduced that to a review of 1,000 abstracts, which yielded 100 papers that we looked at in detail, and only 20 studies met our inclusion criteria. So this is a huge question for the development world for economic theory, a whole host of issues, and only 20 studies met, sort of, which you might characterize as a rigorous empirical research design. And those studies fell in, let's see, nine countries. And there were 20 studies that fell in nine countries. There were five in Latin America, five in, that is studies in Latin America, five in Asia and 10 in Africa. Now, what were the results? Okay. Now, the results, I found very interesting, and I think you will, too. In the Latin American and Asia cases, they're after certification, or typically titling in Latin America, especially. There were significant average gains to productivity, and I'm focusing on the productivity question, especially. Significant average gains to productivity after tenure recognition, after the certificate, of between upwards of 50% and 100% gains in productivity, and strongly positive gains to investment and income following tenure recognition, typically titling. So very significant gains to productivity and strongly positive gains to investment in household income. However, in the Africa cases, there were weak or modest gains to productivity, there's between zero and 10% following certification. That is gains to productivity and investment and income, though in most cases, there were still positive gains. Okay. So that's the second important finding. The third finding was there was no or weak discernible credit effects anywhere. So this notion of credit flowing from the title of this. Most studies, and we were actually looking very carefully through a gender lens with respect to differential effects on men and women. Most studies failed to disaggregate effects of tenure recognition on women, though two quantitative studies identified positive effects, one in Ethiopia, one in Rwanda. Okay. So then the question becomes, well, why these sort of significant gains in Latin America and Asia and these relatively weak or modest gains in the Africa cases? And we have three hypotheses that we're exploring through further research. We're going to publish the, our findings, you know, based, we're going to take the work into a new direction and exploring more deeply what might explain the weaker responses in Africa. The first hypothesis is what we're calling the role of pre-existing institutions. In Africa specifically, customary tenure. Okay. Customary tenure often and very typically provides high levels of tenure security for the whole land under tenure, under customary tenure. Customary tenure systems or systems provide access to land as a social right by virtue of one's membership in the community. You're a bona fide member of that community. Now this land, an indicator of the security of that tenure is that it's often inheritable to other family members, but it can't be sold most typically. So for poor people in Africa who have access to land, this is land free of charge as a social right, and that is a pervasive institution in Africa. So the designers of these programs, we hypothesize, were likely underestimating the, the tenure insecurity of people who held those lands. And so when those land rights were certified, the kind of productivity gains or investment gains that would have been projected, assuming prior tenure insecurity didn't happen. Those assumptions were misplaced. A third factor is what we're calling the wealth effect, is that household resources or wealth income in Africa are much lower among poor farmers in comparison to poor farmers in Latin America and in Asia. So, you know, if you're going to really do something with your land, it's just not about land as an asset. It's about labor, capital, having the income to invest in, you know, in your farming enterprise. And the generally high levels or low levels of income among African farmers constrain the ability of farmers to make better use of their land. That's hypothesis number two. And the third hypothesis is what we're calling complementary public investments. And these are things like, you know, those of us who work in the land tenure field have long been talking about, you know, it's not about land reform alone, it's about what we call a grain reform. This is very much a lesson from Latin America, is that it's just not providing secure land rights to people. It's about providing packages of support around farming, inputs, access to markets, roads, infrastructure, cooperatives, and so on into farmer training that enable once again the farmers to capitalize on their secure land rights. And levels of public investment in rural areas in Africa are, we believe, much lower than they are in Latin America and Asia. And so, you know, one of our arguments is that, you know, when talking about land rights certification or formalization in Africa, you really have to approach it as a package of investments that go into roads and other kinds of investments. And you also have to take account of this wealth effect. And so I think I'm sort of not more than a minute over, and I'll leave it at that and welcome questions. Thank you very much. Thanks very much. Thank you very much. I'm sure there is a large number of questions, so let me see hands of those of you who are who would like to think. William and then Vibhika. And one more in the first round. I would say the predictable suspect. William first, Vibhika. And then Pablo. It sounds like a fascinating study. I'm looking forward to reading it. Reading it. A simple question. It sounds like the converse of what you found in Africa would be true in Asia and Latin America, that the customary rights were under threat. Can you say a bit more about that? That the customary rights in Asia were under threat? That in comparison to Africa, they were less stable. Not knowing the Asia agrarian history, if you will, as well, I would say that would likely be the case. The colonial experience in Africa was, except for in those countries where there were large settler communities, Kenya being an outstanding example, Zimbabwe being an outstanding example, the approach of the colonial states was to basically allow customary tenure regimes to continue, more or less unaffected, although they introduced sort of an underlying state assertion. They asserted underlying state ownership of customary land. But on the surface, customary institutions, the traditional authorities, more or less continued unaffected. And so that today, we have customary tenure regimes dominant. An explanation, with respect to the Asian difference, would be the maybe larger sort of agrarian interests, foreign agrarian interests, high demand for land, facilitation under the colonial governments and sort of securing that land, and to sort of large scale plantation style enterprises, for instance. And so the kind of norm of inheritance of the customary, of sort of tenure policy was very much either a state owned kind of regime. It's a combination of a state owned regime and then a private regime, and customary tenure would have been marginalized. That could be the case. Thank you very much, Steve, for the very fascinating presentation. I had two sort of interrelated questions. One was on methodology. Can you explain your justification for using or focusing on studies that used RCTs? And while I can understand that you're exploring the linkages between titling and investment is a lot easier when you focus on studies that use RCTs, it also means that RCTs is still sort of a recent methodological development. So does that limit the type of research that you can focus on? And the second is I'm interested in your question, in your hypothesis about customary tenure. And I'm wondering if you could please elaborate on how you would carry out further research, especially because customary tenure, as you know, is very fluid. So would you again focus on RCTs or would you broaden your horizon? Yeah, very good point. And one thing I failed to mention because of the shortage of time is that our study included a set of qualitative studies. Not only quantitative, in fact, the study stands apart from systematic reviews, which focus on quantitative studies, because of kind of systematic reviews are very much about selecting studies that use a common methodology so that you can analyze the data sort of collectively. But we sort of systematically, if you will, selected a set of qualitative studies to look particularly at the gender questions, which we feared we sort of expected and that proved to be the case, would not be treated well in the RCTs. And so that arguably is a subject maybe for another talk, but we're able to get much more nuanced understanding of some of these issues, particularly with respect to the effects of certification or titling on women's income, well-being, rights, and so on. Now with respect to, and once again, I hope we can share a link to the larger study with everyone. With respect to the second question, customary tenure and its fluidity, this is a very live area of sort of debate and discourse and policy reform and making in sort of the land policy field, particularly in Africa, there's a growing recognition of the importance of customary tenure rights to the poor. If you sort of convert customary systems to private title systems, the people who stand the greatest chance of losing out are the poor. Once again, this is a system that provides access to land as a social right, a virtue of your membership in the community. And for poor people, land secured in this fashion is often the only secure asset, apart from their labor, that they have access to. So to take away that right through conversion and giving rein to land markets and so on and so forth raises serious welfare questions. So there's a growing recognition that if we're really concerned about rural poverty, we need to take on board the role that customary tenure plays in alleviating poverty, providing something of a safety net, very much relates to questions of migration that Christine and other colleagues are concerned about. You go off to town, you still have that land base in the rural area in which you can invest. Very important for social reproduction and other values. So in all of this, the question becomes, referring to, I think, the future, a concern, a growing concern about the need to protect customary tenure rights. So we're seeing a movement in Africa around what's called efforts to promote, in law, the statutory recognition of customary tenure. Because as I said earlier in response to William's question, during the colonial era, the state tenure was put underneath the customary systems, today making them vulnerable to arbitrary taking by the state and conversion to other purposes. So the notion is that customary tenure rights will be recognized statutorily at a level equal to state land, land held under by the state and land held under private tenure. So it would enjoy all the kind of rights that other tenure regimes would enjoy. And there are a number of countries who have embraced this approach. Botswana has this system since 1968, something of a model. There's no new private land was created in Botswana after independence in 1968. It's customary tenure, very secure, access to social right. Kenya and its new land policy has adopted this policy that South Sudan has. So that's, I think, very exciting and very important. There's pushback, for sure, because other people want that land for other purposes. Thank you, Steve. Next question is Pablo's. Try to be briefer in my response. Thank you, Steve, for the talk. Quite interesting findings. My question is a bit more, what exactly do you mean when you talk about the after? Because I think there's a temporal dimension in that. And I think it takes some time since the titles are granted until the people get the benefits of those rights. And I think that differs across the different regions. And I think, mainly in Latin America also, there can be some other factors that explain how long it takes for the people to get the benefits of those rights. And even those productivities, even though they can increase right afterwards, there are some other factors that explain what they can sustain over time and even they can drop. So how is that the studies that you have been looking at, they can talk about this temporal dimension. The temporal dimension, yeah. Well, it was very much a mixed set of studies. We basically selected studies that looked at reforms or conversions between 1980 and 2012. And that the length of time, the temporal factor, was not explicitly taken into account. In other words, there were studies in the mix that had looked at the effects over a 20-year period, in some cases. Others had looked at the effects after a three-year period. So, you know, we weren't controlling for that. And you're raising some important questions. Time is important to the kind of life of any enterprise. And what we saw in some of the Latin American cases was the Nicaragua case, it was sort of a land reform beneficiary settlement community that had been held back, that was the argument, had gotten land, people were settled there and so on and so forth, but had not gotten the title. You remember part of the sort of agrarian history in the 70s and 80s, you know, the promises of title, things got complicated. And so finally these folks got their title. And so a lot was already in place. You know, networks, people who were the market was, investment in housing and some investment in land. And with the title it just really took off. This is where we saw this like 50% growth, 50% initial growth. Because we saw a drop-off in productivity, you know, over time, we were settling into kind of a new sort of mean. But the time factor is very important. You know, six of the 10 African studies were in Ethiopia, which skews our findings, you know, but these are mainly World Bank studies. World Bank has been doing a lot of research and some investment in land rights certification of customary rights in Ethiopia. And, you know, the responses were, you know, short-term. And so maybe over the longer term, we'll see a pickup. But the interventions are fairly recent. And really in the last, you know, five to ten years, HAPTA would argue that things are now sort of gaining momentum. We're seeing more tree planting on these farms that have been certified under the law and so on. So time is a factor. Thank you. We have two more people, but if I could just assert my right, because I'm standing, to just a little bit more clarification, because I think a few of the things you've said here recently about the fact that there was really great variation in the temporal dimension, but also that three of your studies were in one country. Six. Oh. I just wanted to say if we could clarify that, because we're talking about the whole world. We're talking about Asia. We're talking about Latin America. We're talking about Africa. And you've got 20 studies, which really worries me, especially with the issue of the systematic reviews that we squash 20,000 articles into 20. Could you just say a few more words about what these 20 articles were and how you actually, because you have, you know, obviously your knowledge doesn't derive from the systematic review about what you think the important biases were because of this particular approach. Yeah. I mean, this is the first systematic review that I have been involved in. And my colleague at NYU, Cyrus Sammy, who's really, I think, a very, you know, brilliant quantitative political scientist had done several. And so he was, you know, in terms of working within the protocol, if you will, I think we were, you know, the process had integrity. But the questions you raise are questions that I have in my mind also. I mean, there's this one observation one can make, randomized control trials, okay, come out of the medical field where there is control, if you will, with respect to inputs, the pill you take and the population and so on. And one has to, you know, understand that even within a country like Ethiopia, there's tremendous variation in the landscape and in agrarian history, in land use strategies. And there are some agroforestry-focused programs. There are others focused on cropland. And so all these variations are not, you know, need to be addressed with care. And, you know, we can make some generalizations within Ethiopia on the basis of six studies. But, you know, I want to emphasize that on the basis of the studies, these were the findings. Now, one thing that we did do was, you know, these Africa results, hmm, they kind of, half the studies were from Africa, they really stood apart from the other studies, five of which were Asia, five were Latin America. So what we did was we went back to the literature and looked at studies that had been excluded, had just sort of almost made it into the, met the inclusion criteria. But for some fairly technical, they were randomized controlled trials, but we might have had an issue or something. And we looked at those and we included those in the mechs and thought, well, is there anything that sort of might raise particular questions? And it didn't. It didn't. Now, the methodological problem there was the question of selecting those, you know, biases that might have been among the researchers. I think that what we're left with is, okay, maybe there's something here and let's go deeper. And in Africa, based on my experience, going deeper means looking at customary tenure. And knowing something about Africa's agrarian history, that the assumptions from the West of customary tenure is inherently insecure, is deeply flawed. So let's sort of apply that kind of knowledge to land tenure reform interventions and see, you know, and do more studies. What is the productivity effect of? We're certifying land tenure all over the place in many African studies. We're not doing research. We're not assessing what difference it actually makes against the assumptions. And huge investments are involved in converting tenure to title or to sort of a huge public sector investment, huge maintenance and administrative costs. Kenya invested very heavily beginning at the end of the colonial period and into the independence era and converting virtually nearly all land into Kenya to title. The whole system kind of turned to dust because of the administrative costs and because people felt that their land tenure security was delivered through custom. They didn't register their transactions and so the whole record system was out of date within a generation. So that's why we're doing this. I don't know if I'm on the board, but is it going to change minds about the virtue of this kind of intervention? Probably not, you know, at the popular level, but it may give pause. Let's think a little bit about what we're doing. Thank you. We've got Louie and then Miguel with questions. Thanks for your introduction to your article. It sounds very interesting, especially sort of considering the potential for customary tenure to represent a different kind of security over time. There's a small group of us now starting to look at collective tenure reform, some new work on collective tenure reform in China, and we're starting to see a very interesting debate between among people who think that the individualization to the family level of land rights in China and the subsequent huge increase in productivity after that is evidence in favor of privatization, whereas others, and of course, land can still be redistributed in China, so the other side is that over time, there's the potential to maintain equitable distribution into the future, so I'm wondering if the studies that you looked at in Africa on customary tenure that cover customary tenure systems all include redistribution as a component that potential redistribution that could potentially contribute to long-term equitable distribution of land while, of course, having a different effect on individual land tenure, the tenure of individual families over specific pieces of land over shorter time periods. Yeah, the land holding distribution in customary regimes tends to be fairly equitable, because once again, land is made available to families who are bona fide members of the community, so it varies among communities. Some traditional authorities will claim kind of a stewardship or trusteeship role, really a land administrative role, and in many settings, really because of factors that came out of the colonial era, a certain ownership of that land. South Africa is in a very difficult place in the post-departite era, because the political leadership would basically defer to the chiefs on how their understanding of their role in the tenure regime and their understanding is that I own it, and so that's really raised lots of issues. There's some interesting issues in Ghana around the constitutional role of chiefs in land stewardship and trusteeship, where they're converting that into their minds or their views, ownership. So there are some issues there, real concerns, but as a system, it's really about assuring kind of a basic level of livelihood and income in a home for families. Now customary tenure systems are also adaptive to new kinds of changes in the economy. So research I did in Lesotho some years ago, this is an economy, high levels of out migration, of mainly men working in the mines in South Africa, sort of labor shortages in the agricultural sector, sort of men kind of disappearing, and then women, widows, having control over the land. And so the customary tenure system kind of resolved the kind of problem of, well, the sons are off of the mines, and the wife is sort of in this kind of in-between space about her authority over the land. Well, the customary tenure authority said women inherit from their husbands. The sons do not, the sons inherit from the wife. That's an adaptation. And then the system started adapting to this notion of, well, women, widows often without male labor had a strong land right, now clarified in customary law, but didn't have access to draft power, you know, oxen, cash for inputs. And so the system started sanctioning a sort of a sharing in, a sharecropping kind of regime, where the landholder would basically go into a sharecropping arrangement or run out their land to a farmer who lacked land, not a wealthy guy, totally a guy, but who had draft power, it could bring soil fertility up to... So that's sort of an adaptation that's very significant. Enabling, in this case, a widow to mobilize an asset in ways that generate income. So there's adaptivity. Now, I just want to also add there's tremendous popular support for customary tenure in Africa. And we see some efforts to, you know, convert it for other uses or other regimes, and that those are generally resisted. So this is an area where you have to go very carefully. There's one comment on China accompanying their individualization processes would have been other agrarian reform factors. So the response in post-reform, pre-reform, it was just not land. It was a whole host of things, prices, and a whole host of things that would de-incentivate investment as well as land. Well, as a siforian, I would like to hear more about how this, what you're finding in your reviews about the tenure regimes or tenure policies, how they are related to anti-forest hypothesis. Tom Rodel published an article, a couple articles about how the Schwartz, when they got tenure, have produced one of the massive deforestation in Ecuador in the name of increasing food productivity. When they produced the sugar cane, they didn't market to sell. But the damage was already done. And I could go over another questions, another examples, but I would like to know more about that. How tenure is a tool for replacing land use activities that are based on forest and trees? Yeah. Well, that's a huge, very important question. And it gets into the issues of kind of agency and the state's role in protecting the forest domain against, you know, what rural people will do with it if given the kind of the right to the land. And, you know, a way of thinking about this is that, you know, any tenure regime is not based on the whole bundle of rights, if you will, placed in a particular individual or family or community. Those rights are shared among a host of interests. And, you know, we think of the bundle, sticks in the bundle. And so with respect to the forest rights devolution efforts that William has written about and others have written about, you know, we're not really looking at programs that give communities necessarily all use and management rights. The idea is to devolve a significant amount of use and management rights to communities to enable them to make their own judgments about how best to use those resources. Forests and other resources. Now, typically states retain some rights, regulatory rights, that condition the exercise of the use and management rights of the communities. Now, if it's a forest area that the community wants to remove all the trees, well, that's going to have to be negotiated because there is a public interest, arguably, and this is going to be negotiated in policies of any given country. There is a public interest in forest conservation. Forest degradation has external effects on watersheds, on health, and on the planet. So I don't know, not knowing the circumstances, and I'd love to see that particular study. It sounds like an important study. One wants to look at it. But on the other side, you've got the question of state ownership, all the greater part of use and management rights being concentrated in the state, and what those imply for the ability of rural people to realize their livelihood goals, exercise their agency over land use and stewardship over resources, and what's lost in terms of diminishment of rights, dignity, livelihoods, and environmental outcomes, in many cases, when those rights are denied. So I think getting into the case-by-case basis here is very, very important. I think it's very much a balance and distribution of those rights. My caution is that we see a formal devolution of use and management rights as part of the rights-devolution movement to communities, but the states are retaining significant control over how those rights are exercised through permitting controls and requirements for management plans, which are very onerous and very restrictive. This is, I think, a very important area of research because there's huge emphasis on rights to evolution on the premise that there'll be better, there'll be jointly positive social and environmental outcomes. And let's get to work in testing those hypotheses. Questions? Great. Please, Daniel. Thank you very much. We did a similar kind of study on different topics, but at the end of your... You just said about the development of hypothesis. Is that a kind of common approach after doing such a huge kind of literature survey, a hypothesized thing to develop future kind of research? Yeah. Well, this whole question, the other is Arun Agarwal at Michigan and a few others. In a study I did with some of these colleagues involved a few years ago, we were seeing some research that were not quite systematic reviews, but we're looking at trying to control, do our RCTs, if you will, of areas of forest, including in Latin America, that were under community management and controlling for a host of things, access to roads and climate and so on and so forth, presence of police, and areas that were under state ownership and management, for livelihood and environmental outcomes. And with environmental outcomes, for instance, measured by changes in canopy over time in areas under community stewardship versus the state. And the evidence, once again, I'd have to go back and look at this sort of methodologies with suggesting in a number of cases jointly positive outcomes. So I think that's very important research. I mean, it comes back to, you know, so many questions arising around things like zero deforestation in which colleagues in governance are working on. What are the outcomes in terms of greenhouse gas emission reductions? I mean, let's look at that question. I mean, we've got, we have different governance regimes, Daniel. We have state regulation, state ownership before us, regulation. We've got Red Plus regimes based within governments, giving away to PES regimes, but kind of high regulatory elements. We have certification experience in regimes and we have zero deforestation. Now, what difference do these management regimes make with respect to things that we're concerned with? Greenhouse gas emission reductions, for instance. Now, state stewardship of forests in Brazil and Indonesia, arguably, has been problematic in terms of land use conversion outcomes, as we're aware. So are there alternatives that we can look at? I mean, a very interesting report from Brazil the other day showed that companies in the soy sector are all observing the soil memorandum that prohibits deforestation, and that there's only been 1% increase in land under the deforestation of land under the stewardship of these companies. So that seems to be like people are, this company responding to the market pressures. The same study reported that only 30% of companies in Brazil observe the forest code. They basically ignore it. So the regulatory regime around that's seeking to regulate deforestation through law and regulation, there's kind of an indifference to it. So what's that about? I mean, how are these governance regimes working? And I think we can look at those on a comparative basis. Okay, we have one last question, Daisuke. Sorry, I will be quick. Thank you very much for a very interesting talk. I was wondering when you always think about certification, they try to always secure tenure rights, but then you come into the program of indigeneity. Indigeneity. So I was wondering in your study how you try to deal with this problem. Yeah. We really didn't, you know, the cases in Latin America were not, if you mean by that, indigenous communities as the literature came up. And usually there's not a, you know, the indigenous forest rights movement and activities and laws and reforms are very much about protecting collective rights to the forest or to the landscape and not about converting to, you know, on the individual basis. It's really a collective basis. We really didn't look at that. Interesting question. Okay, well, since that was, is there another question? Since that was a very short question, I will allow myself to ask one more question and I'm going to try to be as provocative as possible without being completely dumb. And it's obviously about migration and it's about whether the fact is that urbanization and migration are real facts and the great sort of transfer of people more towards an urban base, both existence and income generation and all is a fact almost everywhere or at least that's the trend. Are we being sentimental in talking about customary land rights as the most important thing we should be looking at? You know, is it, is the real limitation the fact that people can't, under any customary law, probably can't sell their rights effectively in order to then invest in urban areas? Are we just, have we just become so focused on this particular area, something that necessarily is good and our donors like, that we're really ignoring important new trends that say that it's actually a sort of a divorcing from that land and investment in other activities that really is the key to reducing poverty and raising productivity in these areas. I don't think we're being sentimental. And here's why. Well, it's not about so much what I think about the customary tenure, it's about the effects on what customary tenure does. I think the evidence will support this, but here's an area of needed research in increasing the livelihood, improving the livelihood and food security and other sort of prospects of rural people in transitioning economies. If you want to, by transitioning we mean migration. And, you know, I really kind of grew up, if you will, in terms of my own work in Southern Africa, which is a region, no other region, well, I'm sure one can make the case that there are others that has been so, where the rural areas have been so affected by migration. And this great kind of magnet of South African industry drawing low-cost labor into the factories and the mines and then, because of the apartheid regime, really not getting those folks kind of rights. That's all changing now, of course, very importantly. But people came from Botswana, neighboring countries, not just the rural areas of South Africa, but Zimbabwe, Malawi, Botswana, Lesotho, half of all working-age men in Lesotho in the mid-1980s were working in the mines in the mines in South Africa. So what is this, you know, but then there was this persistent, what I would characterize as commitment on the part of the migrant families that had sent some migrants to South Africa to customary tenure. And why? Because, once again, it comes back to this notion that in the urban setting, people lacked rights. They lacked the money to, even through their jobs, low-income jobs to buy housing. They lacked, you know, service land. You know, Nairobi has two million people and just one slum. You know, a great sort of characteristic of African urban migration is informality in the urban sector. There is not housing. People retain interests, economic and social interests in rural areas that provide some measure of social and economic security against the vagaries of the low-wage, low-income, low-opportunity economy that poor people face. And so I would say, let's ask them. You know, I remember having a conversation in a hotel in Vintock a few years ago in Namibia with the waitress. I like to chat with people about where they, sorry, it's anecdotal evidence, but it's still evidence. And I asked her, you know, to tell me her story. You know, she, her home was up north in the cattle producing area. Her son was with her mom. She was making cash in Vintock to send home to invest in buying livestock and in housing. And her prospects for doing any of that on a family basis in Vintock were very limited. And, you know, she identified with home. For her, I mean, in Vintock and other cities in Southern Africa on holidays, people are home, which means the cities are empty. Home is where, you know, the customary land is. So let's, I'd say this is a dynamic system. It's adaptive. It's responsive. But it's providing secure assets to people as a social right. So let me just make one more comment if I could. The Convention's International Covenant on Social, Economic and Cultural Rights, which all but three African countries are signatories to, provides that countries aspire to a whole host of outcomes economically that are dependent upon a land right. And these are the right to shelter. Arguably a land right, a secure land right, right to shelter, right to livelihood. Now under our feet in Africa is a system that delivers land to families as a social right. And we're acting as if it's not there. How, you know, these countries are in a position now to deliver on that aspect of the covenant by protecting their customary tenure system. If anyone's got anything better to offer, you know, in terms of upgrading informal settlements and giving title and coming up with, you know, credit and other regimes to sort of do that. Well, those have been tried, but that very, very little effect. Time is to tell, but I think over the longer term we want people to have the ability to make the judgments about what's in their family's best economic interests. And we do that by, you know, allowing them to retain a right, it's a right that they currently enjoy as a social right. Well, thank you very much. And I'm so glad we ended on this positively sort of lovely.