 Okay, we are in the homestretch. Congratulations for making it through an entire very dense day of learning and we are the last panel between you and some refreshments, so we'll try to keep it lively and keep this panel pretty quick. And then we'll look forward to continuing the discussion afterwards. So thank you again, my name is Yulia Panfil and I am a member of the Property Rights Team at Omidyar Network and I am joined here by an illustrious panel of experts that span the fields of advocacy, land administration, policy, technology, working from the global level to the regional level to the national level and across academia, the private sector and also the nonprofit sector. So directly to my right is Chris Jocknik who is the president and CEO of Landesa which is a nonprofit organization that serves land rights all over the world. Prior to joining Landesa in 2015, Chris led Oxfam America's business and development practice where he conceptualized and launched the Behind the Brands campaign. Next to Chris is Noel Taylor who is the founder and former CEO of Cadasta which is an organization that harnesses innovative technology to simplify and expedite documentation of land and resource rights around the world. Noel has more than 20 years of land and property rights experience particularly in modernizing title registration and cadastral systems. And last but not least we have Professor Grenville Barnes who is a professor of geomatics in the School of Forest Resources and Conservation at the University of Florida. Grenville is a leader in the field of land administration with over 25 years of teaching land administration cadastral systems and geomatics. So before we jump into the panel, I will do my best to summarize in two minutes some of the most interesting lessons, takeaways and perhaps questions that I was left with listening through the panels today. A few words that really stuck out to me that were repeated over and over by the panelists and the speakers, hope, innovation, perseverance, customer service, co-design, autonomy and partnerships. You know, just some points that really stuck out to me. One, you can make progress on land rights even in the absence of fully legally recognized rights. So if you think about the Moabisi Park case study and their ability to electrify that community even in the absence of formal, full legal rights. Something else, just piecemeal digitization isn't enough. You need really a holistic change management and business development approach to upgrading your land registries and we saw that in the Jamaica case study, Australia, Ontario. Something else that stuck out to me. When you talk about PPPs, you really are talking about all three P's. So when developing PPPs, we have to harness the comparative advantage of the business community and the private sector as well as the government and then look into the synergies that are provided by the partnership. I mean, just the example in Ontario of 30 million to four billion dollars in revenue kind of speaks for itself. Another takeaway for me is that securing land rights and updating land registries is a long, frustrating, but ultimately rewarding journey, but it needs a real commitment of both time and money and importantly mandate. And that's something that really came through from several of the case studies. Another takeaway, beautiful laws don't necessarily equal beautiful practice. You could have the most perfect law in the books, but if it's not implemented correctly, you're nowhere. So how do we really get to the implementation piece? And finally, securing land rights is not necessarily the goal in and of itself. It's what can you do with your land rights once they're secured? So it's this whole idea that securing tenure is a necessary but not sufficient condition for achieving these economic growth, food security, empowerment outcomes. So those are just kind of a handful of aspects that stuck out to me. And before turning it over to the panelists, I'm just gonna throw out a few of the questions that I thought were really interesting that some of the speakers dealt with and if the panelists want to riff on any of these or pick them up, great. I'm sure you have many of your own. You know, one, how do you record communal land rights in a system that only supports individual rights from a legal perspective? I thought that that was really fascinating discussion. How do you deal with different departments within a government who handle different pieces of the land-titling puzzle? How do you, I really like the graphic from Elizabeth Stair's presentation of that puzzle piece in the middle. How do you actually make that puzzle fit together? How do you merge departments that may not want to be merged? How do you make registries sustainable from both a financial perspective and a participation perspective? So how do you monetize certain aspects of a land registry that perhaps subsidize some of the free services that you're providing? Or how can the private sector help in the development or in the delivery of property rights in these systems? And we saw some of that through the Ontario case study. Or perhaps how do you use innovative structures like the statutory authority that we saw in Australia? Another question. How do you create in communities the capacity to respond to legal changes or policy changes that are happening at the national level? Because as we saw, and this goes back to the implementation problem, if communities aren't ready to receive these changes, then the changes can be implemented. And finally, and I think this really came through from the Tanzania case study, how do you efficiently build the capacity of a large number of people? And we saw in the Tanzania case study a cascading approach. But when you have a policy or legal change at the top, and then you have thousands of people who have to implement it, how do you build their capacity? So those are some of the interesting questions that I thought the presentations delved into and would love to discuss more in the context of this panel. But for the time being, I will stop and leave it to the panelists. And I'll open it up if each of you could take maybe five minutes to reflect on what you thought were some of the more interesting or perhaps more surprising aspects of the case studies and what you heard today. And how do you think that these case studies could be applicable in the contexts in which you work and how perhaps they can't be are there portions of the case studies that you don't think are applicable? So we can start with Grenville and continue back this way. Okay, thank you. One mic on. Good. So since I've worked in just about all of these countries with the exception of Canada and Australia and Tanzania, all of them are really interesting to me and including those other countries because even though I didn't work there, I was studying their history in the late 80s. So it's very interesting to see the kind of changes in the positive side of things. I mean, I was starting to lose faith. I hate to say that, but this is a nice positive stroke to push me in the right direction. Surprising, perhaps. I did some work in Jamaica way back in the early 1990s and the registry at that time of the Titles Office was known as the deep, which meant that you didn't wanna go down there because who knows what was happening. And I don't know if this is true, but the urban legend was that the Titles Office itself was not registered. So it's nice to see that Jamaica has come such a long way. The Kyrgyzstan, we also done some work, is another sort of surprise because of overcoming this huge change in land tenure and land policy from a communist to a sort of a private property system. And then I think the surprise that Leon and I had, which is sort of a negative surprise when doing the South African case study, was that there's no mechanism to register communal property which constitutes something like 35% or more of the land in a country which supposedly has a good registry was surprising to both of us. So that's the sort of negative surprise. In terms of innovations, I think what's very, very interesting are these PPPs, these private public partnerships that they're going and all the different ways that it's been put together are extremely interesting. I don't think there's no one from Brazil here, right? But there was a case study in Brazil and probably very few people read that. So I will just mention that there's something very innovative going on there. There's an agricultural, sorry, a thing called a car, which is a slightly different approach to a cadastra where people go and they self-declare what their rights are and they are trying to build this from a sort of a conservation end of things. And at some point they will put it together with the legal registry. So it's a very innovative way of trying to get around and trying to eventually get to the formal registry. How does this fit with my context? My context is pretty broad. I have worked and had an interest for a long time in this whole idea of legal pluralism and trying to bring together different land tenure regimes, if you like, so looked in Latin America and in Southern sub-Saharan Africa at how does one accommodate a property system that's really based on a completely different, if you wanna have it, cosmo-vision or something that sees land as a very different thing, not as a commodity as in disorder would have it, but as something much deeper than that. How do you marry that with a system that is treating land as a commodity and what is the interaction between those? And I think that's a big, I don't think we've solved that one, but that is a big challenge. So I think I'll stop there. That's probably my five minutes. Thanks. Let me just start first by thanking Jennifer, Paul, Peter and the immediate team for the chance to participate because it's a unique undertaking by a media to fund these studies. And I can't reiterate enough what a fantastic job Maya did with the Landgate study that I assisted on. I left after a week of interviews, fairly exhausted and every day walked out thinking how the hell is this going to be distilled into something that's readable and useful? And I think what Maya has produced is really fantastic. And also for New America for getting involved into this and trying to disseminate the learnings from these case studies as well. I think they're really important when I think back to around this time, almost 10 years ago, I took a team of around 10 to 15 Egyptian government staff down to Jamaica to look at the reforms that were done by the NLA and spent about a week with Betty's team down there as well. And it was immediately after we had just been to London and done the same thing with HMLR. And at the end of the study tour, I had a meeting with the Vice Minister of Justice and before we went, you know, London was wherever we wanted to go. It's the most advanced system. It's fantastic. We want to see all the bells and whistles. Do we really need to go to Jamaica? Well, at the end of the study tour, they thanked me so much for getting them to Jamaica where they were actually able to see something that was a much better context for them to understand the process and the applicability of reform that they could themselves undertake to modernize their own systems and processes and institutions. And the challenge does lie in getting that information out on what the solutions are. I think one of the bigger problems though is getting more understanding of the actual problem. We've heard about the nuances of property rights and how pervasive they are through so many sectors. And I think this is another area where the immediate network is contributing as well through the property rights index where we can actually start to get more granularity of people's perceptions of tenure security. And then what is the impact of that perception of insecurity and what does it mean because once you start talking to governments about the fact that somebody doesn't have secure rights so there's no productive use of land which is holding back 10 billion dollars of agricultural productivity, I think those are the sorts of discussions that will have them looking for the solutions we're talking about today. So we really have to come up with some more nuanced discussions around the problems, what they are and how they could apply to developing country contexts in particular. In terms of the innovations, for me there are very different layers through the case studies that we've gone through today and read through as well where we have innovative models and we have innovative systems and technology. But for me what's really driven it is the innovation in the change management processes for each of the cases. And the focus of the innovation in terms of the land registries we've seen is really what are the benefits to the customers that are gonna come from this? Whereas when we're talking about the innovations on the securing rights, it's coming back to what Catherine said earlier this morning, it's about quality of life and opening up opportunities for people who are being left out of the formal system, bringing them identity. And it touches on what you had mentioned earlier about land rights in themselves, not just being what we need to focus on, but what are the benefits that extend beyond land rights that can come from improving systems, processes and technology and applying all of those together. And it is a whole ecosystem of stakeholders and players that need to get involved into that from the communities and individuals themselves and how they get engaged into processes right through to the government agencies and underpinning all of that is communication and the social preparation basically of getting that in place. Without that then the sustainability of reforms is really gonna fall over. In terms of where this applies in my context, I've been doing this for about 20 years and it was 2006, I think I was in Zambia doing process analysis of the deeds registry there and as part of the doing business report for the World Bank identifying steps in the process that could be streamlined to cut down their average processing times. And what I found was that each transaction was spending an average of 13 days in the typing pool. So an immediate step they could do was just give people more typewriters. And it comes down to what are the simple things we can do? We don't necessarily always need to think of the Rolls Royce technology solutions but what are the more fundamental changes that we can make for working culture and working processes as we bring people along this journey as well. For me it's really a process that we need to innovate. Great, well I also wanna start with a thank you. I'm honored to be on this panel with such expertise. I don't consider myself nearly the land expert as the other panelists here, I'm more of a generalist. My background is more of a development in human rights and I've come to land a little late but I have seen land in so many different ways as central to both development and human rights issues and I'm very happy now to be digging deep into this issue. So first, thanks to New America Foundation for hosting it and Omidyar and Princeton. I was also really impressed by the studies and as some others have said today, this kind of work strikes me as some of the most important we can do because the land rights field really suffers from an effective marketing strategy I think and from a simple evidence base and digging in in this way and thinking about creative ways to get it out there through social media and otherwise is really critical just to demystify the space a bit and bring on more supporters and hopefully bring more funding and political will. So kudos to all that have contributed to such an effective set of studies and also a great day's discussion. What I was a little surprised by in some of the studies was first, the lack of attention to political power. In many of the studies it almost seemed like that was presumed that the authorities were supportive or we missed that stage of how do we turn the tide on lining up the right political actors to support either the legislative reforms or the kind of implementation issues. It's there, but it's not really explicit and because it's not as explicit, these studies miss some of the strategic questions around how do we bring the right set of actors to the table, how do we convince them, what are the most effective arguments, where are the new allies, the business community, for example, that can be brought to the table and that really speaks more to my own background as an advocate. I'm always thinking about how do we line up the right set of actors to move an agenda and I think some of the studies could have used a little more attention to that. Of course it's such a rich set of issues, it's tough to get at everything. Related though, in terms of households, I was surprised that there wasn't more attention to women in particular because we know that women are systemically discriminated against in many countries around land issues and that is vital to so many issues, their identity, their ability to take part in civic life, all of the household issues around development, food security, education, health that we know are improved when women are empowered and certainly land is perhaps one of the easiest ways or quickest ways to empower a woman and so I was a little surprised that didn't come out more. Some of the studies talked about women as part of the process which is great but not so much about how these projects would or wouldn't benefit women in particular and so that I thought would have been interesting to hear a little bit more about that. But that said, I was more struck by how much of these studies really spoke to the kind of work that LANDESSA does and a few of the things in particular. One is the focus on bottom up solutions was really heartening and encouraging. At LANDESSA we started, we've been at it for about 50 years and we started off really just focused on top down the legislative and policy reforms and came around to recognizing that implementation is such a critical part of it as Julia said, a perfect law doesn't take you very far and then in terms of implementation, my expectation in meeting the LANDE rights crowd, the engineers and the surveyors or the rest of it was that I would hear a lot of technical fixes or top down fixes even on implementation and so to find so much of discussion around participation and all the messiness of local politics and how do we manage some of those relationships was really encouraging and from my space, I think that is absolutely critical that we need to think more about how do we bring more actors from the grassroots that people are actually affected by this into the process so the community mapping and the participatory processes that are talked about, the land literacy and raising awareness for purposes of creating demand is really critical, the capacity building, all of those issues I think are fundamental and can be wedded to some of the top down solutions or that's to say the top down solutions have to be wedded I think to that bottom up process if we're gonna ensure lasting solutions, solutions that are really fair, solutions where people really feel like they have a voice in the longer term development issues that come out as their LANDE rights are strengthened so that was really heartening and then a couple other quicker ones, the incremental approach also seems absolutely fundamental, part of what makes LANDE so challenging and I think part of what turns off maybe a lot of people is it just seems so complex so seeing some of these incremental steps where you get tangible wins without getting to the end line but already people start feeling a sense of being empowered, being identified, having an address, getting some service, those kinds of steps I think are critical and should really be highlighted because they, we need those short term wins if we're gonna create momentum and build more power or more actors coming into this space and so that was really great to see how we don't need to have a perfect formal registry we can see successes even halfway down the road and then finally one other issue that I think is really critical is this idea of holistic approaches or we work in India around a model called convergence where alongside the LANDE you also crowd in lots of other issues, the irrigation or the school or the road or the different services and I was sort of struck in coming to this a bit late of why does LANDE have to be that issue that brings a lot of these issues together, why couldn't any one of those things, a schoolhouse or some other intervention create that kind of an anchor but really I think it is LANDE that is the natural anchor to lots of different services and so we have seen that as the LANDE is titled and as micro plots are given out that that provides a real opportunity to think about how all of these other things can be synergized in a more holistic fashion and I think that came out in some of the case studies also. Thank you, thank you all and I'm going to jump on something that Chris said which was about getting governments on board so I think that this was a common theme that emerged through some of the presentations but that I would like to explore a little bit more with all of you based on your experience of how do you actually convince governments to get on board with LANDE innovations? How do you line up the political actors? How do you get the political will in place? I mean everything from convincing governments to consolidate multiple LAND departments into a single agency which we know has winners and losers or getting governments to adopt new technologies that may be scary or unknown or even at the most basic level getting governments particularly in countries with a already strapped budget to allocate money to this issue when there are so many other competing issues from your experience both from the advocacy side and the tech and policy side how do you make that pitch to government? Anyone can jump in? I'm happy to take a quick rack at it. So LANDESI got its start actually by making the pitch in Vietnam during the Vietnam War that providing smallholder farmers more secure rights would increase productivity and reduce fleeing to the Viet Cong or recruitment by the Viet Cong and after a couple of years of that work and a million farmers were granted more secure rights productivity had risen significantly on the order of 30% and recruitment had gone down by 80% and that made for a very effective argument and we then over the last 50 years talking over 50 governments have used some of those arguments but really what I think it is most of the good arguments are out there already whether it's for tax purposes or business or reducing conflict or a whole host of development reasons but what is missing is often just a reframing and finding the right argument and then a little bit off we always start with data we do the research we show the incredible lack the feelings of insecurity as well as the actual insecurity that so many folks are suffering by and then we try to frame an argument that actually will appeal to the particular government I would say that's an important part but the other one not to forget especially as you go down the ranks is the personal issues a lot of mid level bureaucrats need to feel that this is actually good whether it's for their career or their self satisfaction and so also being savvy about what will turn a reluctant bureaucrat into a champion for land rights is really critical I think that is so context specific but it goes to this issue of how do we bring the right players into these coalitions and people that are good on those sort of political questions and join them to the tech folks or the others that are as important and I wouldn't want to understate that personal side because so much about this work I think is finding people within governments that can become champions for whatever reasons it appeals to them I think it's probably require the combination of both top down and bottom up and using that evidence base approach and doing pilots and doing things incrementally to show government there is a pathway forward in a lot of cases those governments won't have the capacity or the resources to deliver those services so how can we look at alternative service delivery models as well and we see some of that through some of the PPPs and the different models with the example of Advira being a services provider to Landgate it's a very different sort of services model it's not generally a PPP but we need to be creative and Chris mentioned bringing other actors in and I think we need to really drive the role of business and use market dynamics to drive change in government as well if we think of things like ethical sourcing or sustainable sourcing of commodities that's a starting point where you have the Coca Foundation could have hundreds of thousands of farmers where they start mobilizing those resources because they want to have better outcomes for farmers and don't forget that the data being collected as part of the land tenure process often will also drive other improvements particularly around agriculture and food security if you know the size of your plot you know how much fertilizer to get what your best yield is going to be so there's a lot more use of data associated with land I think that is being left to the side at the moment which we could leverage and a lot more actors that could use market dynamics we saw with the registries that modernized it was market dynamics that pushed them to streamline and modernize so I think we can explore and look for the new opportunities to get more rights recognized as well I just, I agree with most of what's been said there but I think that it takes kind of a combination of a vision a champion an opportunity so for example if the market picks up and there's a demand on the system and it's not able to meet that or else there's some sort of disease or something that is driving the process that's an unusual circumstance and then obviously getting access to resources so I've been involved in a lot of project design and evaluation of things like World Bank funded land and titling projects and so on and so that's sort of a lot of the time where the resources come from and so I mean the arguments would be a lot of the tenure security work has been done on agriculture which is primarily an individualized land thing so I think where there needs to be more work is on the sort of tenure security of common property resources and so I think we're heading into that where you can make arguments for sustainable development and red and all these sort of programs is starting to create a bigger demand on that side of things so picking up on Noel's point about partnerships and PPPs we've heard all day about different types of partnerships in particular taking Ontario's case the government needed to digitize four million property records across 50 registry offices and they solved that problem by entering into a PPP with Terranet there are other examples that we're seeing of governments engaging with private sector actors to help solve these issues from Mozambique where in the context of the Terra Segura program the government is tendering to private sector companies to help demarcate land and register duots to places like Georgia where the government is engaged with Bitfury to help put the entire registry on the blockchain from your experience where do you see new opportunities for innovative partnerships to secure land rights emerging in what context or in what countries do you feel that these sorts of partnerships could be the most effective would the Ontario model for example be transferable to some of the context in which you have worked or why not? I think partnerships are critical definitely but the capacity is not there within government in an age where we're trying to downsize government and the one group which I think wasn't mentioned there which for me is ultimately going to really underpin a lot of work in developing countries is NGOs and civil society groups a lot of organizations like Landesa already have the networks and the relationships built at the community level and offer a pathway in as a trusted intermediary to be able to talk with government in designing new approaches, new methodologies and testing new technology and processes for them as well through Kedasta we did some support work for Landesa and Telangana in India where it's a community-led initiative and Landesa really drove that by educating local community resources much like we saw with Tanzania and Mozambique using community-level resources as well we need to think of other ways to resource these programs to get the data in and also to maintain it and that's where the communication and ownership at that community and individual level is going to drive the sustainability as well I would echo the role of NGOs it wasn't an accident that the first two speakers on South Africa this morning are from NGOs the way that we see the whole land governance structure is that you sort of have the macro level which is the government making policy and laws and things and then you have these communities and one of the key pieces of governance is other NGOs who are able to transfer policy and help implement and do the training and stuff so I would see that as a it doesn't really answer your question but that's a key piece of the puzzle here I think in many countries NGOs play an absolutely crucial role I would agree with that of course both speakers what we found just building off of Noel's comment in India was that the working with communities which many people hear as long, complicated, expensive was actually a very efficient way to deliver on the first stage of mapping basic issues and conflicts related to land holdings and then that combined with some technology and working with the government proved to be a very effective model and so I'm glad that Noel highlighted that I would say that PPPs are probably going out a little bit on the limb here easier to implement in developed countries where you already have a pretty well functioning government and there's a space for a business to come in and work effectively I think it's trickier in some of the developing countries where governance is weaker to the extent that the private sector starts replacing governments or instead of building the capacity takes on certain roles that should really sit with the government or sit with civil society and so where I think we ought to look for this is not to say we shouldn't look for PPPs in developing countries, absolutely we should look for them where bringing in the business hand will leave the government or civil society stronger and better will build their capacity in the process so there will be some information and technology exchange let's say and won't be simply a shortcut to or an alternative to stronger governance Great, thank you I don't know where we are on time because I left my phone in my purse so I will take the opportunity to stop with my questions for a moment and see if there are questions from the audience and maybe we'll take three questions and then Hi, it's Catherine from VPUU I think I attended the Habitat conference last year where they spoke about the four P's not the PPP but the people public-private partnerships and I think that that's the space we're in and I don't think we can even turn back I think we are there but it is that participation that we've been talking about and who does it who masters that process because it's complicated it's time consuming, we've spoken about all those things but I just think that the four P's are something that we should be talking about There was one question that I was talking about you mentioned quite a few case studies you're talking about India and there's a lot of interesting work going on in Colombia at the moment in Medellin where they are making big strides to recognize land and informal settlements and I think that's also something but you did mention some other case studies that we have some case studies here today but there seems to be many case studies out there so it's just a question of how do we we have some case studies developed here but we almost need all of them just some comments for certain questions I think on that point Catherine Mike mentioned earlier this is place and I think that's a fantastic vehicle right now to get more information out on these individual stories coming from certain locations as well but as Chris said land rights has had a bad marketing strategy up to now and how do we improve that and really highlight the benefits as well as get governments and policy makers to understand the problems that they need to address Can I also just quickly comment on that because I completely agree with that I think there's many great case studies that still haven't seen the light effectively in the way that these have even these case studies which are very well done they lack a certain coherence in terms of mapping out some common challenges and then some common solutions and this is understanding that every context in every country is different but I think the next step for these sort of cases and other cases would be to start thinking about okay this case the real basic issue was a political question and here's a couple strategies or in this one it was more capacity and technological and in this one it was really a resources so how did we come up with innovative strategies whatever it is but finding a couple of key themes that go to the common barriers because I think we could map out five or six common barriers or challenges and then put case studies in places where they really speak to that particular challenge but I completely agree I think there's many more case studies that need to be brought to light Working on some of that right now So the question for this panel because I'd like to make my own work easier is are there one or two common challenges and common strategies that stood out to you that you would like to see maybe fleshed out a little bit more in additional comparative work I think on the formal registry side when we're talking government or even a PPP it's the resourcing and it's the strategy development around that and clearly laying out that it's a long painful process and that governments need to be ready to embrace failure along the way you know Ontario had some Landgate had some everybody fails along on this journey and governments shouldn't be afraid of that but it's really been executive leadership in those agencies as well through these case studies that's shone through as owning it and dragging people along on this journey and letting them jump off the ship if they need to so from an interested government agencies perspective I think that's what they would want to see how do they resource and develop strategies around that and there would be others that you would want to focus on for land rights security I think one of the key challenges is obviously the maintenance of the registry so we talk about land titling and that's just getting that's the first registration but as you're going along there have been these huge investments in land titling projects over the last 30 years and if you go back to those countries I don't want to guess what the percentage of people are that are not on that I know from work that my graduate students have done in St. Lucia for example which the whole island was titled in the late 80s 20 years on 27 or 28% of the people in the registry were not on the land so there is this idea of de-formalization so you cannot assume that just because the land is titled that it's regular it's probably the person who's on the register could have died 15 years ago the kids are on the land and maybe they've subdivided and so things change and so the big challenge is how can we compete against the informal market if you like how can we cater for that and it's obviously got to be through incentives, through showing real benefits and things like that I would just add one more category which is that first thing I mentioned about the political will or power and I think you have to look at that at the formal level of how do we convince governments what are the most effective arguments but then you step down a level and you have more of the societal level who are the key actors and all those interness in squabbling and vested interests and how do you manage that and build an effective coalition and then household how do we address the fact that it's always men that wind up on top whenever things are titled and how are we going to address getting more women land rights and equal rights in many of these contexts and at mid-level I would include the whole question of traditional authorities, cultural issues, societal which are basic power issues and if I may I would just add one more to that and that's the issue of incremental upgrading I think that that's something that's really key because it's just so practical because to get from complete informality to complete formality and you know statutory legal recognition is a really long road and a long road to travel so what are practical solutions for getting people better tenure security and securing their property rights along the way and I think that several of the case studies touched on this in different ways I think that that's a really interesting theme that's kind of looking for innovations Thank you, my name is Kelly Askew and I direct the African Study Center at the University of Michigan and I'm an anthropologist by training so just as a proviso before I get to my questions I just wanted to contest or challenge our understanding of formal versus informal because as anthropologists we understand that customary systems which don't get credited as formal are often formal within the context within which they work and that often goes unstated but my two questions are one has to do with the other side of the coin with rights which is responsibilities and also my second question will have to do with priorities so when we talk about property rights the assumption in certain circles but not in all circles which is a bit problematic is that with property rights comes the responsibility to pay taxes and Chris you just mentioned taxes moments ago and I think Jody is the only other person today who have mentioned taxes and that's understandable because when we're talking about trying to introduce land tenure reform in a developing context you might not get your community engagement the participation that we all agree is necessary if you start talking about taxes instead the selling point is credit with title will come the ability to collateralize your land and access credit so that unstated agenda item which some people will acknowledge but most public awareness campaigns do not is a problem in terms of recognizing that people are not always not cognizant of that fact I work in Tanzania and I've seen so many district and village offices where issued titles are littering the office in piles people afraid to pick them up because they recognize that with picking this up could come the responsibility to pay taxes so at what point in the process does that become part of the public conversation and so that's one set of questions the second one is priorities because we're all I'm sure in this room well aware that there's boom and bust cycle too many development paradigms we've seen microfinance come through women's education women's empowerment leadership training is one of the new ones now and titling could be one of these hopefully I'm sure for many of us we want it to be more long lived but when I go into rural areas and talk to people in Tanzania and ask them what their priorities are titling does not typically come to the top of the pack water healthcare roads storage facilities for agricultural producers these are the things that people tend to put ahead of titling but looking at the big picture looking at governance looking at responsibilities and rights we can see why there might be a place for titling so what happens when you start asking people and this gets also to the question of gender when I talk to women especially and ask them do they want title and they often say yes and then I say why and they're like oh I hear I can get loans what would you want to use your loan for if you were able to get one almost always women say they would send their children to secondary school that's not going to enable them to pay back a loan that's out sourcing responsibility onto the poor for things that perhaps should be prerogatives of the state responsibilities of the state so I want to ask about priorities role development priorities both by from the community level the grassroots level as well as at the level of donor agencies and governance and see what your thoughts are on those thank you maybe we'll just take one last question from Amidio and then we'll have the next question. Okay thank you this is not a question it's more a contribution on PPPs an example of what is happening in Mozambique right now you mentioned Terrasagura I don't know how much you know about it but it's a government program initiative of delimiting four thousand communities in five years and five million individual titles well our experience in land delimitation puts a lot of weight on social preparation information to communities and we became worried with the fact that five million in the Mozambican context can become more target in terms of numbers rather than doing titling with quality so we raised external funds to our program and proposed to the government to enter in a partnership actually we are leading this partnership but the government is with us and a third player a private sector company owns the software land management system software so we are three and I expect in the next three months to be able to deliver a report which harmonizes our delimitation system with the government's rules on land titling plus the technology of processing information and expect that as a result the government will adopt a parameter standard of land delimitation and registration for the country I'll jump in on the property tax piece and I think it's going to be an emerging issue more and more as countries need to finance these titling programs and resources become scarcer the governments need to have honest communications with their citizens and their communities and realize also that using land titling and land titles as a policing mechanism is ultimately going to fail when communities don't see benefits that come from that participation in the formal sector. I think there was work done in Bogota quite some time ago where households self reported the value of their properties to the city and some of the studies they ran over the few years showed that they were reporting accurately because people were having their garbage taken away they were seeing roads streets being cleaned they were seeing services that they were paying for. When they stopped seeing the services and the rubbish piling up the self reporting numbers actually dropped so it's human nature to try and avoid taxes I think the only way governments are going to get around it is if they start to deliver their responsibility to citizens in providing infrastructure and services to communities so it needs to be a package as well and similarly when I was working in Egypt the government took the position that if somebody built a house that was one meter inside what was approved on the planning document they weren't going to give it a title well the landholder didn't care 95% of the properties in Cairo were off the registry anyway people are still buying and selling but the government is taking the blind attitude that because they're a meter out we're not going to register them they need to be pragmatic and adopt to the reality on the ground as well so I think it's give and take on both sides when it comes to property tax but it's going to become a much greater issue going forward I can to get to the whole idea of titling being panaceas I can remember this Honduran woman it was a USAID titling project and she was commenting on the titling she said what good are these titles I can't eat them and so you know there was is it addressing a need and I don't think titling is a panacea I think titling has its place when there's a need and when there's a demand on the tax side of things I have seen I work primarily in rural areas I haven't seen an operating tax system in a rural area in developing countries maybe ever so we're really talking about urban areas and you know so that's really not an issue I've seen it become an issue in terms of trying to implement a land titling project in Bolivia and it scared them away they would have nothing to do with it so you're right it does play that role so I think tax payment is only a responsibility if there's something that comes back and right now in most of the countries I work that doesn't happen on the flip side of that I think tax authorities also offer an opportunity to consolidate services and data where they have rich data sets that land agencies could use in place for having to send people out to the field to collect it again so that needs to be looked at as well I don't have too much to add to that but I will say that I think the argument for titling and its effectiveness is likely to increase as there's more higher and higher demand for land and as countries increasingly modernize that land isn't that big an issue if you don't feel threatened and there's plenty of it but as land comes under threat from different sources having secure land rights is absolutely fundamental and that might be the moment where communities and individuals start recognizing the importance of it and on the positive side I think people have to recognize some kind of benefit that would come along with the land beyond just avoiding the risk of losing it and that benefit if it means credit or it means government services or if it means ag extension or irrigation or whatever it is but those sort of things come as part of a bigger package so on its own titling yes is a tough pitch but as part of a more holistic set of interventions then I think it finds its space and it's a powerful argument thank you well with that I will go ahead and close this panel thank you very much to our three panelists