 Okay, hello. Welcome everyone to this webinar on the role of land certification and securing land rights and collective land. This webinar is co-hosted by the Research Consortium for Land Portals, DAI Global List, the Center for International Forestry Research and Associates Research Trust, Uganda. I'm Amanda Richardson, Co-founder and Program Director at Research Equity, which runs the Research Consortium. Evidence shows that women can benefit from having individualized land rights formalized in their names. However, similar evidence is not available for formalization of land rights that are based on collective tenure. Studies have estimated that as much as 65% of the world's land is held under customary collective tenure system. Improving tenure security for land held collectively has been shown to improve resource management and to support self-determination of Indigenous groups. But little attention has been paid to the question of whether women and men share equally the benefits of formalizing collective tenure. This is complicated by the fact that often, even if lands are held collectively, they are sometimes allocated and managed on an individual household basis. So this webinar aims to explore the question under what conditions might formalization of collective tenure improve women's tenure security. In August of 2018, the Research Consortium launched a grant making program inviting proposals on the topic of the effectiveness of land and resource tenure interventions to improve the lives of women. The three resulting papers cover interventions in Ethiopia, Uganda, and Indonesia, Peru, and Uganda on large-scale systematic land certification to individual or jointly held plots, issuing certificates of customary ownership on lands that are held collectively but are managed on an individual household basis, and formalization approaches on collectively held and communally managed right-to-forth land. So for today, I'm going to start by introducing the panelists to some of the authors of those grant-funded research papers. We'll then discuss five different questions for about an hour, and we'll end with 30 minutes for questions from you, the audience. If you have any questions, please post them using the questions feature, and we'll then answer them during that final half hour. So the panelists, first we have John Leike, who is CAI's Global Practice Lead for Land Tenure Improperty Rights, and has 20 years of international project experience in the land, natural resources, and environment sectors in Europe, Africa, Central and Southeast Asia and South America. John has worked as the Senior Registration Advisor in Rwanda on the award-winning land tenure regularization support program, and he's currently the Registration Advisor to the Difficult Funded Land Investment for Transformation Program in Ethiopia, and supports CAI's Land Tenure Improperty Rights project across the globe. Then we have Ileana Montorosa, who's an environmental scientist. She's currently co-coordinating gender and social inclusion research with the Center for International Forestry Research as part of the Equity Gender Justice and Tenure Team. Her research focuses on gender, community forestry, indigenous territories, tenure, and collective rights, predominantly in Latin America with some experience in Uganda, Indonesia, and Nepal. Next we have Paul Indakeka, who's a statistician, and has close to four years of experience working in the field of quantitative data analysis at Associates Research Trust Uganda. He has worked to design data capture templates, clean data sets, and build variables to stress the quality of questions and resultant statistics for their suitability and analyzing gender, according to internationally accepted global standards and concepts. Finally, we have Herbert Kamaseyme, who's the Executive Director of Associates Research, Trust Uganda, and has more than 15 years of experience working on gender land and livelihoods. He's also a member of the National Land Policy Working Group in Uganda, and has worked on gender conscious data collection analysis tools, and to build the capacity of grassroots organizations to monitor evaluation. So, now I'm going to move on to the question for the panelists, beginning with the question for Herbert. In your experience, Herbert, what mechanisms help to ensure that women's rights are protected equally with those of men in different processes for formalizing gender? Thank you very much, Amanda. I'm going to talk from insights we've gained working on certificates of customary ownership in Uganda. These certificates are a 10-year transformative tool, talked about in the 1998 Uganda Land Act and the International Land Policy. So, straight to your question, Amanda, there are three things I would want to highlight, as far as assuring women's rights are protected, probably in eco-measure as those of men. First of all is moving women to become active participants in the formalization processes. We need to make sure women stop being passive beneficiaries and move them to the level where they need to be part of the practical processes that take place in the formalization processes. For the case of customary, certificates of customer ownership, it's the point at which adjudication takes place. That is the moment when decisions are made on the names that go on the documents, whether things will not be amalgamated or subdivided. It is critical that women are active participants in such a process. The second point I would like to make is we need to go beyond ordinary sensitization. As we interrogated the data on certificates of customary ownership, we realized that the decisions that are being made as the land gets formalized are life-changing decisions, critical decisions that people cannot backtrack on easily. Therefore, it goes beyond awareness to the need to have knowledge, to know what is going on, because those are tough choices that are being made and they're going to affect livelihoods for generations to come. The third and last point I would like to give on that is that the policy and legal environment must be right. It is important to do things as per law or policy prescription. Otherwise, you may think you are helping people when you are actually endangering them. For the case of Uganda, with regard to certificates of customary ownership, they are well-mentioned in the policy and in the law, but there are no land regulations to operationalize those certificates. So people are rotating all over the place, trying to give out these documents, but the proper step-by-step mechanism that is implemented in the land regulations is not there. Those are the points I would like to make on that. Thanks, Herbert. That's really interesting. I think it's really striking. A lot of what you said goes to unintended consequences, both with the law and when you're not educating women and communities enough. So, Ileana, I have the same question for you. What mechanisms do you think help to ensure that women's rights are protected equally with those of them who are formalizing land rights? Well, thanks, Amanda. Well, just to make a clarification, our study differs from the one Paul just discussed, because we analyzed processes of right evolution to forest. So, in some cases, this actually included forest lands, as in the case of Peru, where we analyzed formalization of indigenous communities in the Amazon. But in others, our analysis included processes where rights were not recognized to land, but mainly to forest resources. This is the case of social forestry schemes and partnerships in Indonesia, and also collaborative forest management and community forestry in Uganda. In total, we study seven different reform processes related to forest, but I will draw on some specific examples to discuss the type of mechanisms that emerge from our analysis. First of all, I would like to highlight that participation of women and men in forest tenure reforms differs as it is not only defined in law and policy, but also in common and governance structures, as well as household dynamics. Therefore, we need to look at the factors that favor and hinder equal rights across these different levels. Outcomes on the grant depend greatly from implementation practices. Therefore, the mechanisms should be based not only on clear provisions and laws, but also on clear practices. So, having the law is not enough. Reforms should establish goals that indicate clearly how women and different forest user groups will be incorporated in the implementation process and specify clearly how they will benefit. So, identifying who is the subject of the reform is one fundamental mechanism. For instance, national laws in the three countries where we did our study often refer to an organized forest user group. In practice, this meant that representation is based on household head membership. This influenced greatly how women can participate. As it happened in social forestry schemes in Indonesia, very few women were recognized as former members of these groups. Also, looking at the type of rights and how these are distributed within the collective is also another important mechanism. For instance, going back to the case of Indonesia, social forestry recognizes access, use, and management rights to forest resources. But other reforms, as in the case of collaborative forest management in Uganda, the participation of management is limited and use rights over non-timber and subsistence forest products are the only type of rights that forest user groups get. So, finally, the mechanisms should include a specific sectorial law, clearly determine how this will support gender equity, how they will encourage participation of women in decision-making, and the type of changes in attitudes and the behavior that the policy will promote. From the three countries that we analyze, the only target forest policies that we found on the ground were forest laws in Uganda, but still the implementation of these policies in practices was still limited. Thanks, Alayana. It struck me for what you're saying about this issue of membership, making sure it's disaggregated by gender is something really important when you're talking about collective rights and forestry. So, John, what are your thoughts on what mechanism helps to ensure that we don't have to force both of men in formalizing land rights? Thank you, Amanda. So, I come at this from the perspective of the systematic registration of lands, of large-scale systematic registration of lands from our work in Ethiopia that's described in the paper, but also from our work in in Rwanda and Tanzania. Now, in this situation, you're registering hundreds, perhaps thousands of parcels per day in Ethiopia. It's as many as 25,000 parcels a day. And in that situation, it's not really possible to spend lengthy amounts of time examining each registration. So, it's essential to build women's rights considerations into the procedures for registration. So, I'll elaborate on this with a couple of examples from the field. And the first example, it sort of seems obvious, but it's something which people often get wrong or they overlook. And that is to use a registration form which is designed to recognize female members of a household. I remember, you know, Herbert once showed me a CCRO from Uganda, which, you know, was only really recording the head of the household and everybody else in the household was kind of subsidiary to that. And often that's the case. These standard registration forms sort of record the particulars of the head of the household. That's typically a male in a husband and wife relationship. And then they record the other members of the household as secondary or subordinate even when the tenure is claimed jointly. So, simply by designing the forms correctly to record the particulars of joint claimants equally and equally the title documentation or certificates or whatever is issued should recognize the names of all title holders. Equally, we work on a USA project in Tanzania and there they're using a mobile device called MAST to collect the registration data. So, there it's important to make sure that the interface is similarly accessible to the sort of paper form that you might use. And this might not seem like an issue but, you know, to illustrate the importance of, you know, names and the ranking of names. To use an example from Ethiopia, through our work on on the LIF program, we've issued millions of certificates and largely these are registering parcels which jointly registered to married couples. We process the registration certificates in batches of many thousands at a time, 3000 or even 5000 at a time. And our IT system lists the names of all the landholders in alphanumeric order on the certificate which means that in many cases the wife's name appears before the husband on the certificate. And we discovered pretty early on in the process that many male landholders were a bit concerned about this. They were feeling that somehow this made them subordinate to their wives in terms of the rights over the parcel. So, we managed to address this with, you know, raising awareness that this was not the case, that the rights were recognized equally and that this was just an administrative issue. But it kind of goes to show how things appear on paper can have an influence on how rights are perceived in reality. My second example, again from LIFT in Ethiopia, it involves providing a resource to support the enhanced participation of women and vulnerable groups in the registration process. This has to go further than a few sort of targeted public awareness events and messages of women's only meetings and this kind of thing. In the case of LIFT in Ethiopia, we have a specialized team member called a social development officer, an SDO, who works with villages and local authorities to identify women or other people in the community. You might be vulnerable to being left behind by the process for various reasons. It might be a nursing mother who can't attend the registration events or an elderly widow with mobility problems or people who are involved in land disputes. And so the SDOs work directly with these people and the wider community to ensure that they're properly represented and they have the right access to the registration services. Thanks John, those SDOs sound like a really important resource and I'm hoping to hear more about them when we get to the question and answer section. And speaking of which, if you have questions for those in the audience, please feel free to just type them as we're going so you don't forget them. So we've talked about a few different mechanisms but I can ensure that women's rights are particularly those of men in formalizing land rights. Let's now turn to what lessons, challenges, or questions remain on how to ensure gender equitable outcomes in different processes for formalizing land rights. Herbert, what are your thoughts? Thank you again Amanda. The lessons, challenges and questions, I'm afraid they are a bit many but let me pick a few things that I think would benefit this conversation. First, like I mentioned in my earlier submission, is the issue of standards. Very many actors and there are no regulations. So it is very possible and it is happening that there are variations in conception, in implementation methodologies and therefore we don't know whether the outcomes will be the same or will benefit women at the same level as men or even amongst the women themselves. And that because of their being no standard protocol, the issue of opportunistic inclusion and exclusion at the time of registration of names is a very real problem. Secondly, there are still many conceptual problems around the issue of customary certificates. First of all, the lands are not simply customary, they are communal customary lands and they are individualized customary lands. So when you look at the uptake of the certificates currently, in the south of Uganda in Kassese and Kavale, where customary lands are more individualized, the uptake and the attitude is more positive to these certificates compared to the north, like Gulu, where they have more or less not gained much mileage in these communities. So there are conceptual problems around customary lands, even they are not the same. It is communal at certain points and then it is individualized at certain points, even when you think about it in the communities like the Karamoja region. The third point I want to make is around the integration of customary and tradition restrictions within these processes. Generally in the police and law, at least in Uganda, these are sidelined completely. But then these institutions usually have some rescue authority on the ownership of these lands. People claim this is Karamojong land, this is actually land and so this belongs to Klan X. It is land for Klan Y. So in those circumstances, the issue of the social license becomes very important and for this particular innovation to take root, it has to avoid pushback and that is an issue to contend with still. Then the other point I want to make is the structure of the family. Some of the very simple issues, but it is very problematic, especially when you think about polygamy. As far as these circumstances are concerned, do you issue one certificate to the polygamous family such that the man, the name of the man and the two, three wives, or do you break up that piece of land and issue three certificates with the man being the common person on these certificates? There are still issues that need to be teased out and there are no easy answers. The other point I would like to make is the issue of secondary vulnerabilities that are coming out of these processes. There is a lot that is happening. The motives for giving out the certificates are various, but there are also things that are happening. For example, I'll give an example in Kavale where the moment the certificates are issued, those communities become the hotbed for money lenders, for loan sharks, and things like that. The issuance of the certificates so far has not yet gone to the level of thinking about mitigating the probable and desirable effects that are likely to follow in the aftermath of implementing. Thank you. Thank you, Herbert. That was a lot of outstanding things to think about. Eliana, do you see the same questions and challenges in your work, or what other lessons or challenges do you see with ensuring gender equitable outcomes in different processes to formalize the land rate? Well, thank you, Amanda. I will briefly discuss three lessons and challenges that also relate to remaining questions. The first lesson from us is that there's no single type of reform that performs consistently better for men or for women. However, what we're seeing on the ground is that these processes of revolution can actually make a whole lot of difference in terms of influencing an internal debate and how existing rules affect men and women differently and allow new forms of organizing that could actually empower women at the local level. The challenge is to ensure that the interventions should be very specific on how we will involve women. And this is not only in terms of how we are convening processes, like how we're designing them, but also other exercises that involve mapping and demarcation processes. And this is very important to avoid the risk of formalizing or perpetuating existing inequalities or ignoring some use practices during formalization processes. The second lesson that we see from our research is that four factors are influencing perceptions around tenure security, at least from the seven reforms that we analyze. These include whether respondents were women, the socioeconomic status that they have, whether their village is actually participating of reform processes and whether the individual is participating in a forest related organization. Thus we can say that indeed the reforms are influencing how women perceive the rights are secured. However, the challenge is that we see is that the sources of tenure insecurity remain and need to be addressed. This includes overlapping rights, the lack of clear boundaries, and these calls for the need to consider conflict resolution through formalization processes. And also from the study we have seen that women are quite active in these processes, something that we saw in Peru, so we need to involve them in conflict resolution. And the third lesson that I would like to highlight is that still since we're talking about forest reforms on forest, is that we see that the forest sector continues to be perceived as a men's domain. However, our results highlight that women are quite active and participating not only in meetings around forest management, but actually adopting on the ground management practices. So the challenge that we see is to how to ensure extension services that are available and also involving women. And two activities that we saw where women are quite active, it's in terms of monitoring, but also in terms of management practices. So we see these two examples as a way to start. And this is quite relevant as this will have also important implications in terms of livelihood improvements, not only for women, but for the whole community. Thanks so much, Oriana. It sounds like a major piece of this might also be considering the heterogeneity of women and ensuring that all women are given support to participate. So, John, we'll now move on to you. What are your thoughts on the lessons, challenges or questions that remain on how to ensure gender equitable outcomes with the processes for formalized standards? Thanks, Amanda. Again, looking at this through the lens of large-scale registration activities, a systematic registration process, it might be a great success in terms of capturing the correct landholders in a gender equitable way. And it's been demonstrated that that is possible. But what happens next? People go away with their new titles or certificates and then they make transactions. You know, they exchange lands, give gifts, sell lands, they inherit lands. And sometimes they do that through formal land administration systems that are recognized by the government. Sometimes they do it informally. They use traditional ways of doing it. There's a great deal of complexity around that. And are those processes that people are using of a gender equitable as well? Are we going to see, having captured all of this gender equitable land ownership or these land rights, are we going to see the kind of erosion of the register, not just in terms of lapsing into informality, but in terms of women losing out when land transactions are made around inheritance or whatever? And so I think there's a need to put in place procedures and support resources that are built into the land administration system and the formal land administration system going forward to ensure that these outcomes of systematic registration are sustained and maintained with the register. So ideally that would be a position which is akin to the social development officer, the SDO that I mentioned earlier, who would be part of the land administration service provision. But I can't say that this is always seen as the priority. I mean, the government services are always under resource pressures. They're always struggling to put fuel in the motorbikes and to keep the lights on. So in that kind of situation, typically this kind of position is the first thing to go. And so I think there's a need to build some more consensus that it's actually a priority position going forward. Thanks. Thanks, John. I'm interested to know if you do have any examples of best practices that have worked for that suggestion. So I'll say again, if anyone has questions in the audience, please send them over. So for now, let's move on to our third question. Herbert, in your opinion, what are the most important enabling conditions for achieving gender equity and outcome? Thank you, Amanda. I think for me, the most critical enabling condition is rights education. We really need to move our superficial awareness because the people need to engage with these processes. So I guess rights education is powerful. Number two, the community have to accept these processes, buy into these changes. Otherwise, you will have pushback or whatever innovation you are putting across as far as achieving gender equity is concerned. We will not be implemented. Thank you. So thanks, Herbert. So building on your earlier answers, it sounds like a major piece here is education and sensitization. Ileana, do you agree? What do you think are the most important enabling conditions for achieving gender equity and outcome? Thanks, Amanda. I will add three enabling conditions to those raised by Paul. Well, the first one is related to one of the issues that Paul mentioned. We need institutional arrangements. This means have clear rules, specific rights that are sensitive to women concerns and needs. So having laws, provisions, rules, as well as norms and customs in place that are inclusive. And these arrangements are important as they enable access, use and control of forest resources, but also because they are influencing the type of decisions, the collective choices around resources, influencing livelihood strategies, incentives for collaboration, investment and opportunities. The other point that I would like to raise is that, of course, rights and rules are very important, but it's not enough. We need to ensure that those rights gained are secured. So tenure security is fundamental. Rights to lands, but also to forest resources are a key determinant of decision making process around forests. And finally, we need to ensure the continued support of productive systems and capacities of forest users to outcomes in the long term after issuing certificates, titles or permits. So this means ensuring livelihoods because livelihood concerns are an important aspect associated with the satisfaction of rights, but also of improved tenure security for forest peoples on the ground and for both women and men. And this is linked to ensuring extension, linked to ensuring training, linked to ensure that we are supporting forest livelihoods for the people that we're targeting with these reform processes. Thank you. Thank you, Eliana. I think it's interesting how you're kind of talking about the whole life cycle of reform, from starting with the good laws and customs to ensuring rights are secured to looking at continued support. So, turning to John now, what do you think are the most important enabling conditions for achieving gender equity? I very much concur with my colleague's feedback for 2019, how does it feel to be your conversation for employees starting in the middle? If I was to choose one thing, it would be political will. Of course, underpendence by clear laws and procedures. Development partners, I think the performance feedback for 2019 has held a successful end of your conversation for employees is now starting in the middle. I think the donors have come a long way in terms of indicators, but do more than just sort of count the number of women who attend an awareness event or whose name appears on a land register. And improved land information systems allow us to develop a clearer picture of the patterns of ownership and the numbers of parcels, an area of parcels, for example, which enable us to monitor whether registered lands are equitably recorded and take corrective action. This political will and the accompanying laws and policy, they can't just be a sort of top level. They have to embrace an element of complexity here. To give an example related to what Herbert was saying earlier about polygamous households. Polygamous households might seem like a minority issue in a country like Ethiopia or Tanzania or Rwanda, but it can cause all kinds of confusion and even dispute, even conflict when the time comes for children to inherit lands from their parents. So having clear guidelines in place which support those complex household relationships like Polygamous households shouldn't be disregarded. And I think that there's a need for decision makers and policy makers to kind of engage at that level of detail in order to make sure that they're serving the public in a gender actable way. Thanks, John. So I think some of your thoughts there kind of lead us into the next question of what kinds of data are helpful in answering these questions. So Paul, can you start a file? In my opinion, the research community has a lot of qualitative data. A lot of what has been gathered to assess certification of lands on a large scale is narrative and less skewed towards numbers and figures. If we are to convince politicians and other action stakeholders and principal decision makers about importance of certification, I think it's very important to back it with numbers. And then the numbers that we have as these are for the most part counts of who is written, whose name is written where, who is included where, how many women are on which list of it. However, I think it's important that we invest in collecting data in robust evaluation processes that go beyond counting how many women are there and goes down to breaking their perceptions and their access to that land and all sorts of detail in what they can do and what they cannot do when we go to the landing question. This is particularly important. If you take a look at our paper, more than 80 percent of the pass was assessed, actually had at least one woman in them. But for the most part, these women did not score highly aggregated scores in the various aspects of completeness. Because why their names were on the, on the paper, they did not view themselves as owners, which was asymptotic to the custom. Then the variables that are collected when you, when you assessing the effect of an, of an intervention should reflect the, the interplay of power, the interplay of, of, of politics about whose name goes where. And for, for a particular case, it was the household. If you, if you are assessing an intervention like that, the unit of analysis at this point, I think should be the household. And again, it should go beyond counting how many women from this household have it. It should also go into assessing how many of these women can sell, can use that land as collateral, can access the land, can subdivide it, can mobilize it, can add it to puzzle. And if, if, if the data from such, I really can put what it gives, it gives a great, a great opportunity to benchmark and to understand what aspects of the processes work as rights enablers and what don't. That's my, that's my contribution. Thank you so much, Paul. I'd like to hear more about how the decision is very much important. But first, Eliana, what kinds of data do you think are helpful in this kind of talking? Thank you, Amanda. Well, one of the things that for us was really important is like the way we're understanding reforms. And for us, you know, it's important to look reforms as dynamic processes that involve not only how they are designed, but also how they are implemented. So for this, we need to collect information on the formal, but also the informal frameworks in place. So this means responding to who's making the rules, who's designing these reforms, who's monitoring and enforcing their implementation, who's taking the decisions and participating in governance structures. And this data exists at different levels. At the national level, we collect information on implementation. But one of the things that we saw from our from our study is that we also need to understand what happens at the subnational level and understanding the role of the different sectors and the levels of government involved, their skills, their agency to influence decisions and the support they have, the train they have to be able to implement at the local level. We need to understand also the context of the reforms. For this, we need to collect information that responds to questions such as who is involved, who is in favor or opposing these reform processes. And also understand that because this question, the response to these questions will help us to understand better what are the what are the barriers that women are facing to effectively participate in these decision making processes. So also understanding what happens on the ground is fundamental if we want to improve implementation practices. So collecting data at the village and household level is key. And this should target both women and men. They should draw from different methods, qualitative but also quantitative as Paul was mentioning. And at the household level, doing intra-household surveys is extremely useful. In our case, they allowed us to better understand the existing gaps between men and women. For instance, just to give you an example of how it was extremely relevant and the type of data that we were collecting, Peru was a country that came out as the largest bundle of rights because they were recognizing not only rights to forest but also to forest lands. So they had also the highest percentage of respondents, both men and women, indicating a positive change in the perception of improved tenure security. However, when we look at the intra-household data, these revealed important differences between men and women, showing that women may know the rules, they may consider them as clear, but they do not always consider them as fair in comparison to men. So this level of detail actually helped us to understand the type of gender gaps that exist in these processes. Thanks, Siliana. That's great. I think we'd all welcome this kind of detailed data. So, John, do you agree? What kinds of data do you think are helpful in answering these questions? I come at this from a different perspective. So to sort of paint a picture really, a couple of weeks ago, our project in Ethiopia demarcated its 14 millionth parcel, so 14 millionth parcel. So that kind of very rich data is very interesting and very compelling, but if you've got 14 million parcels worth of data, it's a massive headache and would be a lot of costs associated with collecting that level of data. So really, from the perspective I'm going from, the essential thing is to collect the data that pertains to people's rights and the basics which are required to register parcels in the name of a person. We can pick out some interesting findings from that data, and as our land information systems are getting better and better, as time goes by, we're better able to access gender disaggregated data very quickly from the register. In Tanzania, for example, we're using this mass mobile device to collect data, and that's almost allows us to collect real-time data on who is registering land. If we monitor it carefully enough, we're able to take corrective action if you find that in certain communities there's a particularly low turnout of one demographic. We can go and look into it and go and examine what the issues might be. This, of course, it has to be registered, referenced against the kind of ordering monitoring data from field work and from public meetings that behold as a project and so on. I think that this kind of monitoring, it needs to continue into the land administration, as I mentioned before, and the register maintenance phase. So somebody within the land administration needs to be mandated to be monitoring and reporting, following up this data. Thank you, John. So the final question we have here is, what are the next steps to the research community? Paul, what do you think? Thank you. First of all, in very, very good experiences. Right now, there is no university accepted metric or inclusive prior to land certification. I think that would be a great starting point. There is no university accepted metric or genius to think. Those two would be an excellent starting point. Having done this, the community can then invest in collecting data that is in line with these two metrics and the variables collected will go in a great way in understanding what aspects of a certification process works and what aspects do not work. Such as future processes can be more inclusive and have more general equitable outcomes. So in addition to this, the research community should try as much as possible to generate quantitative evidence because our experience has been that people in the community, as an influence, will be able to land in the administration. I find it so difficult to proceed a lot of important tasks that show this data about certification processes that the community needs to collect a lot of familiar processes that actually shows and quantifies outcomes of the certification procedures. Lastly, the community should share and publish a lot of information about those index that I first spoke about. If we have a tenure security index, then we can look at all certification processes and have universal accepted metrics to show which one goes a great way in guiding which one was inclusive and why and which one wasn't and why. And that I think will solve a lot of problems. Thank you. Thank you, Paula and I do hope we are moving towards these kind of made-up metrics. So Iliana, what are your thoughts on the next steps to the research community? Thanks Amanda. Well ongoing reforms need to be informed with practices on the ground and we believe that the research community can provide information and respond to whether these reforms are promoting women's rights as equally protected with those of men during formalization processes in relation to land but also in relation to forest or other natural resources. From our work, we observe that reforms are perceived to be completed once the certificates, titles, permits or authorizations are granted. However, our findings highlight that realization of rights and the sustainability of outcomes derived from those rights is closely linked first to the ability to improve livelihoods and second to the ability to secure those rights in the long term. For us, participatory action research can contribute in rethinking the role of the state and other external actors as non-governmental organizations and social moments in how this process takes place. And I will mention three specific issues. First, by further understanding the ongoing and existing pressures over resources that are hindering livelihood benefits. Second, identifying the existing gaps in training and supporting skills to improve extension services like in situations of conflicts in an inclusive manner. And third, identifying other structural problems of power and inequity that are influencing implementation and outcomes. And as you mentioned earlier, these inequalities are not only related to whether the targets of these reforms are women and men, they're also related to other dimensions as the age people have, the ethnicity, the class, the socioeconomic status that are actually impairing the ability of forest dependent people to improve their livelihoods, which we think are issues where the community and the research community should be working on in the future. Thanks. Thanks for that interesting response, Alayana. Kind of the more qualitative perspective to talk about how quantitative recommendations. So John, I'll give you the final word of this discussion. What do you think are the next steps to the research community? Thanks. I have a ton of questions for the research community, for my colleagues in Ethiopia and elsewhere. We know that it's possible now for large-scale land registration to successfully formalize gender equitable land rights. But so what? My questions all relate really to what the impacts are for women. And in relation to that, what is the behavior change that is yielding those impacts? So do those rights that people have got on paper, do they really translate to rights in reality or as a woman's name just ignored on a title? Do they have more decision-making power in the household? How are women exercising these rights in terms of accessing new opportunities, new resources, or using the land administration system in a way which continues to support and hopefully benefit them? For example, do women rent out land now that they feel more secure in doing so? Are they able to rent out that land for more money? What do they do with this income that they derive from this? Do they set up a shop or do they invest in something else? Do women feel more secure in filing for a divorce now that they know they won't lose their land? Are they more inclined to marry outside of their community knowing that their home and family land is better protected from encroachment? So really, yeah, all of my questions relate to the changes and certainly this list is not exhaustive. The changes in behavior that take place after this security of tenure is confirmed to people's lives improve, what are the challenges they face, and ultimately what's the impact at the end of the day? Thanks. Thanks, John. That's quite a list. Thank you to everyone. So we've covered a lot of ground already from recommendations around developing refining metrics on land tenure security to focusing on laws, sensitization, education, and specific examples of using local resources to ensure women are being included in reform. We have a lot of questions from the audience, so I'm going to turn to those now. If you have a question you haven't asked, please send it to the question function now. So I'll start with a little group of questions for all the panelists. What's the role of traditional leaders in supporting women in securing their land rights? And then a similar question, how do women secure their land rights in a context where they aren't recognized as the owner but as users, and how can they overcome customary and traditional barriers? And then a third question, what's the capacity of the systems and certificates to secure women's land rights in the cases of death, divorce, and inheritance processes that historically disturb us women? So I don't know if one of you wants to read on that or if I should call on someone. I'm sorry, Amanda. Could you repeat the questions, please? You went quite quickly there. I was trying to jot them down. So the first one was what's the role of traditional leaders in supporting women in securing their land rights? And then we have one from Sophie Ruth. How do women secure their land rights in a context where they aren't recognized as the owner but as users? How can they overcome customary and traditional barriers? And then we have one about the capacity of the systems and certificates to secure women's land rights in the cases of death, divorce, and inheritance processes that historically disturb us women. Can I take the first question about the role of traditional leaders? From the point of view of systematic registration, everyone in the community has to be involved. And that means traditional leaders and maybe non-traditional leaders as well, people who have an important role or function in the community but not necessarily recognized in a traditional sense, just their influences to use this sort of millennial term for it. You have to take them along in the process. You need to have consensus from those people. And they're the people who can really support you in terms of mapping out and understanding where vulnerabilities lie in the community. What are the historical disputes or conflicts or latent disputes within a community? And understand all of the different power dynamics in the areas that you're working. And to help you identify people who might miss out. With caution, sometimes traditional leaders of course have vested interests themselves. But certainly in my experience, it's typically more helpful to work with the grain in the localities that we work. Thanks, John. Does anyone else have thoughts on this, Eliana? Hello. I just want to add on the question of the role of traditional leaders in supporting women's run rights or helping with the situation. And I want to give an example of actually land in Northern Uganda. For example, in that traditional system, they have what they use to call the chief of the snail shells. It's because traditionally women used to weed millet using the shells of the snails. So they had a chief for that. And that woman would sit in the chief's castle. And therefore would be able to champion the issues around women. So the large structures within the traditional systems that had something to do with the rights of women with regard to land and land use. The other example I want to give, some of the customary societies, especially in Northern Uganda, men or boys of age, when they want to marry, they actually get land for their wives to cultivate via the portion allocated to their mothers. So there are a lot of intricate, interesting things in some of these traditions. But the bigger problem we have that nobody has interrogated these processes, nobody has interrogated these systems, and to see whether those are effective safety nets with respect to the land rights of women. So that's where the problem is. But they do have a role. Whether that role makes my leg for the call of women with respect to land rights is questionable. Thank you. So Ileana, do you have any thoughts? Yeah. Well, thank you Amanda. I would like to link the first two questions, the role of traditional rules with how to overcome barriers when women are not considered full owners but users, because that's most of the case of what happens with forests. And just to highlight three points quickly. The first is, let us remember that there are different levels in terms of the type of rules that are being in place. And as I mentioned, we're talking about national laws, how they are implemented, but also customary systems and how they are like the local bylaws, the local norms that some of them might not even formalize. But it's really important to look like where are those barriers and what is the role of the different actors involved. So I think like in terms of promoting the rules that are inclusive, these of course, the customary and the local rules are going to have a lot of saying, but in the formalization processes, I think there's also a lot of responsibility of what it's like, how the implementation is taking place. So formalization can be an opportunity, but as I think it was Herbert mentioned, it can also be a risk. So we need to be looking at how it's convening is going on, how the marketation is being done, the type of mapping that is being placed, you know, in order not to to take advantage of the opportunities of formalization and not to perpetuate the type of risk that could happen in terms of deepening inequalities. And related to the second question, I think it's very important also to look at the customary systems are highly dynamic. They're not static systems. They are always in place. So at least what we saw in the cases that we analyze is that some of these communal bylaws, some of these customary systems were actually being reviewed during formalization processes. And we saw that in some of these cases, they actually allow women to participate more actively in the process. And some of them, at least we saw that in three of the 10 communities that we saw in one region in Peru, were able to gain rights from those processes. So I think that we need to be aware of these different situations. Okay, thank you so much. So I'm going to switch to a question that's just for one panelist. So, John, how do you identify and train SDOs to ensure that they support women's rights while also responding to local norms? That's a great question. So the interesting thing from Ethiopia is that I think we currently employ 28 SDOs. And I think 26 or 27 of them are men. And we find we're really not receiving many applications for the position from women. There's another subject for research, but I think in some ways it works in our favor. Because these young men are kind of perceived as not coming with a particular agenda, that they're coming to look at the wider community. So it's not just women, it's all the vulnerable groups, it's orphans, it's elderly people, all kinds of people who are vulnerable to being left behind. And I think they're well listened to by the predominantly male leaders in these communities that we work in. These are young people, they're graduates. Often they come from, they're sort of promoted from within our field team. So they've got a good standing knowledge of the different processes already. And they've worked with communities. And then we train them in house. We have something called our SDO guidelines, which are a set of procedures and case studies, which our teams can work from and help them, it helps them to make decisions in the field. And then, of course, they have to go and work directly with communities themselves. They have to engage with the different local level institutions in Ethiopia at the Kamele level, which is kind of village level, I guess, or a large village. There are a number of kind of formal institutions that exist, land administration committees, women's development committees and so on. So the SDO is engaged directly with them and then trying to map out where vulnerable people might be found and go knocking on doors, really. So sometimes soon I would, I hope to kind of turn our SDO guideline into something a little bit more digestible. It's a couple of hundred pages right now and more general, which can be shared with the wider community in land. So it's something that you can keep on your desk in Malaysia or Kenya or Mozambique or wherever you're sitting and refer to. And perhaps we can share some of the lessons with London and Ethiopia that way. Well, that sounds like a great project we did on. So I have a question now for the Uganda team. The general discussion in Uganda indicates that they issue certificates of customary ownership to rural households. Is this process based on demand by holders of customary land or government initiated programs? Should I repeat that? Paul noticed. Could you repeat the question please? Yes. So the question is the general discussion in Uganda indicates that they issue certificates of customary ownership to rural households. Is this process based on demand by holders of customary land or government initiated programs? Hello. Okay. I hope I got the question right. The question is whether this is on demand or government initiated? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. This is government initiated. I would say that. For two reasons. One, for a long time in Uganda, the dispensation was such that people looked at three holds and these holds as the ultimate transformation to registration away from and registered customary lands. But the law, the land act, the land policy allow or introduce this mechanism of certificates of customary ownership. And crucially, if you look at the, if you read the law in the strict sense and the policy, this was intended to be a transitional, a transitional, a transitional mechanism to the, to what at that time would be regarded as higher level registration, which is the freehold. So to that effect, the document itself was expected to not involve very complicated processes like we are seeing people implementing right now. So, but the process is very cheap compared to the formal, to the other formal registration processes. The drive to implement it more strongly driven by civil society take on the need to have tenure security. I have not read any document anywhere or any report anywhere that talks about community level, household demand. No. So between the fact that the process is cheap, very many people think tenure security is important. It can be realized through that option. There is that drive, but it is, I wouldn't put my finger on community or demand driven need for that initiative. Okay, thank you, Herb. So now a question about unintended consequences. Has any of you seen any unintended negative consequences based on this work with improving rights? An example is mentioned about women being subject to GBZ based on their participation in things like a two hour M&E interview. So anyone have any unintended negative consequences to share or thoughts on that? I wonder whether there are some, you know, we will see some, I mean, I don't even know if this could be considered a negative consequence or not, but, you know, if women feel more secure in their land rights, might they be more, and this is a question, I don't have any data to support this or anything like that, you know, just speculation. Might they be more inclined to leave their husbands? Might they be more inclined to get out of a bad relationship? And, you know, what is the, you know, what is the possible negative consequences of that or perceived by wider society and negative consequence? Would there be a backlash against having women named, improving women's land rights because of the fear that it may errone traditional family units? So that's the question that I often discuss with colleagues in the car when I'm out in the field. And another thing which I, again, and I don't have any data to support this, but I remember speaking, working in the Caribbean about 15 years ago in Guyana, where there was a lot of people looking to leave the country to move to the United States and Canada. We're receiving their security of 10 years, I think it's 50-year leases or 99-year leases, I can't remember. And asking me the question, do you think this will help me secure a visa to go to the United States? Which is not really the desired outcome. So I wonder how many of those people took their Solan certificates down to the US Embassy or the Canadian Embassy. And then another thing I think we have to be mindful of is an assumption that, you know, people will get land rights and then they'll go out and use it as collateral and obtain a loan. And I think that is a great idea. But I think there's a need alongside that for improved financial literacy and the right kind of loan products to be in place, which don't put people at unnecessary risk. You don't want somebody to go out and buy a huge combined harvester and find that they can't pay it back. So just some food for thought, not necessarily rooted in experience so much as just observations. Thanks, John. Does anyone else have any thoughts on unintended negative consequences? Well, thanks Amanda. I wanted to share an example of something we saw in Peru in an indigenous community. And that was one particular community where there was a rule that for, you know, like for anybody wanting to marry somebody from outside the community, if it was a man, the woman from outside the community would be allowed to stay. And she would be kind of on probation to see whether, you know, the rest of the community would accept it, but she would be finally, you know, like accepted to stay in the community. Versus if a woman from the community would be interested in marrying somebody from outside, she would have to leave. And therefore she would lose her rights to the communal rights that she got. So during the formalization process, there was a discussion like women were actually able to discuss among themselves what this meant and challenge collectively, whether this rule, I mean, the fairness of the rule being applied only for men and they would, they being allowed to marry somebody from outside, but not the women. So, you know, like at the end, there was some negotiation across within the community of how they would challenge and they would review this communal by law. But I will also say that in some cases, unintended consequences would be related to the kind of pressures that they have. For instance, this community, the community was very well located. There was a lot of pressure coming not only from the existing roads, but also from accessing the community for interest related to forest, but also to mining. So I would say that, you know, like we need to make sure of how, you know, the type of pressures that happen, you know, like, and that would allow us to understand better the type of consequences, unintended consequences this could have. Thank you. Anyone else? Okay, so another question here is how can gender mainstreaming in land reform be monitored? Could I pick that up from the scale registration perspective? As I said before, we can't look underneath everybody's bed when we're registering systematically. So we can't really get into detail about household dynamics and things like that, which is a shame because I think those are really interesting things to study. And certainly we, you know, we should be conducting surveys and research into those things that inform our approach to the registration for sure. And, you know, bring in that very important contextual analysis. In terms of pushing ahead and registering systematically thousands of parcels a day, what we can look at is how people are claiming land. So whether registering jointly or as private individuals, depending on the prevailing tenure regime, we can ask questions about the means of acquisition. So is this family land that's been inherited or has it been purchased or exchanged? We can even look at whether parcels are being recorded in complex households. So you see the same husband appearing with lots of different women on different parcels, and perhaps that would indicate that there's, you know, a relatively less household situation. So I think these are all things that you need to be monitoring and looking at very closely. You also need to be able to look at the size of a holding in terms of the number of parcels that a household or an individual might be claiming, and also the size of those parcels to determine whether, you know, there's an equitable balance there. You know, one of the biggest landholders in the world is Her Majesty the Queen. So she kind of skews the statistics a little bit when it comes to females with land rights, because I think she's got some, still has some domain over big parts of Canada, right, and huge chunks of the UK. So we have to be careful not to be skewing our own statistics. We have to be careful that we're measuring the same things. And just because there are many women named on parcels doesn't mean to say that they have access to a lot of land. They may have smaller parcels. The parcels may be more dispersed. But we have to look at those kind of dynamics. And that's possible from the kind of data that we collect. It requires an investment in land information systems. That requires a bit of project management as well, because that's essentially an IT approach. And those of us involved in the land sector are not always the right people to be managing IT projects, right? So you need to bring in some specialist support. Thanks. I've gone on long enough and my colleagues respond. Thanks, John. Does anyone else have any thoughts? Paula Herbert, do you have thoughts maybe on monitoring? Yes. I have two points to raise on that. It is very possible to monitor gender mainstreaming. You can look at the gender mainstreaming from the point of the land information systems, particularly if these are developed in a manner that allows input from various stakeholders, such that the variables that come up make sense to being able to get matters concerning gender mainstreaming. But most important as well, because LIS is falling through the arena of administrative data, having a very clear pathway for scholars and others interested to be able to interrogate those systems. Is there a mechanism by which people can actually reach out to the LIS, the land information system, and be able to get on various things? But aside from that, we also need to approach it from the point of the different actors, especially can some data, meaningful data collection processes, be implemented prior and after the mainstreaming actions, because not all the actors in the different mainstreaming processes actually do have an interest in data collection, in interrogating these processes, in seeing the effect of these processes. So that is important. Can there be that level of investment, that level of interest in periodic look and review at these processes? So it can be achieved, but this is something that requires government civil society partnerships, such that the government is willing to open up the LIS and these other processes to be interrogated by people, but at the same time the civil society and other actors take the responsibility to say we need to collect data periodically as far as these processes are concerned, and can this data be opened up as public good? So a lot of general mainstreaming in land management and administration has happened, but these processes are not open to public interrogation. And that is a limitation. Thanks. Thanks. That's a good observation. Liliana, did you have anything to add or I'll move on? Well, thank you, Amanda, just to add, and I really support what Herbert just said in the role of civil society and having these partnerships, like for us in Peru and also in Indonesia, the social organizations, indigenous movements, customary peoples were highly organized, but also just to remember, like this go back to the type of mechanisms in place, we need to understand what are the targets to know what specifically we're going to monitor. And also, you know, like in some cases for some organizations, this is not only about mainstreaming, but actually about making sure that these reforms are gender responsive. And there is a lot of women organizations as well, indigenous, customary and civil society women's organizations that are actually demanding to ensure that these reforms are considering women's concerns and needs from the upfront in the design process to make sure that the implementation mechanisms actually, you know, derive the outcomes, the outcomes and the goals of these reforms. Thanks, Liliana. And I think that leads to an interesting question that's come in, which how are women included substantively in designing programs to test the assumption that certificates or documents are the best way to strengthen women's rights in practice? So does anyone have any thoughts on this by including women substantively in the design? Maybe just quickly what some of our results from an analysis that we did with only agents of implementation, this was mainly governments at the national, subnational different sectors, and the truth at least from what we saw in the three countries that we analyzed is that, you know, like out of 10 people involved in implementation, only two were women. So this is very, very slow. And this was not only in terms of implementation, but also in the design. So there, so there is different ways in which we can involve women into the sign. One of them is just to ensure that we have women's organizations. Another one is just to have, you know, like the skills and the training in place. So the those involving implementation, whether they are men or women are having these considerations in mind when they're doing the work. Thanks. Does anyone else have thoughts on this? Yeah, I can speak to a little bit to how large scale programs are designed. And it kind of falls into two halves really. If you're looking at it in terms of, you know, how the program is structured overall, then that's very much, you know, a lot of that is a political decision. A lot of that is driven by the donors. There isn't a great deal of participation, to be honest, this consultation and this kind of thing. So that really, our women involved in that process depends who's the minister at the time. In Rwanda, yes. In Ethiopia, no. In terms of how the process and procedures work on the ground, so in terms of how the people experience the loan registration process, then there is quite a lot of participation from women from the wider community, from people from villages have an input into the process. They're required to participate, but also, you know, people give feedback and we learn how to improve those processes based on what we find and feel. I think, and it's important that teams that are project teams that are delivering this kind of work also give priority to having a social inclusion specialist on the team, somebody who's looking specifically at gender as well on the team. I was surprised to hear from some colleagues that that was not always the case on registration projects. But, you know, very often these are processes that have a very kind of, the priority is geotechnical, if you like. And certainly for the projects that I've been involved in implementing, the role of a Jesse advisor on the team is critical and you need that person there. Even if you can't afford to have 28 SDOs on your team, you still need somebody on your team. You still need somebody on your team. That person needs to be sitting down with the management leadership of those teams and making sure that their concerns and their ideas are heard. Hello. I want to add a comment to, first of all, I agree with John that as far as design is concerned, there is a question about there, the extent to which women are included at that level. But I want to talk a little bit more about the aspect of implementation. We all know there is this affirmative action, a third representation on land management and administration institutions, the area land committees, the district land boards, even the adjudication teams on the ground. That a third representation is standard pretty much. But I want to raise the point of effective inclusion and the token inclusion because we actually do not have data that tells us that that a third representation is actually effective inclusion for the women. Why? Because dispositions for women still happen. Land transactions that should actually be family sanctioned still happen without the family sanction. So it raises the beta peer to swallow whether this is effective inclusion on these bodies or token inclusion where the women are there but we don't actually see the service delivery being women responsive if I may use that kind of language. Thank you. Thank you, Herbert. So I think we have come basically to the end of our time. So thanks to everyone for your participation and thanks to everyone who's called in. It's really been an interesting conversation. So we will have a recording available in the next few days and a report on the discussion coming in the next few weeks. And in that report I think we'll include some of these questions that we didn't get to from the audience. So not to worry, the question will actually be the light of day. So thanks again to everyone and I hope everyone has a great day.