 Thank you so much for the introduction, my name is Arach David James, I work for NAMATIS Community Land Protection Program. Just as the theme is, we want to support communities to protect their lands. As you may all know, climate change, food and water insecurity, population growth, and natural resources have led to land grabs globally. At NAMATIS, we have categorized land grabs into large-scale land acquisition by international investors and then at national level by elites and within the community by the stronger members grabbing land from the weaker ones. Now all of this put together pushes for the need to empower communities to document their customary land claims. At NAMATIS, we have drafted a process that we support communities to follow and we believe that if communities follow this process to the end, they will be able to protect their lands. Now this process is a step by step and we have the following steps that I will go through briefly for you. The first one is laying the groundwork where we work to support communities firstly, appreciates and own the process to protect their land. They do a visioning to be able to recap how they've used their land previously, how the trend is currently and what is the likely future and what shall they do to ensure that they have a prosperous future. At this stage, we agree with the community on the terms of reference, what will be the terms of the facilitator, what will he do and what will the community do to ensure that the process goes on smoothly. Now after that, we go into the core of the process which is a strengthening of the community governance of land and natural resources. So here is where we do the bylaws process, where we support communities to document all of their bylaws, all of their own rules, document those and have them reaching down. Bylaws are to talk of governance of their natural resources, decision making and all of that will look at the bylaws process in the next slide. Once they do that, they go, we support them to document their land where they harmonize their boundaries, draw maps, resolve conflicts, make agreements and document all of their boundary agreements. We believe this put together can be used by the community to pursue legal registration. Now this usually depends on the legal framework in a given country, but a lot of countries have a legal framework for communities to use, but other countries are still in the process of preparing this. So for countries that have, we believe this is a good tool that the community could use to register. But for those that don't have communities that use this as tools for self-governance to govern their lands, this is an empowerment process. Even if before legal recognition, the community starts to live, sustainably starts to live by their bylaws and they are able to manage their natural resources. Now after legal recognition, we support communities to prosper. So the communities figure out how they will live, how they relate with the investors, how they will support livelihoods and things like that. So in a nutshell, that is the process we have developed for the communities that we support. Now as the co-op of this discussion today, we'll look at the co-op of our work which is strengthening community governance and which is mainly drafting of bylaws. Now we believe the bylaws that we draft tackle these three challenges I have listed. We know that it's dangerous to give a community documentation for their land without ensuring that the community is empowered enough to have accountability mechanisms and the community is not strengthened to govern their own lands. These have oral rules, they have some bylaws that they live with but these are oral. So this provides for opportunity for manipulation by the greedy members of the community. Anything that is not documented can easily be manipulated. There are lots of intra-community discrimination but practices that weaken land rights of the minority groups. So we do the bylaws to try to deal with the three challenges. So the bylaws drafted to ensure good governance within the community, management of the land and natural resources, linking the plan the community has, their vision linking it to the bylaws, to governance, linking their map they've drawn to governance issues and natural resources management and how a team of the governing structure will work and how shall we relate with the community. So we have a series of meetings that the community goes through to be able to develop and draft and document their bylaws. The first one is a community-wide brainstorming and shouting out of all the bylaws that they remember from the past. Documenting all of those oral rules that the community knows, okay, putting all of that down. So as a facilitator we try our best to ensure that the community shout out as we document all of that. We don't leave out any and we ensure that this remains in the community's terms you know how they put it. Now once we have gathered all of that, the next meeting is to provide legal education for the community to know what the legal framework looks like, land rights issues, human rights issues and things like that. Once the community has done the legal education, then we ask them to critique the bylaws that they had shouted in light to the education they've had. So then they revise, they critique, they remove, they add. And it's at this second stage that we ask the community to start to think about their future, what's the vision like, and how they ensure that the bylaws they are drafting take care of the trend, the future. We also separate the community into the different social groups, the women, the men, the youth, the leaders, so that in their different social groups they start to critique and ensure that the bylaws take care of their rights. Now once all of that is done, we have consolidated a number of bylaws. We take this for legal check. This could be done by a legal expert or by the facilitating organization to ensure that the bylaws align with the national law. The bylaws don't contradict any human rights provisions. So once that is done, then the bylaws are brought back to the community together with the feedback from the legal check, the legal analysis. And so the community is asked to revise their bylaws, considering the feedback from the legal experts, the legal checks. Now once the community has revised their bylaws with all of this taken care of, the community is facilitated into adoption of their bylaws. This is done by consensus or supermajority votes. And once the community has adopted, they start to implement their bylaws. And normally what happens first is the bylaws are implemented to elect a governing council, a management council structure to govern the land. And that's normally what the community does first. And that is the process for bylaws drafting. The bylaws are generally categorized in two three major themes. The bylaws on governance of land and natural resources, this take care of community definition, land ownership, how the governing council shall work and how decisions shall be made as you may read as listed. The second category is rules on management of natural resources. Oh sorry, the first category was the rules on governance. The next one is on management of natural resources, food resources, water, community forest and raising lands and things like that. How shall they manage all of those? And finally, social and cultural rules. So this process revitalizes customs and this provides for harmonizing of customs and the state law. So you have the opportunity to ask the community to revise their bylaws, their rules in line with what the state law says. So this provides for that opportunity. And as from experience, communities are likely to start to mention their social rules and start to mention their custom cultural rules. And it's good that you ensure all of this that has to do with land is captured when you talk of the bylaws for land management. What are the potential outcomes? Empowerment, protection of women and the minority rights, since this will be enshrined in their bylaws, downward accountability by the leaders. The bylaws will ensure a greater democratic participation in decision making, increased conservation, how they will manage their natural resources and how they ensure sustainability. Like I said, this also provides for aligning of the customary rules to the national law and then a stronger foundation for prosperity in the future for the community. How do you ensure that the women rights are protected? Now as facilitators, we try our best to marry the customs and formal laws so that we bring in the formal laws that protect women's rights and ask the community to revise their bylaws to ensure that women rights are protected. During the drafting of the bylaws, you also ask communities. We train the leaders on why it is necessary that the rights of the minorities are taken care of. We also actually, like I mentioned earlier, separate the groups, the committee to different groups so that the different groups, the women groups, discuss the bylaws in light to their interest and ensure that the interest is taken care of, that in a way gets enshrined in the bylaws and that's protection. And finally to ensure that the protection is in the implementation by creating properly watched dogs groups that monitor implementation of the bylaws, training the leaders, the police and government officials, training all of them and together the customary leaders on why protection of the minority groups is essential for land rights. The final part is, you know, drafting of bylaws is one part. The next part is actually implementation of the bylaws. So we've drawn some things that we've put in place to ensure that the bylaws are implemented by one, ensuring that the process is participatory that everyone participates, dividing the, you know, ensuring that there are different social groups writing and critiquing the bylaws, probably going at village by village level so that everyone is reached in the process of bylaw drafting, involving all leaders in the process, especially those that have to do, that have been playing a part in land management, ensuring that all of the officials and leadership structures in the community have copies of the bylaws that have been created. And then in the in the bylaws add steps, actions to ensure that the bylaws will be implemented. And then a watchdog group that monitors the bylaws implementation. Now as we talk of natural resources, we know that has to do with some fees and fines if the bylaws are in place. So a way to manage finances is very crucial if the bylaws are to be implemented and then to ensure that the bylaws remain, you know, to take care of the future, it is very useful that the community is able to revise their bylaws according to their trends. Thank you so much. That's the end of my presentation. Thank you.