 Good morning. Thanks for coming. We're going to get started here in just a minute, so get your last cup of coffee. Welcome to day one of a two-day event about driving change, securing tenure, innovations in land and property rights, hosted by New America. We're hosting Princeton's Institute for Sustainable Studies here today. I'm very excited about this. If there's any tweeters in the audience, the hashtag is, hashtag ISS cases. And if you're watching on the live stream, you can tweet questions there. So, to start the day, we're going to have Professor Emery Slaughter, Peter Rabley and Jennifer Widener. We're going to start with Emery Slaughter, who is the CEO of New America and doesn't really need an introduction. So it's my great honor right now to introduce Emery Slaughter. Peter's about to welcome you. I like the fact that Mike actually said needs no introduction and then gave no introduction. Generally when people do that, they say needs no introduction and then go on for five minutes. So I compliment you. And I, you know, it's a Princeton event when I get called Professor again. That's been a while. But I have a number of things to say. This is a particularly sweet event for me because I was the dean of the Woodrow Wilson School when ISS was founded. Indeed, I was explaining to some of you yesterday that I recruited Jennifer. And one of my jobs as dean of the Wilson School was to rebuild our international relations and comparative politics faculty. And I had known Jennifer from when we were at Harvard together and I went all out to recruit her successfully, happily. And part of what she wanted to do was this work. She didn't know that it was this work exactly. What she knew was with her deep Africa expertise, coming to the politics department and the Woodrow Wilson School jointly appointed that she wanted to put, to draw on her knowledge of Africa, to work on the ground that would be directly relevant in policy circles. And you would think, well, yes, there was the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. Isn't that what you're supposed to do? Yes. But it wasn't always so obvious to the university. I think that's a fair statement. So I, as dean, put in initial funding and supported what was then the program on fragile states and is now ISS. And I'm thrilled to see that in some ways things have come full circle for me and that our Future of Property Rights Initiative started to work with ISS through Omijar, even really without my knowledge. So when Mike originally said this, I'm like, yes, this is fabulous. I think ISS is wonderful. I will say one other thing about that history, which is just the shift from the program on fragile states to innovations in successful societies tells you something quite important. It is more important to focus on the positive, on the resilience, on what makes for success in what are often fragile societies than to focus on fragility, a general life lesson as far as I'm concerned, but certainly something I think in this work that is very important to do. So I couldn't be happier to have Jennifer here on stage. The second thing to talk about is why the Future of Property Rights Initiative is so important for New America. Now part of this is technology. One of the things that led me to leave, not just the Wilson School, but academia, for New America was that I saw New America as a place that not only did technology policy, but had technologists on staff. We had engineers here, we had designers here, data scientists here, and as somebody who spent my life studying, teaching, and practicing public policy, I am passionate about the need to combine technology and public policy to bring together what technology can do, which also means understanding what it can't do, and I'll come back to that in a minute, with the traditional tools of public policy, which are mostly law, economics, and of course deep expertise in a particular area. It is striking to me that even today at the Kennedy School, the Wilson School, of great public policy programs, students can graduate without knowing anything about technology. We don't make them economists, but we at least teach them enough to ask important questions of economists. We should be doing at least that much in technology, and even better, we should be having joint degrees with computer science, data science, design, all the different disciplines that feed into what we think of as technology, and I am talking about information and communications technology, primarily digital technology. So I love the tech focus here, but I will say it isn't just technology. It's technology, and you know this, I went through your case studies, it's technology, ideology, sociology, and we could add others, but let's take those three. So many of these cases are about what happens when technology runs into politics, and in Washington, I talk tech all day. In California, I talk politics and policy all day. I'm constantly pushing on, wait a minute, the technology will not succeed of its own. It must be married with an understanding of culture, of society, of the local politics, of the national politics, and that's what this program is putting together. It does not think that having an electronic land registry is magic, it's all done. It says having an electronic land registry when combined with an understanding and knowledge of the local culture and the politics, then, and there's still no magic bullet, but then we have new tools married with deep knowledge of the kind that you do in comparative politics and sociology and history, and other, I actually would add literature, maybe that's going yet in another direction, but then you have a better chance of succeeding. So technology, ideology, new ideas, particular political ideologies and sociology together is really what New America's about. Now the last thing I want to say is why host this wonderful international global program at something called New America? And as many of you know, in my career in international relations, international law, foreign policy, why New America? It's actually a question I often get. Why did you leave international relations to run something called New America? Well, a number of reasons, but here's why I think it's okay, more than okay, good, to be hosting something like this project, which is global, at New America. We believe in networks, and we're all here supported by the Omijar Network, so I don't think I have to talk about the value of networks particularly, but I have spent 25 years studying networks and have just published a book on the strategy of connection, what it means to build networks strategically and how you exercise network power and how you lead in networks. And in a network, you do not lead through command, you lead through connection and cultivation and curation and cross-fertilization and being a catalyst. From that point of view, New America is a place that is dedicated to solving America's public problems, both in domestic policy and foreign policy. It sees itself as a central hub in what I would love to be a global network of New India, New South Africa, New Jamaica, not controlled by New America, quite the contrary, and quite possibly having different names, but places in other countries that would bring together technology, politics, and policy, bottom-up change, as well as top-down change. New America, just like, in my view, America, the country, the United States is a country, is a central hub. What does it mean to be a hub? It means to disseminate ideas, but also to take in ideas. You cannot lead in a network without taking in as much as you put out. So that vision of what we do here doesn't make us the hub, certainly doesn't make us in control, means we are a place that supports that cross-fertilization of ideas and that thinks about leadership itself and public problem-solving itself in a different way. So all told, I couldn't be happier to be partnering with ISS. I couldn't be happier about the connection between technology, ideology, and sociology, and real bottom-up work, as well as top-down wall-making and norm shift. And finally, although we're at New America today, I can imagine future meetings at whatever the equivalent is in multiple countries around the world. And with that, it's my pleasure to turn it over. Is Peter here? Did he? Right there. And your hand was down to Peter Radley. Thank you, Anne-Marie. And welcome, everyone. It's very exciting to see this day come to fruition. First of all, a few thank-yous. Thank you to Jennifer and Pallavi and Maya and her team at ISS. They've done a fantastic job and we're very excited today to see the results and to hear from the different protagonists. Thank you, Anne-Marie and Mike Grelia, who's in the back there. And New America for hosting and being engaged. I think this is what we hope is the first of many of these types of events. And thank you to all of you who've traveled so far. I know some of you have come quite a long way. I see some familiar faces and I know they've come from literally halfway around the world. So we look forward to hearing from you directly about all of our work and detail around these use cases. So I think it was about two years ago or so, Jennifer, I think. 18 months. Menzee, well, that's all right, I won't probe that. But 18 months ago we approached Jennifer because Jennifer had actually already done a case study on the Georgian Land Registry, if I remember. And actually one of our employees in London used to be at ISS with Jennifer. And so there was a good connection already to work with ISS and the team. And the idea that our team came up with was that I think as a community in the land and property rights space we're very good at describing in great detail all the problems that we have and how complex land and property rights are and how we have to be so careful about all the nuances that are so different everywhere in the world. And there are special cases and if we don't pay attention to all these special cases we'll never move forward and get anywhere. And we were struck by how little in our minds we had in terms of solutions. Presentations of solutions. And we asked around and said there have to be some solutions out there. People have to have dealt with this problem. It can't be solutions and woe is me type of thing. There must be some solutions and if we don't have solutions then we have a problem but if we do find some solutions let's dig into them let's find out what they did how they solved the problems what were the challenges and see what we get. And I think as you see and if you've read the case studies you'll see actually there are a couple of common themes that come out. One is two it's not an easy problem to solve. It takes time, it takes a lot of resources and what all of the case studies show is that when you commit time and resources you can get success. And what I was struck by is how similar many of these case studies are. Many of them have to do with institutional reform. Many of them have to deal with organizational change, resistance to change from within. The way things have been done for a very long time. It's very hard to question and say do we need to continue to do this simply because we've always done it that way. And then I think external drivers as you saw from Landgate from Terranet and even from Jamaica. Pressures coming from the outside. Market forces saying you need to keep up with demand and agencies realizing they were struggling in keeping up with demand. Agencies realizing that information technology was changing so quickly that they were not in a position to take advantage of the IT and nor was that skill set theirs and that their skill set was something else. And I think you'll hear about those in today's presentations. So I'm very excited with the result. Again really would like to thank Jennifer, Pallavi and Maya for the hard work. I think these are important use cases now that hopefully will go into the literature. We hope they'll be used as part of online courses, MOOCs. We hope that it will be picked up in educational material elsewhere. And I guess what I would throw out is we're very interested in hearing from you today what you think we could do as a next step. If this is just the beginning what could come next? What could we do? How could we expand the use of this material? How could we generate additional material? Because while this is the end of this particular chapter we'd like to open up and see what the next one might be. So thank you all again very much for coming. I hope this is and I'm sure it will be a very vibrant discussion today. And I look forward to meeting all of you throughout the course of the day. Thank you again. So thank you all for coming today and because I'm a professor I can be a little bit more forthright and say you have an assignment today and it will be graded. So let me just say a few more words about the focus of today. I think Peter and Emory have set this up beautifully and I thank them very very much for that. So I want to say a few words about the focus of the purpose of the cases what your role is I hope in the course of the day and for those who are staying for tomorrow as well and I want to offer some additional thanks and maybe I should offer those additional thanks first because when we started this emphasis on land tenure and land registries 18 months ago there were actually two partners. The Ombudier Network was a tremendous partner in this but the UK Department for International Development also joined us and DFID has financed about half of this program and although you're not looking at all of the work that they have supported some of that still in the field I think they've been a very important element of this as well. So thank you to New America to Mike Greggly and Emory for participating in this. Thank you very much the Ombudier Network which has done so much on this subject and has helped bring this together and thanks also to DFID. So I say a few more words about the purpose. You are really at the center of this 18 months ago a little bit longer than that. We said what are some of the really tough problems with which reform leaders in governments around the world really struggle and a land tenure security is a big one. Land tenure security was a repeated theme in the interviews we were conducting with reform leaders everywhere. It affected economic growth. It affected conflict levels. It affected forest protection and so many other things. So we thought we really ought to do something with this but we entered this area with great trepidation because as you know because you are the people who do this it's highly technical and we thought do we really have the skill to do this. Now we are not emulating what you do. We are the loyal scribes of the university. We go out there with our analytic tools and the social sciences and the writing tools and the capacity of the space in the university to try to pull things together but I regard us as loyal scribes with maybe a little extra twist on it. We said we can help you share your experiences in order to advance innovation and learning in this area. So you are really at the center of this. We can not only help practitioners like you share ideas and maybe find those solutions Peter referred to but we can also channel this into training a rising generation that's what universities do. So channel the learning into public policy programs or business school programs or other kinds of programs to help people who are learning to work in this area know more about some of the implementation challenges they are going to face, some of the design challenges they are going to face and perhaps tactics for getting around some of those big challenges. So that's our second mission and we have a third mission which is to back out some kind of academic scholarship as well but I won't go into that. So that's how we got involved in this and there are really two strands of work. One focuses on land registries trying to improve performance of land registries. So that means reduce error rates, improve delivery times so it's a business process issue. Protect from undue influence corruption and this is extremely important. Many parts of the world we certainly work in a lot of countries where land registries are not secure and for this reason it's very hard for people to invest in their land to improve agricultural production or whatever else. So land registries are one strand and we have one panel today focused on land registry improvements and that's going to focus on Canada, Jamaica and Australia. Canada having pioneered some approaches Jamaica having learned from that, other countries having done so further and Australia having done some things to push the envelope further. We invite you to offer reflections based on other situations you know we've obviously worked in other parts of the world on this too. The other panel today taps the other strand of this work which is really land tenure systems and improving land tenure security by trying to come up with legal systems and practical systems that will help people secure their land rights further and we're going to introduce some of these tough problems by going shortly to a two person panel on South Africa which Peter Radley and I agreed was kind of ground zero for this because South Africa has layer after layer of challenges so we decided well let's take the hard cases and we're going to take two examples of and I'll say partial success but more success than most have had we're going to take two examples this morning and see where they might translate usefully and then we're going to later in the day look at Mozambique and Tanzania and we'll consider some other cases as well but we want to think about land tenure systems that are particularly useful if you have people who've been living in communal areas or who graze animals together and and cultivate together these are particularly challenging situations especially where there has been no effort of formalization in the past so we're inviting you to participate heavily in this this is your homework assignment not homework you're going to do this here but you're we're asking you to draw on your experience to throw us tough questions throw the people on the panel tough questions think about well where does this approach have some potential utility what are the pros and cons of this how do you mitigate the downsides how do you amplify the strengths in each instance and then for those who stay tomorrow we're inviting you to help us develop the kind of teaching materials these cases are like Harvard Business School cases they put the practitioner in the driver's seat and then they walk people in with a great deal of operational detail through the steps taken and how they dealt with some of the implementation challenges and design challenges but if you're teaching these cases whether in a staff training college or to a group of your peers in a land registry or in a classroom in a public policy program what does the instructor need to know that's extra so what other angles should we be bringing into this we want to talk a little bit about that and how you develop a curriculum around these so there again we are enlisting your help and we really appreciate all of your ideas and tomorrow will be breakout groups so small group discussions and then we'll come back together so let me leave it there there is one additional person I'd like to thank this was a talented team of ISS researchers because they had to master a lot of new material very quickly and integrate both interviews that they conducted and a lot of other forms of data and Leon Schreiber who is our researcher based in South Africa has played a really central role in that as is Maya Gainer and I think Leon you didn't get mentioned so there you are and Leon has been key in this as well so with no further ado we're going to move into the first panel which as I said is really on South Africa with layers and layers of challenges and I'm going to invite David Mason and Katherine Ewing to come up I think we're already mic'd up for this so I'll do the introduction so our first guest today oh I've got probably two mics going here but our first guest today is David Mason who helped facilitate an effort to improve security of land tenure in a communal area in South Africa and as many of you know this is a particularly challenging problem in South Africa because you had former homelands and you had colored reserves under the apartheid system and the question is how do you secure land tenure now in the new era David is going to explain how one community did this successfully I think many others have wrestled with this problem he helped facilitate this and he found an approach that has worked although it's still in progress David is with and I'm going to mispronounce it Pudassani what we would call a non-governmental organization in South Africa our second guest is Katherine Ewing who is director of the violence prevention through urban upgrading program in Cape Town and she is going to explain how VPUU worked with residents of a peri-urban community where violence was a problem and where people had migrants had moved into the area and had no secure land rights how they tried to introduce an occupancy certificate to give people a little bit more stability it's short of full ownership but an occupancy certificate that would allow people to have an address qualify for services then the kinds of services that other people had available to them serve as a basis for say a cell phone contract and perhaps serve as a basis of other forms of collateral so they could invest in their land and the aim was partly to bring down levels of violence but also for greater investment in the area and there are lots of interesting levels of this problem as well so we're going to dig into the complexities in this instance both land tenure systems, the legal side of this and the registry side because certainly in the Monroe VV Park case in Cape Town you had to figure out how you create a registry for this, how do you make these systems manageable for a registry so we're going to turn to David first and then Catherine and then we're going to open it to Q&A and I will try to accumulate a few questions and throw them to the panellists. Take it away David. Good morning everybody Good morning Can you hear me? No Is this working? It's really great to be here to share our experiences and to hear and share with others who are facing very similar challenges I think to what we are doing the way you pronounce the company it means to develop it's really an instruction to people to develop okay the rights of the poor who live on and make use of communal land across the globe are increasingly insecure and under threat the vulnerability is heightened when firstly land governance and administration systems are weak land is managed by external officials and when there is inadequate record of rights insecure land rights opens the door for elite capture and makes rights holders reluctant to invest their labour and money into that land land activists across the world are in search of remedies to reverse this toxic trend and we argue that partial immunity lies in the development and legal recognition of local land governance and record of systems which enhance local control and which are backed by legal reforms that provide legally secure rights there you go we're busy doing this in Ebenezer with the Ebenezer community on the west coast of South Africa and I want to talk about this experience with the Ebenezer community and for many centuries but before I talk about Ebenezer specifically I want to contextualize this process in three ways firstly by looking at the broad history of this possession in South Africa secondly by looking at land reform program in South Africa and thirdly by looking a bit at the history of Ebenezer itself the San and Koi people are considered to be the indigenous people of South Africa and when the Europeans first set up an able supply station in Cape Town in 1652 the San and Koi were living across various parts of South Africa colonial expansion and the development of agriculture in the Cape relied on slave labor and the Koi San fought many wars of resistance but were either turned into slaves or vagrants on their own land and until 1934 beg your pardon most farm labor was based either on slavery or on restrictions, vagrants with restrictions contained in the various Koi codes and vagrants vagrancy ordinances many of the Koi San settled on mission stations which became established across South Africa and they did this to resist the oppressive laws and to retain at least some access to land wars of conquest waged in the 19th century meant that by 1900 most of South Africa was under colonial control the process of creating black homelands and colored or mixed race reserves was the cornerstone of apartheid and it meant that by 1994 just 13% of South Africa was in the hands of black people and the remaining 87% was either owned by white owned companies, individuals and the states let's talk to turn to land reform in South Africa with the end of the formal apartheid in 1994 we introduced a land reform program which was based on the property cause in the constitution and it has three legs of the land reform firstly restitution that is where individuals or groups or communities that were dispossessed of land under the previous government could claim restitution of that land either restoration of the land alternative land or cash compensation the second component of land reform is around redistribution those people that never had any access to land can apply and get access to land for a variety of reasons and the 30s 10 year reform where those that are living on land currently but with very insecure rights are able to then access support to strengthen those rights the 10 year reform there has however been significant failure of land reform since 1994 over 8 million hectares have been transferred and at least 50% of that land is either un or underutilized importantly the majority of this land is held by communal entities land property entities either trust or communal property associations the department of rural development and land reform that is responsible for these CPAs reported in 2016 that only 208 of 1,490 of these entities were compliant with the law this failure of land reform is extremely complex and involves many factors but we argue that the lack of governance and administration of land rights is one of the most important factors in this regard let's turn to Ebenezer's history the Ebenezer community descended primarily from the Koi people, the indigenous people of South Africa and when the whites arrived in that area in the early 1800s they found the community death the state allocated some crown land to the mission church and to the community under the management of the church and so at that time the first time the Ebenezer community got access and formal rights to land was in 1837 but that land access was under the management of the church the reynish mission church at that point in 1909 a law was passed which transferred the land allocated to many mission stations back under the control of the state the policy priority, this is early 1900 sort of 1900 to 1930 the policy priority for government was creating opportunities for poor whites many of whom were dispossessed of land in the wars between the British and the Boers right at the end of the 19th century the idea this purpose had devastating consequences for the community the state decided to build a dam and a canal system to provide an affirmative action land reform program for poor whites and this targeted the Ebenezer community which was located at the end of the canal system so the state passed a law which dispossessed the community of the most productive part of their land and removed them into alternative but inferior land over the hill adding a number of other portions of land in the process on this reallocated land 153 families were allocated a plot a house plot an arable plot with water and communal grazing land and that number of land right holders remains today so there are still 153 plot holders with 1.6 hectares of land and 8 grazing camps which are subdivided into sub-camps for rotational grazing purposes the community in the meantime has grown to 2,500 people this land continues to be owned at the moment by the national state and the land rights have been managed with various degrees of success by the municipality when we began our work at Ebenezer in 2013 we found the following there was no management of land rights by the municipality 65 of the 153 plot rights holders had not been formally allocated after the death of the former rights holders and disputes were aplenty amongst the rights holders and within the community generally on the grazing areas, communal grazing areas 97 individuals without formal rights were on that land farming with sheep and cattle and there was significant elite capture by some people who were able to keep others out of the areas that they were allocated so for Ebenezer there are two land reform processes one is restitution for the land that they were dispossessed of and second is tenure reform strengthening the rights on the land that they are on I'm only going to deal with the tenure reform processes given the focus of today's discussion the applicable legislation there is the transformation of certain rural areas and that really is focused on all these mixed race or coloured reserves of which there are 23 in South Africa and it requires the community the future owner of that land and management of that land they can decide to cut it up and divide it amongst them they can decide to hand it over to the municipality for the municipality to manage it on their behalf or they can decide to hold it as a community establishing a communal property entity which is what Ebenezer decided to do they established what's called a communal property association so there are two focuses of our intervention one is on the ground developing local tenure arrangements at Ebenezer the second focus is at a national level a broader policy intervention to develop a national record which recognises communal land rights within a land rights continuum so there were three processes that we then undertook at Ebenezer the first was to manage a land rights inquiry process to clarify what rights to the different portions of land the second was to facilitate the design, a participatory design of new tenure arrangements at Ebenezer which would be under community control and the third was to design an appropriate local land rights recorder system on the land the land rights inquiry involved five processes the first was the enumeration of right holders who says that they have a right to a land the second was adjudication with adjudication it was very important for us to understand the difference and the relationship between customary understanding of land rights and the formal legislative manner in which land rights were obtained and transferred we looked at certification in adjudicating does the person have a certificate who is actually using the land now so who has de facto rights to the land on the ground and then we looked at was this person who says that they had a right eligible to be a member of the CPA the communal property association according to the membership criteria the third component in our land rights inquiry was around mediation and arbitration there were a number of conflicts and disputes around the allocations that were made the fourth was to then take that to the municipality who was the formal administrator of the land to get that confirmed and passed in a municipal council resolution once that had happened then we facilitated on the ground agreements around boundaries so we got neighbors to come together at the boundaries and say is this the agreed place we took the coordinates and then got them to sign an agreement that that is very important the second component was developing what we call the land use management system essentially the tenure arrangements for the future what we did there was was firstly we researched and provided technical detail about each of the different land parcels on the land and then conducted a community process which involved people dividing up into focus groups those focus groups then visited the different portions of land came back and developed proposals around what kind of land rights what kind of management systems what are the responsibilities for each individual and so forth and then presented that to the plenary which was then critiqued we as Pushkissani then wrote that up proposals which are in the process of going through the community for final acceptance this participatory process that we ran was extremely successful for the first time community felt that they were involved in determining their future of how the land should be what rights should be there how it should be managed and so forth and for the municipality and the department of agriculture it was the first time that they had been involved in a process and we were also very excited about it some of the key issues that emerged out of this process were the following firstly how do we clarify individual rights on community land and it was agreed in the absence of other forms of formal rights it was agreed to provide members with title but with restrictions in that title that if they wanted to sell transfer that land it had to go to a member of the community property the second was how to clarify given the nature that grazing rights that it was communal grazing how to clarify that right what kind of rights should it be eventually a fully tradable communal grazing rights was agreed to and then finally it was around management how should this land be managed given as community land the first is the CPA appoint a manager but there is an association of users that works with the manager with regard to the record system there is no there is currently no system of recording communal rights in a local and national register in South Africa so for Ebenezer we're drawing on the thinking and development of such systems internationally and we've decided to go with the social domain model which has been designed and developed by the global land tool network connected to the UN habitat this approach seeks to clarify the nature of the rights that a person or group has to a specific spatial unit a piece of land water body or natural resource the design of this at Ebenezer has been quite challenging but we're making progress very closely with the GLT the objective is that this record and management system of rights will be locally controlled by the CPA so that is community control this requires a record system which is cheap which is locally operated and easy to update but which is linked into the national system to allow oversight and further formalization if required our work at Ebenezer is linked to our national policy of intervention to find remedies against elite capture South African property law does not easily accommodate criminal land rights in the absence of such a law is one of the reasons that the rights of people in such circumstances are so vulnerable Pujlistan is playing a leading role in a broader intervention to reform property law in South Africa and the aim would be to provide for local management and register of rights which cascade up through the municipality into the national deeds office the intervention is located within a national titling debate where individual title is considered the apex of property rights oh that's it so the jury is still out about how successful this intervention will be but it's critical in South Africa 30 million people live in context where their rights fall outside of the formal property system so our aim has been to avoid capture of land by elite in communities and to achieve the land tenure security objective which is espoused in our constitution and the key lessons that we've drawn from this experience are firstly within with land rights inquiries we must really spend time to understand the nature in custom in law and on the ground secondly the process to clarify and formalize the land rights and tenure arrangements must be participatory in design involving as many of the community members as possible to ensure and enable sufficient consensus these processes must be practical affordable and supported by adequate technical information so that people can make proper decisions the record all systems must be sufficiently flexible to capture and certify the range of rights making up the continuum in each context fourthly the land rights management and recording systems must be supported by the local state in order to enable local level land holding entities to implement the agreed tenure system and to contain the power of local elite to appropriate resources beneficial to the poor finally the record systems must link to national formal recording systems otherwise the nature of these local rights will be undermined and relegated to secondary status second cost status so these have been our experiences at Ebenezer I'm really putting it out there we're in the process of establishing these the days are still early but really looking forward to sharing the process involved in other areas thank you good morning everybody I feel quite privileged to carry on the South African context and we take the front floor at the beginning of the two days so thank you very much for everybody involved in this whole process thank you very much to all the people back home as well particularly the CEO of VPU Michael Krause so I just wanted to say a very big thank you to him and all the partners we have we've talked about networks in the beginning and I think it's an amazing network and an opportunity to have so thank you so I'm going to zoom us into Cape Town and straight into a case study so we're going from rural South Africa to urban South Africa so monobisi means hope we've simply separated that though the case study is about hope and I never give up we've been working there for seven years now and I still believe that we have some good examples and I still believe that we have hope so this is the current situation that we do have in Cape Town around housing delivery we've been stuck in a housing delivery system in Cape Town that delivers a one-house one-proth scenario but what we experience is very different from this in the informal areas we're working in and I think that we need to change we're in a point in South Africa where we have to change we don't change our issues of crime our issues of violence, extreme violence and all our general social issues will be extreme so I'm just going to explain a bit about VPUU is that it's not only around land tenure for us it's about a lot more that we deal with so we deal with a strategy that starts with prevention particularly crime prevention but what we do is we turn it around and we start with innovation so we work with early childhood development and youth and local economic development some of these things will fall in but I just wanted to explain that the other is also like the previous example is working with the community so it's not but not only working with the community it's working with the government as well and there are lots of challenges of being the person in the middle the mediator the facilitator, the intermediary but we believe that partnerships are at the core of this and they need to be fostered and also cared for we deal with the protection and this is where my main role falls into the spatial planning and the book environment area but it's also about neighborhoods providing equal access equal access and rights to the communities it's also dealing with the residents vulnerability and last we deal with evidence based it's about research and development working with people with technology on the ground but also working with a soft side and measuring the quality of life we found these to be incredibly valuable in working with governments as well in terms of being able to show service delivery and what actually service delivery means on the ground so I'm going to zoom into Cape Town it's quite a long way from here as I've realized so we work in Cape Town and Parle and Villiersville we work in a big metro city we work in a medium sized city in Parle and a rural town in Villiersville in Cape Town we work in predominantly three areas but the area I'm going to show you today is called Kailicha it's about 35 kilometers from the city center so we started in 2009 actually and with the city of Cape Town the municipal government and it was about a revised approach to upgrading of informal settlements in South Africa something had to change and we couldn't just ignore the informal settlements that we have but it's moving from not only an infrastructure based approach to a more holistic based approach about the quality of life and the built environment for us that automatically changes the levels of crime it's about an approach based on needs and priorities identified through the involvement of communities and it's about the implementation of pilot projects to find and test the methodologies and processes we haven't got any solutions as such but we're working on processes and I think that to get away from the idea of a product is something that is incredibly important for us so we started with an informal settlement called Lonaviti Park but I think we didn't start with tenure we started with a variation of different levels of the spatial environment and some of those we're looking at a safety strategy an education strategy particularly for young children a tenure strategy and also looking at movement networks linking it to technical infrastructure working with the the municipality of Citikotan so that's what I wanted to say we didn't start out with tenure tenure was something that we realized was very important as we went along but in terms of tenure what we did we find out we found out that we needed to incrementally secure a tenure through both administrative mechanisms at an individual level whilst also legal recognition that secures the formal status of the settlement as a whole they had to work together however since that and all the challenges that we've experienced along the way we have also added a third one securing the public realm for long-term development at a precinct scale this is something that in informal settlements you don't often have you don't have a land that is institutionally set aside for public facilities or public walkways so back in 2010 we started with urban landmark with Lauren Royston and Tessa Cousins and Mark Napier and the study of Cape Town going through workshops to try and understand and although we said it's a step by step process we realized it wasn't quite step by step so the first one was around the status quo what it is and carrying out an enumeration and that was considered step one step two was to be the legal recognition so we proclaimed the area and go through land use management applications etc and that would lead then to securing the long-term tenure and that seems quite simple when you put it in step one, two and three but it's not that simple and we often flipped between the long-term number three with the community saying what is the long-term vision and then going back to step two and then back to step one all at the same time so let's just get to the context Monroe BC Park some of the facts 25,000 people it's a big informal settlement the size of a small town in Etterby we have 6,470 new households and I can say that from an enumeration however we do have changes but that's good, life changes people die, people are born and so it goes on we have about 65 households for a working town and 19 households share a toilet that's a lot however 79% of the residents feel they'd be living in Monroe BC Park in five years' time and that was through a survey we conducted last year 85% of the registered households are on the community register that sort of flips between 80 to 90% because people also change so that's also something we have to monitor and 59% of the residents perceive that they feel safer after receiving tenure certificate we work very closely with a local the local community the local leadership is called the Safe Node Area Committee so they're not only a political group they range and they are inclusive of faith-based and youth organizations as well we're on four parcels of land here it's owned by between the City of Cape Town and the Western Cape Government so we are on government land and also are adjacent to a nature reserve and then on the other side we have a formal Kaili chair we've done a mapping process since 1996 and we continue to do a mapping process we have much better technology and aerial photography at our fingertips than what we did when we started I think that's also something that we've experienced over the seven years is access to information and the way we can use technology cell phone apps etc is so much more advanced and really does help produce just a quick snippet so this I'm constantly on the ground taking photographs just in a few years somebody painted their house they claimed the area, they claimed the front space on a more institutional level 2012 an entwongenia of the public space that's what happened, we had a crash developing so let's just quickly go through administrative recognition so it goes back to what was called the book of life and I called it the book of life as well because it's like this big Harry Potter book and I think Leon I described that to Leon and I was amazed when I saw this book but when I looked at it it didn't hold a registry that was viable and it actually writes to it so that was when we decided that land tenure actually was a very important part of what we were doing in informal settlements it has a history of what was given to the area through the years from 1997 also what was quite important and it was quite hard to find one of these was a service registration card but we did find one and it takes us back to what the process with the municipality started so there has been a process with the government and with the municipality right back from 1997 so we set up not an enumeration we set up a community audit and the reason it was that was because there was this register in place it needed to be an updated community register called a new register because of the politics on the ground so we liked that that came from the community themselves updating our existing register but we realised that it had different parts of it enumeration spatial, tenure and skills each one we assigned to different responsibilities to different areas whether with local leadership local authorities or ourselves as the implementing agents then conducted the community audit and this was the municipality called the enumeration form we called it the community audit of the dwelling questionnaire and dwelling particularly not house or home it had to be the house household which linked to a dwelling there were different aspects of what it did so we asked more questions in this process than we had to but we needed more information we worked with students initially we started working with volunteers and we trained up people to work on the ground with cell phones and GPS's there was an existing number a WP number and then through our process we went through a process of stickers to know which houses 6,500 houses is quite a lot of houses to enumerate on the mound there was a community register office set up at one of the we built a small community facility and we set up a community register there where people were interviewed people could also locate themselves on the map this also took some training to be able to train people to work with maps and then because the houses were geolocated we could accurately pinpoint exactly which houses hadn't necessarily come to the community register office or they hadn't been interviewed each then person that the household head was then asked and they had a photograph taken to take away all the conflicts we also worked with the University of Cape Town on conflict mediation we then had new numbers put in place some of the information we got was gender headed households 50% were female headed households electricity information and how we could actually work with the local electricity department to actually then electrify the community the mayor then gave out 10 years certificates in 2014 and then we continued to work with the community and we did a recent evaluation on how useful was your 10 years certificate access to electricity of course came up as the biggest one we also through all the information we also still continue to monitor taps and toilets using cell phone apps it's important as well for the tenure and the quality of life of people in the area legal recognition so instead of taking the normal route subdivision consolidation rezoning to an establishment we realized that there were different levels that you could tap in to be able to get some form of legal recognition and that didn't necessarily mean that you had to have one to be able to get the other so we started a process in 2010 where we co-designed with the community and I have to say we did co-design with the city of Cape Town but they seem to forget that where we we did a lot of work on the ground we did mapping we mapped the whole area the geospatial we walked I walked all those areas we mapped them time and time again and we continue to map them as well the landscape we're in a dune system we're on an edge of the nature we then developed a spatial structure that could then start working that made more sense and then we worked with the developable areas we worked with the biodiversity area in the city of Cape Town we worked with the planning department in the city of Cape Town we worked with the fire department and safety to work out the safe width of a neighborhood block we developed a network that could give you quick and easy access access for people walking home so you're improving your safety levels but also access for fire engines and refuse trucks etc we called that the special reconfiguration plan the city of Cape Town then asked us to call it a development framework put it into legal terms so what we also did was we renumbered all the areas to have a better understanding of what the areas were so different block numbers so 18A, 18B, 18C this also then worked with your tenure certificate so the two had to run hand in hand the spatial development framework and the administrative reconmotions we then looked at different options you could have various options you could do block development you could do sub block development in individual plots but that was almost leaving it to the end because what we would do is just recognize the area as a settlement not an informal settlement but a settlement in land use management terms so that was what we got to in 2013 we submitted the land use management application that land use management application still sits with the municipality of Cape Town so there were many challenges to taking it to the next step in terms of legally recognizing the system and I've got a few ideas around that as well but I know I've got two minutes left but what I did want to say was that we have managed to incrementally put some strategic projects on the ground so you can do things we built 25 public spaces I haven't had time to even talk about our public space program we built two community facilities we put there's about 98% electricity to the area we've got a few more people coming in we've got ECD programs running, we've got youth programs we have a movie night on Fridays we have all sorts of other things going on but what the idea was to focus that implementation in two particular areas and those were based around public space projects so this was one of our Entongeni and our Entongeni means public space in 2014 and then we slowly bit by bit have been working there we had our open day on Saturday which is why I didn't, I only arrived yesterday because we had a very big open day where we built a community facility and particularly in Brick as requested by the community and we've got building plans approval for this what we've also done is we've surveyed the site we've managed to identify and peg out this area for long term institutional space for a community facility which is not something that we often think about in tenure we often think about the individual house and I'm saying house, not even a household here because we have tenants and all sorts of other things so for us moving that to a totally different domain is very important we're also working on safe walkways now safe walkways are also good points for putting your services as well but I think in closing I think that's almost my last slide is that the next step so what do we want to do next we can't necessarily get legal recognition without going through full engineering processes but we do want to work with grey water systems we do want to work with fire systems we do want to work with safe walkways so you don't necessarily need the full legal recognition to do things so some of our lessons that we have learned is that the two go hand in hand administrative recognition and legal recognition needs to work together there are various elements to each of those but the one also if you miss one it's not necessarily the end of the world you can keep working on these things but I think it's also about a process and it's about allowing a medium to long term development which is often doesn't fit within a government process short term quick wins we've been through three mayors on this project so where are your political champions to drive this and then it also is desperately in need of engineering standards and an upgrade in terms of how do we deal with a four by four that can go in and access a community or a bicycle that can pick up rubbish you don't have to have a big refuse removal vehicle to do this so I think it's about I think in the beginning we said we need to question the way we are doing things and we need to deal with this resistance to change and that goes from all levels from NGO from government and from community and with thanks for questions and what I'd like to do is take three questions first and then throw them to the panelists and then we'll see whether we have time left and there's another time during the day where we can talk further and please introduce yourself the second presentation I just came back from South Africa too I was disappointed by just how segregated it still is even in cities but I was very much encouraged by your presentation I wanted to ask several questions one, the enumeration system is that similar to the slum dwellers international enumeration how does what difference, what's the same second one of the things I heard about when I was there was buffer zones but people still settle on that so who's monitoring that to make sure that those buffer zones stay safe, unsettled and third so in some ways you are dealing with the easier situation of city owned land and what I was hearing in another place is the real tough nut is informal settlements on private land in municipalities so then the electricity company feels like they can't provide electrical services because that is starting to recognize those settlements and clearly there is a private owner so what do you do in those situations ok, thank you very much great we have another question over on this side my name is Gip Feperman I'm an economist I run the global business school network so I wanted to ask an economist question you've worked for many years and this is a very complex multifaceted social engineering program what are the resources that you put into this it looks to me of hand I would guess that a lot of money has gone into this per person and how do you assess the benefits at the end Susana Lasterria from the University of Wisconsin my question is that relates to gender and rights to land in both of these projects it sounds like the Ebenhouser I'm not sure if that's the name is correct Ebenhouser project with the communal land title I'm assuming that everyone in the association becomes one of the owners corporate owners of the communal land but then and that I think does include women because everybody over 18 is a member of the association is that correct with the individual land titles are those legal land titles or are those certificates that are handed out by the CPA if they are either way I'm just wondering whose names are on those titles are women's names also included in the titles regarding the townships Cape Town outside of Cape Town again when you are handing out the occupancy certificates or the residential certificates are whose names what is the criteria for putting names as occupants or users or owners on those and I assume those are not legal titles those are just within the community itself recognized within the community itself and then related to both of those I'm just wondering what are both the norms and the rules for inheritance rights and do those include daughters and wives thank you thanks so you have a full agenda I think the last one relates to me yes the community as a whole owns the whole land men definitely dominate in the rights to the arable plots but it's not only men that own those that have the rights to those plots in the custom the current land holder can decide who that land goes to and many of those situations have been where the woman daughter wife takes over that land and then becomes the land rights holder it's up to now it's been restricted to the 153 primarily because of a restriction on water there's hopefully an upgrade of the dam and there will probably be additional water that comes into play and then any expansion there there's a particular focus within the community saying those must that must be particularly for women that I think it's a recognition that in the past that women within the custom have not actually been advantaged in access to that you asked whether the title is a legal one or not at this point it's not and that's why we are also involved in a national intervention to try and get communal rights and or a continuum of rights to be recognized and recorded at different levels so at the moment it's not at the moment in fact implementing this thing the rights that are held are very insecure some of whom don't have a certificate with the local municipality so this is the anticipated system that will be implemented once the land is actually transferred to the community in terms of I think inheritance I explained it's really in custom most often men receive the right and that currently it would be the right to communal grazing and to the arable plot but it's not unusual for women to also do that but most mostly men do do that what we found out in Monabisa Park is that it was about 46.5% of the household head was a woman and so what we particularly did was worked out with the community of what they thought was the household head and in a lot of cases you had couples coming together as well a lot of women who are not necessarily married so so what we also allowed was a secondary name on the list there was always allowance for somebody else so one so the household head and then another what we also did we made sure that the tenants were also on the community list as well I was amazed at that percentage in South Africa I mean I think for that amount of women to be considered the household head I was blown away and it really was and very important as well what it was but it also shows the urban context and how people migrate and move around between urban centres in terms of the inheritance aspect we have an ongoing community register so it allows for people to come and register deaths and births and life particularly but the problem that we hit was the tennis advocates are not necessarily updated by the city of Cape Town so then the local not necessarily administrative recognition but the local recognition has a gap for the long term use of it there was no intention that it would last so long in terms of that we could get quicker legal recognition plus administrative recognition but we still stuck on local recognition but we do realise that there is a need for that ongoing inheritance or maintenance it's like a broken tap when it breaks you got to fix it just like a registry you got to keep it updated very important I'm going back to the first question from Claire do we use a similar enumeration system to some dwellers I think we did but enumerations are they're kind of quite standard but what we did was really try and understand what it meant at the beginning what is the status quo so we did a lot of the work on the ground trying to understand whether it was what the community wanted was this enumeration system so yes a similar process was followed but I think what we're making sure is it's continuous because a lot of enumeration people come in from the outside they do the enumeration and then it goes what we wanted to make sure was there was some kind of continuity and activity to it and community ownership it's all run by volunteers the community register office is run by volunteers they've been trained up in geolocating mapping there are wizards on the computer now they have all our community facilities have Wi-Fi access there can be live data that's fed straight to the municipality on correct systems at the same systems municipality in reality buffer zone so who monitors we had a land invasion in 2014 before the elections in South Africa by one of the political parties but the people who came to the forefront was the local leadership and they blew us away they literally people wanted to burn down the register office and so kind of normal community dynamics but to it's almost extreme and the safe note area committed snack they sort of stood there and hold hands and stop people and there are very few kind of in migrations but there's a lot of internal growth of what we find so you can't stop internal growth a husband, a brother comes from the eastern Cape and sephals in Cape Town and that's normal so but the ongoing monitoring is very important what about privately owned land I didn't have the opportunity to present our other area but we are working in another area called Lotus Park that is a very different environment on Prasa land so the local rail organisation but they're a subsidiary company and they're not government so we do have that problem where we have one and a half thousand households on land that is not state we're going through a different process with it but it still is one that one can deal with incrementally as well that one's been a three year land transfer in the process the land transfer part the legal part doesn't necessarily take that long the negotiations everybody around the table is the difficult part just to the economic part the feasibility of all of this I personally can't put an amount to improving somebody's quality of life I find that that is insurmountable I can't the amount of value we have I think is quite minimal our staff members on the ground have one local community facilitator on the ground and we have various people who technical staff as well as ground staff who we're employing from the local community so I feel that there is a little bit of feedback we have a little construction team doing a public space who live in Monobiqui Park so they're all getting training and field development through the process I think partnerships so we don't work alone we work in partnership so that's very important we work with our early childhood development that is done in partnership so that network that we spoke about at the beginning that for me is what we need to do and we need to be innovative we have to deal with these areas the idea was to set up the pilot and see how we can run it out to other areas so the sustainability sustainability of it also means how can we ingrain learnings and teaching beyond just what we are doing and with the city of Cape Town as well so this for me is an important platform to actually share the information and get further continuity of the project as well just on the economic one you know if you consider that 13% of South Africa's land in former homelands and 8% of the land has now been transferred through land reform so we are talking the order of 20% of South Africa's land which is either underutilized or unutilized completely I don't know if people that have been to South Africa have been driven through the former homelands in many areas people are not cultivating anymore and that's primarily because of land administration breakdown because they can't trust that someone else can come in and eat their cabbages so people stop producing so the value of doing this and it's going to cost a lot because there are many communities involved and there are many land rights that are not clear enough but the value of doing it means that it's going to make a major shift in the economy bringing those areas of land under production at Ebenezer itself many of the portions of land are not utilized partially because of the lack of land rights but partially because of the ineffectual canal system but there again there's a proposed new canal system being implemented at the moment and that with an ability to go to a bank and say here's my certificate for my land rights it's going to make a major difference to the person's decision to intervene to invest in their land and that is going to be the part of the spin on the quite large amount of money that's going to have to be spent on implementing this across the country Thank you very much I think we are at the end of this session so I want to thank the two of you and then after this I think we're talking to the back of the room and we'll be able to help in but thank you very very much and we'll let the people have more questions Thank you and you're kind of locked in and certainly we can read you you're on I'm Mike hello hello we can come back to our seats okay thank you so the next three cases we're moving from what we just learned about in South Africa helping people get their rights to the institutions that manage those rights keep them live and keep them valuable and generate valuable for the owners of those rights and for society so up on stage we have Jody Kent from Western Australia Landgate which is a statutory authority we have Elizabeth Stair from Jamaica which is the NLA which is an executive agency and we have Elgin from Terranet now a private company that started as a public-private partnership so something I'm interested in is three different models of the types of organizations and I think the Canada is particularly interesting because good question as we look over to Australia and see what's going on is it the future of where some of these registries are going but I'll save it for the questions with no further due it can be a lot of fun to learn about these agencies as Princeton said they went out and saw really innovative and pushing the edge so this is going to be a crash course in how you either make or evolve an agency to get some best practice from around the world Good morning Prior to Jamaica deciding to create a national land agency the national land policy which was published in July 1996 referred to effective land management and administration institutions shortly thereafter the government took the decision to merge the four land administration departments dealing with land titles, survey and mapping, land valuation and estate management the push for more effective institutions was also as a result of Jamaicans demanding more from the government in terms of performance transparency and accountability so the pre-enlight status there are four government funded departments with individual heads reporting to our permanent secretary with two different ministries we all had contact with each other but we did not rely on each other we didn't really know each other we had different goals, different procedures and our staff had different office cultures we all had statutory responsibilities and operated in our private silos we received our budgets from the Ministry of Finance and it was difficult to plan as it varied from year to year we had minimal control in hiring staff and there are no formal standards for our customers so in merging the four departments the government decided to use the executive agency model of governance this includes a delegation of departments focus on performance measurements outputs rather than inputs managerially autonomous agencies and the provision of quality services especially related to customer service the transition started in just about 2000 and it went for about 18 months so what did we do we created a new structure we prepared new job descriptions we advertised all the posts in the agency and we interviewed all staff coming into the agency there was no automatic transfer of staff if the staff was unsuccessful in their applications for the agency or if they did not want to work in a new agency they were redeployed to other government departments or they were retired on the grounds of reorganization and this was important because the terms and conditions of employment were changing from a government a real government institution so in the end approximately 25% of the staff were redeployed or retired during the transition we also gave a lot of attention to communicating with the staff during the transition by way of general staff meetings newsletters, focus groups our customers because we needed our customers to understand what we were trying to do during the transition the CEO was also appointed and so approximately 6 months before the agency started I started work so a lot of the matters I was able to influence from the very beginning we commenced operations in April 2001 and under this new government structure the CEO reports to the minister and not the permanent secretary the CEO and all directors and managers of the agency are on 3 year employment contracts the executive agencies act was introduced several months after we started and this is what gave power to the CEO to manage the operations of the agency although the individual legislations for the different core areas of title service etc are still standing because those govern their statutory responsibilities so in terms of our structure I'm just going to mention two things the advisory board this board is appointed by the minister and their role is to advise the CEO on the strategic and business responsibilities they are not an executive board they are not a management board it's currently chaired by an attorney at law and we have other stakeholders the value is represented on it the land surveyors, a businessman and a finance person information technology is also a very important part of our operations in that it gives us the ability to improve service delivery we buy software services and build some internally the CEO receives delegation of authority instrument from the minister of finance this sets out my obligations and duties and I'm the accounting officer for the agency I have full HR responsibility but if there's an appeal for example somebody is dismissed then that is dealt with by the services commission the issue of accountability was brought sharply into focus for us all the executive agencies are monitored by a wide range of government agencies we have to do several reports quarterly, annually we are set targets for each year or we set targets along with the ministry and if we want to give an incentive payment to our staff at the end of the year then we must meet at least 80% of those targets in our 16 years of operations we have never failed 100% of the revenue earned by the agency is from the fees provided and these are kept totally kept by the agency each year we have to give the ministry of finance or projections for revenue if we earn more than those projections we keep 50% and 50% is given back to the ministry of finance in some cases we can apply the full amount over our budget the 90% of the fees are actually earned by the land registry which we call the title office we also enhance our revenues by creating new services and this was as a result of the merge databases we also divest lands for government by sale or lease we don't keep those monies but we keep 5% of those monies as a discharge for that management in 2003 we undertook a major business process review to change operations of the land registry from a totally manual system to an automated system this also resulted in improving the linkages between our surveys and our title in areas all titles have now been scanned also the majority of our land documents and these are all available online the documents are electronically signed so that helps to improve the turnaround times for the process we now have approximately 600,000 titles in the registry plus the original documents which includes transfers mortgage documents birth, marriage, death certificates so we still have to maintain hard copies of those documents so we have them all online so as you can imagine storage is a major issue there's a document tracking system which allows persons to go online to see how long it will take for their documents to be completed and when it will be completed because we found that people kept on calling the office we have online forms where they can go online and complete the forms print them and present them to our office along with their supporting documentation we offer a subscription service for something called property watch where we can warn you if there is some kind of activity against your property and most importantly we designed a fee calculator so you don't have to call us to find out how much should you pay you don't need to come online in the office to find out how much you should pay so that helped a lot for customer service I've highlighted just three services and tracked their delivery times and you'll see that it's pre-2001 as at December 2016 and in 2008 and about 8 years after the agency started generally there has been a marked improvement in turnaround time of the services provided some matters we can do 24 hours some matters and that's at an additional cost and some matters we do for two days in two days but at no additional cost in November 2001 when we were going through the major changes of creating the agency and putting it in place the customer service index which was measured by an outside person was 2.9 out of 10 when we looked at it again in March 2005 it had increased to 8.1 out of 10 the merger allowed us to create new services because of the huge amount of data no available in one place so Elan Jamaica service is an online service it's a paid service where you can look at your title or the supporting documents or the plans and you can print them at your leisure and Elan Jamaica is a free service and it's really maps so you can look at the maps to search by street name community names coordinates etc we are currently working on having those two services mobile enabled the agency has other achievements as a result of the merger and one of those things is the map products that we cannot produce so we can map anything we want us to map, we will do it we offer services to our developers that if you are doing a subdivision we will do the splinter titles for you within 40 days and this is a paid additional service if not it takes on average 150 days with the in and out of the documents if we don't achieve the 40 day turnaround time we pay about the expedition fee but you still have to pay the normal fee in 2010 we established a VRS reference network island wide to improve the accuracy of our service and this will ultimately help us to build our cadastral map of Jamaica we established regional centres outside of Kingston because people don't want to come into the city all the time so it appears we are doing something right because we have received several awards one of them in 2008 was the prime minister's award for the best customer service agency and in 2010 for the most innovative and creative public sector agency but we did not go through these changes without learning some important things business process review is an important part of the change it makes no sense to computerize or to digitize things that are manual processes so we have to keep on reworking to improve performance communication is extremely important you have to ensure that the staff is on the same page with you and we can't forget the customers so newsletters focus group meetings meetings with unions and you need to manage their expectations because everybody wants everything at day one we also have to bear in mind the worst before they get better be prepared for the brand new computer software you have invested in to not work quite the way it should on the first day that you open to the public so delivery times for services will decrease but it is important to just keep focusing and keep talking to the customers and telling them it will work after we worked through all these issues with the delegated authority that the CEO now has I need to tell you that autonomy is great we can now plan we can now save we can become the masters of our own destiny and that is really important it has helped us to grow as an agency and it has helped us to challenge ourselves to have new products and services so we now have several services from which we earn revenue next steps more change the agency has received funding from the World Bank to carry out some studies towards introduction of electronic titling which it is expected will further reduce turnaround times and give some increased security to our title data this of course will necessitate legislative changes to the Registration of Titles Act we have found that a traditional separation of agencies may have had administrative convenience but it led to duplication of functions a loss in the value of information and longer turnaround times to produce services by combining the four departments the agency combined the data sets reworked some processes created new products and services and drastically reduced the turnaround times for providing the services we regularly have focus group meetings with our customers and review our business processes with a view to reducing turnaround times and just as a side note our customers the most difficult ones we try to ensure that they are on the focus group meetings so that they are a part of the process we realize that the need to provide quality service to our customers will continue to drive the process of improvement our motto on agency one goal this was as a result of the need to let the staff understand that we're no longer working in silos we're all working together for one goal I thank you Good morning I'm Elgin Farwell the CEO of Terranet like my colleagues I'm here to talk about a story of transformation and land registration services I think you're going to hear that none of them were achieved overnight and none of them were achieved without challenges those challenges can be political policy operational technical and if you've ever worked in land registry they certainly can be emotional while I'm here to talk about the Terranet experience in many ways it's more about the Ontario land registry staff that had the vision the commitment and the leadership to make it all happen in Ontario meaningful transformation took almost a decade and well both the model that delivered the transformation as well as the services have continued to evolve since that decade I'm here today to share the early Terranet story by setting the impetus for change the strategy and the structure to address that need and talk a bit about some of the high level lessons and results that have been realized so a decade might sound like a long time but not so much if you think of it in the context of a land registry service that had not changed in close to 200 years settlement European settlement started in the 1600s in Ontario but it wasn't until 1795 that provincial statutes were introduced to establish land registry and land rights at the time land was administered under a deed system which was a variation board from the British but in the late 1800s Ontario adopted the new Australian Torrin system for first grants to property now well enhancing property rights for some this also created disparity that would last for another 100 years for those that were still under the registry deed system and over those 100 years Ontario itself went through profound change and growth initially 80% of the Ontario population was rural in nature and was spread across a geographic area four times the size of Great Britain so over 60 registry offices county based registry offices were established to service and administer property rights in the province each of which had their own interpretation of the provincial registry and land titles act given the geographic distribution during the 1900s Ontario became Canada's economic engine population more than quadrupled and the demographic profile shifted to 85% urban development of land became intense and like most jurisdictions development fueled surveys, transfers and mortgages which in the registry were all fueled paper and more paper this in turn put significant pressure on the urban registry offices in particular in Ontario a real estate transaction does not close until you actually register the transfer in the registry office in other words you don't get the keys to your house if you don't get registered on your Friday afternoon by your lawyer in the 1980s with population and the economy booming the land registry system was not coping the first thing that seems with paper staff and customers we were actually setting up tents in parking lots where offices could extend their services and lawyers and conveyances would come to register register was consistently missing the legislative timeline to complete transactions and in a period of intense development this created exposure for the province for properties managed under the torrent system and was potentially putting confidence in the land registry system itself at risk and confidence and trust is fundamental to land registry services by the 1980s roughly 50% of the provinces the properties in the provinces were titles and 50% were still under the deed system registry staff and legal community had to maintain two legislative administrative systems and workflows as well as the expertise that would be prescribed by each to manage them again it also meant that those who held interest in land did not have equal rights and protections provided by the province some were able to rely on a provincial guarantee while others simply had to rely on their lawyer so in the mid 1980s government concluded that the inconsistency of rights the increasing cost of the service and the decreasing level of service was creating too much risk for what would be considered a critical piece of economic and social infrastructure so to address this the government created a vision for real property administration in Ontario that planned to leverage the newly emerging information technology capabilities and that vision was to afford all property interest holders the same protections and benefits by proactively converting the deeds properties to a qualified title under the torrent system create an electronic parcelized ownership database for every title in the province integrated electronic workflow to enhance the efficiency of the registry staff and coincidentally create a digital parcelized geospatial map fabric as an index to the property records as well as an expandable database for property attributes that could inform public policy finally it included a long term vision to automate the real property document creation and registration process today some know this as e-convancing now many jurisdictions in the 80s were building title databases so that was not that unique what I think was unique was at the time the decision to convert millions of properties property records from a deed system to a title system as a starting place and then envisioning a world where the end-to-end land transaction would be paperless, automated and conducted remotely was unique and while it was understood that the effort to attain this long-term vision was large the government did not know at the time that the scope of magnitude of the vision would become much greater than anticipated and this in turn would drive the need to be innovative in the way in which that vision was achieved initially the land registry took on attaining the vision on themselves and started by designing and developing the polaris land titles database and operating system and then to support the records conversion they developed enabling legislation and procedures to streamline the process to search a deeds property parcelize it, automate it and certify it under the torrent system unfortunately after a series of pilots the land titles team concluded that the cost, difficulty and resourcing to convert and map almost four million titles and the complexity of the desired enabling information technology as well as a related investment to enable all of that exceeded the government's capacity so to their credit, to the government's credit they did not reduce the scope of the vision they were trying to achieve they looked for an alternative model to achieve the vision and concluded that a new trend in public-private partnerships for hard government infrastructure might actually be adopted to a soft infrastructure environment so government saw an opportunity for a private sector partner to bring capital, discipline competency and capacity and surveying technology and process optimization as well as bring a commercial lens to customer service and to market newly created data again to their credit they anticipated that unlocked value in land registry would be released and that this could be captured and retained by government so they could be associated with a private sector partner to accelerate that vision and in 1991 Terranet was created as a 50-50 partnership between the Ontario government and a private sector consortium Terranet and the private sector were expected to bring the capacity and the expertise to accelerate the conversion of titles drive IT solutions innovation allow government to guide and government project outcomes on processing day-to-day land registry records and then provide the capital and be motivated through an economic model that maximized and accelerated the benefits of automation to land registry and its customers it took two tries to get the right consortium but ultimately a private sector owners were comprised of survey firms legal firms, technology firms all backed by capital that committed the required funds up front to the province however vision capital and experience was not a guarantee for long-term partnership success so why did it ultimately work clear accountability of roles rights and decision making and the adherence to these trickled down from a joint Terranet board that had equal representation from government and the private sector partner as well as independent expert members Terranet would be accountable to meet performance and production criteria that included quotas timelines and quality and quality for records conversion the government continued to own the data and certify the title using the system that Terranet would deliver Terranet on the other hand designed operated and owned the system within which the data resides this created a symbiotic reliance on one another and a shared and aligned view of the customer Terranet retained fee revenue government retained fee control so fees were predictable and grew at a pace that was known to the customer base once critical mass was reached on the number of parcels automated Terranet could commercialize the data but government had the approval rights from a privacy perspective and a market perspective Terranet was only compensated by retaining statutory fees on automated properties in the early stages this motivated the company to focus on simpler land titles properties generally found in high turnover urban areas government also set performance standards for system availability the rate at which properties needed to be converted and data integrity for those properties all of which had significant penalties attached so you had the combination of revenue upside and performance downside which motivated Terranet to successfully standardize the processes and the performance standards for title certification staff in a unionized environment and having been around the world I can tell you that's not easily done in the complex world of land registry well this model drove revenue to Terranet which would be used to fund more conversion it also allowed government to process records more quickly due to the advantages of automation long term nature of the arrangement it was important that government was not fettered in making policy or legislative changes that might need to be reflected in the systems that Terranet was maintaining on their behalf so a comprehensive governance structure was established and evolved to monitor contractual performance and customer service but more importantly it was a commitment to dedicate the right talent and decision makers that facilitated the ability for the regulator and Terranet to work collaboratively on advancing the vision being innovative and adapting to new needs within the marketplace and within government and to jointly engage stakeholders and customers and I'll talk about that in a minute a fund was established and collaboratively annual planning process so Terranet would fund on an annual basis any changes government wanted to the system which could be driven from an operational perspective or by legislative changes and I'd say the most significant of which was a move towards reducing fraud property fraud and enabling that with systems checks in the 90s I believe another key to the success of Terranet was that from the beginning it was not singularly private sector in composition Terranet was seated with government board members and the voluntary transfer of government land title staff over to the company when it first started and to this day we continue to recruit and retain a contingent of both government and more specifically land titles capabilities and DNA in the organization having government representation at the board level in the first decade and hiring former deputy ministers or sorry deputy registrars not only allowed the company the credibility to engage and contribute to the transformation in a true partnership with government and stakeholders but it also allows us to understand and work within a government context it appreciates that public interest as a business interest a conversion project that was supposed to take roughly 10 years took 17 but that was because the number of properties and the complexities of those properties were underestimated in the 90s or the 80s despite this by 1999 critical mass was reached and with the busiest and largest counties automated and converted to land titles so in 1995 anticipating success Terranet and the province set about to introduce the electronic remote registration system but the vision did not just see the automation of land registry processes as they existed today it also envisioned the reform of land registry practices policies and legislation by moving away from the submission of evidence to use to the use of legal statements government collaborated with Terranet but they actually led the engagement of stakeholders in this endeavor and it became a joint effort with the Law Society of Upper Canada and the Bar Association to reform and change the real property practices with a goal to rely more heavily on the legal profession reduce property risk and create a more efficient marketplace the legal community was engaged and allowed to influence which ultimately turned them into champions of change when we rolled out the system we worked closely with the government to design and develop the system based on the reformed and more efficient workflows supported by auto certification sorry auto signatures online collaboration between parties in the industry office the auto population of title details from that automated database into the electronic documents so that you knew that information that was being submitted could be checked and would be right as well as being able to be automatically abstracted and registered without human intervention prior to the launch Terranet and the government together delivered a comprehensive change management program to ensure that the community was aware supported and trained and as mentioned the legal community was in support led by the law society and in 1999 Terrabee became the world's first digital land registration system and it immediately transformed the practice after the successful launch of Terrabee with the records conversion nearly complete the government sold its 50% interest in Terranet in 1993 to its partners three years later we went public through an IPO the government participated and saw a return on investment I'll talk about that in a second in 2008 Terranet was taken private by a pension fund and is now operating the electronic land registry system for the province under a 50 year concession arrangement and has strict performance and customer service requirements including a contractual commitment to maintain the registry in a modern state but above all else the governance regime that provides clear accountabilities promotes joint strategy and the funding and collaboration to achieve it remains the underpinning of success the province's original equity investment in Terranet was that actual Polaro system that they built in the 80s which was valued at less than 30 million dollars but since the province divested and over the life of its relationship with Terranet its return the investment received in hard proceeds so these are checks being cut will exceed 4 billion dollars 6.4 million parcels have been automated and converted and 99% of documents are created and registered electronically today this is in an environment where the properties the number of properties have doubled transactions have increased by 25% and the land registry in Ontario has been reduced by 75% through the use of public kiosks the land registry staff have been reduced from anywhere between 1200 to 1400 depending on the time of year they've been reduced down to 200 but the backlogs have gone from 20 days down to one day and finally customer service satisfaction is in the top desk we measure that regularly this has been a journey this has not been a journey without its challenges they always are but a commitment to the vision and the innovative business model has transformed land registration in Ontario Terranet continues to deliver e-convancing property risk and realtor solutions across Canada and has recently entered into a 30-year concession with the province of Manitoba where once again we are faced with paper, paper and more paper and we'll start that transformational journey once again I'm my name is Jodi Cant I'm currently the chief executive of Landgate from Western Australia and I'm absolutely delighted to be here today to share our journey which we're incredibly proud of as an organisation so Landgate is a commercial statutory authority and what that means is we have a commercial board but we have one shareholder and that's our minister it's an interesting balancing act to get both your commercial board and your minister happy but so far we've managed to do that and we provide secure land titling services to underpin a property register and property rights which is very important for the economy valuation for taxation purposes for commercial and open data for government so just to give you an idea of the size of us we're the biggest legal jurisdiction in the world so we claim we're bigger than Texas this map shows that our claims are correct we're also one of the oldest land masses in the world and our indigenous people, the Aboriginal people have 50,000 years of claims on our land our connection to land in WA is very deep and very ancient and very important so today while we're a business that looks ahead with contemporary ideas looking to continually reform and reinvent who we are we also have a very deep, deep connection to our land so our heritage stretches back to the beginning of this one river colony that's 1829 in 1829 this first survey General John Septimus Rowe charted much of our coastline and at the time he was a real innovator himself, he was a naval man who bought naval survey techniques to the land and at the time people thought he was a bit crazy perhaps we've kept the crazy going but we regularly claim that exploration is in our DNA, we were founded by explorers of the state, it's a very big state and for us the guardianship of property ownership and conduct being custodians of our location data is hugely important so we're not your average public sector agency as explorers we approach things with no boundaries we say our motto is we know no bounds and we're working on living that out it's been really important for us to look at our rapidly evolving sector and embrace digital disruption so 200 years after Rowe what happened, 2007 in our world two things happen, the first is the iPhone where everybody became a property expert and a data expert and information was at fingertips and it was no longer paper was no longer going to be the way of the world for Landgate we were also formed so prior to that we'd been a couple of separate government departments we were formed into a commercial statutory authority which allowed us to do things a bit differently and while we had much of the restriction of government we also had an ability to own shares in companies and really take control of our own destiny including keeping the funds that we made or a percentage of them while we give a percentage back to government we can also keep funds that we make so we really knew that for us to take on the challenges that would be we needed our DNA our explorers DNA but we also needed to change how we did business we needed to keep our customer focus as an agency but we also need to take on the digital economy so digital disruption our choice was we felt was to disrupt or be disrupted and given that choice it's a pretty easy one to make we saw things happening around the world that was going to change everything about our industry and that started as soon as mobile technology came along so to maximise the value of our asset we had to reinvent the way we worked both our technology our engagement with our customers and our relationship with our shareholder we knew we were sitting on a valuable asset and we knew it wouldn't be long before other people recognised the value of the asset and came knocking on the door with a big check so where did we start our transformation absolutely started with our own people it has to I can't overstate the importance of having your own people on board we're a values driven organisation we take our values very seriously we all of our projects include reference to our values which are there at Landgate we make the decision based on creating value and being true to our values so it's been a really interesting journey and we start with our customers at the heart of everything we do so what's our digital transformation look like our strategy and reform agenda had to be developed in parallel because you have to keep providing the business that you're there to do we could see that there are new opportunities in the sector we knew the power and the value of the data that we collected we had a strong commercial sensibility and that was both at the corporate executive level and at the board level so our corporate leadership was certainly made up of people with commercial experience and government experience to give the balance going forwards our focus shifted to changes in thinking, in technology and as I said our customer journey so we've driven a really strong bold cultural change program through our organisation and we've got a smaller but more empowered workforce we're flexible, more agile we've gone in the time that I've come from approximately 1200 people to we're about 550 these days we've done all of that so far voluntarily for every person that's exited our organisation it's hundreds of hours of talking and support and retraining if required we've also bought in new skills we've downsized and funded that ourselves so at the same time our ratings have gone up so why did we think we had to change this is a model of the electronic market place it's a reference model we use based on work by two gentlemen, Schmidt and Lindemann I think they won a Nobel Prize in the late 90s for it and this is a view of electronic markets and in Australia when e-convancing was introduced after many years of not going anywhere in 2012, 2013 e-convancing was introduced and what we recognised that when you look at the property market it was just right for disruption so our own area of land registry is over here on the right hand side but everywhere we looked things were happening differently on the left hand side you had things like auction.com and Zillow down in the financial area you've got peer to peer lending and blockchain so in the middle, which is where it says the box that says PECTA I'm not sure if you can see it that's our electronic convancing company that looks at electronic lodgment across Australia so from Landgate's perspective we knew that we had to update our registration systems to work in this new environment we did a global search we have an IT, our IT policy says buy up the shelf first we did a global search and couldn't find a product that we thought suited our needs but what we did find was a market for just that product if we could develop it so with our IT provider in partnership we did a proof of concept funded by our innovation program and we ended up with the world's first cloud based multi-tenanted land registry and what that means is that the land registry we've developed we can use not only to do our own work but we can provide land registry for the first time to other users so it's very exciting for us and what it means for our customers is that the land title transactions that used to take days now take seconds are fully automated basic land transaction is down to 23 seconds untouched by human hand which is pretty phenomenal and why so our prediction of big checks coming in and and land registries putting themselves up the sale or maybe not themselves but their ministers certainly putting them for sales things were happening in Australia that were changing so in the time since we've been looking at this the New South Wales government has come to the market for a provider we have South Australia in the market for a provider and Victoria just announced a scoping study to look at what they might do with their land registry so we would argue what we predicted would happen and the dominoes are falling so what was our response as a commercial statutory authority we can form companies we spun off a company called Udbara Udbara is 78% owned by Landgate and 22% owned by a deco which is the multinational parent company of our IT partner Azulon this subsidiary company is able to work outside of the restrictions placed on a government agency like Landgate but obviously the 78% we have a controlling interest Landgate then licensed the IP that we developed around our land registry to Udbara to commercialise so Udbara is now the IT service provider for Landgate to coin a phrase we eat our own dog food so we developed a system when we were the first customer for Udbara Udbara has just been successful as part of the concession in New South Wales and is the technology consultant on the consortium that was successful against strong international competition for the work in New South Wales so for a little company from Western Australia that's pretty exciting for us our second customer of many more the consortium that consortium sort of gets the keys to the New South Wales office probably around July this year so it's going to be a really exciting journey for us to be on and we're obviously looking now at what the other states are doing and what other tourist jurisdictions around the world of which there's approximately 40 all of them who we know through the search we did earlier so if you need a new system come and talk to me Udbara really exemplifies what Landgate's about and our value of innovate and achieve so it was originally an idea put through our innovation program by a staff member Spur on the other hand is our location in Innovation Hub and Spur is all about tomorrow so while we're trying to do things as the best of breed in the world today and tomorrow we formed Spur a year ago to really help grow our own economy to provide government data to start up so that they could build businesses on the back of it and to continually challenge ourselves about how we do things so Spur is about using our knowledge, experience connections and know-how to help others create businesses and by that I mean trying to find a place in government if you have a good start-up idea and you try and find a government department and the data that will help you do it you can be on an endless cycle of phone calls but because we've worked in this space for so long we can have one conversation and really help a start-up get off the ground so in our first year we've got 847 open data sets available from other government agencies for every one of those data sets it's probably about 10, 15, 20 conversations to try and convince them that they should make their data available we've had four start-ups four new businesses launched we've funded nine grants we had our first round of grants we had 47 applicants funded four of them and it really is for us about creating that extra value for government we've also, last year we've been running a formal innovation program in government in Australia since 2008 last year we were named at number 22 in Australia's most innovative companies list so that's across all private public and not-for-profit we're incredibly proud of this number we're a very small agency you know, with quite from the outside what can look like a fairly mundane brief the only public agency that beat us was the CSIRO which is Australia's big scientific research very well funded to give you an idea they're the guys that invented Wi-Fi so I'm actually totally happy to be number 22 just behind the Wi-Fi inventors and for this, this is hugely important for our staff and for the recognition that all of us should have because it takes all of us to innovate and we've we've absolutely encouraged our staff we allow our staff 5% of their time to work on an innovation of any kind doesn't have to be business related and it's it's really paying off for us so of course back to our customers and community we've been relentless about our focus on value creating value for our our masters we've generated $52 million worth of savings in IT just in the next five years we've gone from 900 over 900 to under 600 staff we've delivered $104 million in profit back to government in 10 years we're also shareholders in PECSA the electronic conveyance in company our shareholding has approximately doubled we invested about $35 million it's now conservatively valued at about $70 million and ADBARA you know is just beginning and we really pitch ourselves as a value adder and a value creator for government and it's hugely important to us because this allows us to write our own destiny and not wait for people to come and tell us what to do I have to say that while we saw the opportunity and saw what was coming and have responded to it no one has ever told us we need to do these things however now that we're doing them everyone's saying what a good idea it was that we did so I should also add that these numbers were going through the middle of the global financial crisis so pretty successful and obviously with the decision out of New South Wales you know we hope the world's ADBARA's oyster so dollars are one thing satisfied customers are another so these are our stats our customer stats which we're very proud of our turnaround times are down significantly our backlogs are down significantly and our customer sat is increasing and remains very high so we become more efficient, more focused on delivering what our customers actually want and more technically capable to meet their expectations so the future for us we believe this is just the beginning we've been sharing our knowledge and internationally for over 25 years we've worked both in country and we have a lot of fellowships if you have a group of people in your country that would like to come and spend some time in western Australia please come and talk to me we've worked with countries as diverse as Vietnam, Fiji, Indonesia China, Bhutan, Nepal Africa so and that's across all of the things around registering and securing property rights for economic development I believe you with three takeaways on our journey your people and your customers must be at the heart of everything you do you cannot do any of these changes with technology alone you can't communicate enough you need to communicate and communicate and communicate and when you think you've done enough communicating you probably need to start communicating it is hugely important and the other thing is you need to be resilient you need to be prepared to fail and as we're discovering you also need to be prepared to succeed thanks very much great thank you all very much impressive I have a number of questions before I go are there any questions in the audience we have Mike okay go ahead my question is specifically on Terranet and I was wondering if you have looked at having considered whether this PPP model would be applicable in developing countries and why or why not I would say it's got some applicability and I think about it in two ways there's the PPP model as Terranet was originally established which puts the government and the private consortium together and you share the risk whereas the model as it has evolved today into a consortium the risk transferred to the private sector so in both cases in our world it comes down to the risk and the assessment of risk which goes to technology risk political risk economic risk and while I think you could set it up if you had the confidence that the commitment was there the economy will sustain the business model within the PPP then those are the mechanics that drive the change and advance it and you'd be able to bring the capabilities to bear through that private sector component Hi, my question is to both Canada and Australia my understanding is that in both those countries you have first nations groupings who live on land which is separate and I understand that that's communal land and I was just wondering how that puts into the land registry system if at all Yeah, we do we're actually quite an interesting land rights issue in Australia which I'm sure you probably know more in detail information on it than I do but we have a lot of Aboriginal communities on Crown land that have rights over the land and one of the you know we have some of the issues that I see in the South African examples where how do you prove your rights when it's communal rights so it's quite a complicated structure and while they have rights to live on the land and government provides a lot of services so at the moment government provides schooling, housing health but it's an issue that I don't think we've got nailed yet we have multiple service providers that go out to some of those very very remote areas and some of them are just if you went there you wouldn't see anything there it's but the very strong connection to land for the people is important so we do recognise all of that land through Crown land in the title register and how it's managed is communally and it's also provided by the government at the moment in Canada Aboriginal lands are generally managed federally so this would be the reserves and they are communal or leased so there would be a leasing infrastructure within that so they're not managed within the provincial context or by the provincial registry and the registry services or the registry integrity I would say is light but there's lots of conversations about introducing a titling system into Aboriginal lands I think the other area that comes into play are lands that are in dispute so Aboriginal claims which would be on title blend and the registry does come into play there as you're trying to define the scope of land, the extent of land and those rights Frontenwell, Peter and Julian Hi, thank you for those really interesting presentations my question is to Jodi and to Elizabeth you both touched on the challenge of convincing different government agencies or government departments to share data with each other and there's a clear case of course to be made for the sharing of data and for the kind of sum is greater than or whole is greater than the sum of its parts of combining different data sets making it interoperable to know the challenges around getting different actors to share data with each other I was wondering if you could give us a little bit of the back story of how you succeeded in convincing these parties to play in the same sandbox For us before the agency started it was very difficult for everybody to share data everybody held on to their data once the agency started however we were all in one place so they had to share the data but the problem still occurs because there is actually work going on now to provide a government data sharing policy so that the other departments will also share with us to help improve that database it's still difficult because I have to also remember that some people earn from their data and so when they put it into this big pool they haven't quite figured out yet how to give everybody a little bit of the share of that pie so it's still an ongoing problem that we are working through I guess in another few years we'll sort that out but it's been worked on So we started we have a thing in Western Australia called Wallace for the West Australian land information system and we run another thing, we love acronyms doesn't this industry just love acronyms we also run a thing called the shared location information platform so we've been in those two spaces for Wallace for over 25 years and slip 13 or 14 years and what we did was build the infrastructure and then start the conversations we'll start the conversations and then try and convince people to make their data available so through slip I think we've got almost 3,000 government data sets and we're able to because of how we've developed the platform you can have open and free data you can have open data that the agencies charge back and you can also have data that's not available that's locked down data which agencies can look at but the public can't look at and we've been able to accommodate all of those things but have we got all of the data so no we haven't our government has an open data policy and we have a location information strategy signed off by cabinet but there's no mandate so every data set that we get available through slip is much relationship building conversation giving confidence that the data is going to be safe one of the things we found with our agencies is when you ask them why they won't share their data they say because our data set is not good enough and then you say to them are you making decisions based on your data and they say oh yes we're doing that and you go okay so that's interesting I guess the other thing that I see in WA we're coming off the back of a large mining boom there's been a lot of money in the economy we don't have that and the dropping market is the lowest it's been since the 80s we would be in serious trouble if we had not disrupted ourselves and what I'm seeing in government agencies there's been massive cuts across the board to funding and all of a sudden people who didn't want to share data or wanted to have duplicate services are now coming and saying you know how five years ago you said I could have you know I didn't need my 50 staff to provide the service do you want to have that conversation so for us as things get tighter the opportunity actually increases so you know I'm hoping that some of the people who've had this bastion of staff that they've kept hold of are now going we actually can't afford to duplicate services so I think out of adversity comes opportunity if you're ready to take it but it's a lot of relationship building and it's very very time consuming and you just got to keep at it because it's you know for the benefit of our citizens and our shareholder it's the right thing to do Hi Peter, Rabli again from a media network thank you all for your presentation it's a question for all three of you and perhaps Elizabeth if you would start as you went through the conversion process how big a problem was fraud both in the records and with staff and how did you deal with it and is it an ongoing problem or have you seen that dissipate thank you okay for us fraud was a problem in the registry missing documents documents torn out of the big books if any of you know what that registry looks like and and I think one of the reasons with fraud is because things took so long to be done that people pay the people to get to out near matters quickly we because of the conversion we have done and we know have all the documents scanned and we have more security of data and we put in more secure systems and have because we're still on a paper based system we put in water marks in the documents etc it is made a little bit more difficult for people to make their own titles because people did that does make sense tearing it out of the book anymore because you don't see the book when you come into our offices you know look at it on the on the computer screen so that has improved quite a bit there's no need to pay anybody to get out your documents because you can pay us and get it in one day or you can wait two days and get it or you can wait the normal time which is five days so there's a big improvement in turnaround time has assisted the whole matter for being reduced drastically or the conversion process the public would come to registry offices and could easily access a title book so they could take it out so they wanted to rule out the mortgage or that was a potential I don't think it was viewed as prevalent when a fraud affected an older homeowner that got a lot of attention but it wasn't prevalent what was unknown was a bank because banks don't readily tell the world that there's been fraud on their properties but as the records became automated they became secure and the government saw an opportunity to enhance that through the supporting processes and in the mid-2000s enacted legislation that required lawyers to register transfers of property they had to verify identity so that was part of their function under their practice procedures lawyers were not allowed to act on both sides of a transaction unless they're in northern Ontario where the nearest lawyer was a thousand miles away so there were a number of things that could be actually put in place and enabled by the electronification of the processes and systems so it still happens you still care about it but I would say it's a more secure system and process today but occasionally people they want to set out to do it they may be underway I think similar for us it certainly wasn't prevalent but they work through e-convancing and now automated land registry the e-convancing work has been done with all the registrars the title registrars actually agreeing that e-convancing is the way forward and one of the reasons for that is the security that it gives and so our new land registry that we've developed to fit with that it's certainly our belief in our registrar's belief that the more you automate and go to an electronic model the more secure it is but I agree with Elkin in as much as when people want to they'll try and find a way but we're very aware we had a fraud a few years ago with people copying documents and going through Africa where then someone was away on holidays and that got a lot of media attention and certainly things like verification of identity and other things have been tightened since then so it's not something that happens a lot but we are once is too often we're acutely aware but really the move to electronic convancing and electronic register actually decreases the ability for fraud two more questions actually three we'll go one here and then the lady and then the gentleman in the back I'd like to come back to the idea of disruption which you raised it seems like most of you experienced not only disruptive technology but disruptive economies disruptive institutional factors and it seems like that's not going to go away particularly the technology side and so I'd like to ask each of you to perhaps identify your top three factors that you think provide resilience to land registration systems resilience to the system or resilience do you mean the whole the whole in the face of disruptive change I guess so when I think about something like blockchain I go back to the torrent system where what's really important is the underpinning of that government guarantee of title and the integrity of it and so that as a disruptor it's got to still support that somebody can't just start playing registry in our context anyways and say this is where you're going to come now because it lacks that that government underpinning and integrity of that guarantee to title which is why people are prepared to secure money against property I think one of the things that's really important to the resilience the whole system and the organizations is I've come back to the people it's really important that you spend, that we spend the time changing our culture and getting our culture ready for that because I agree disruption is everywhere and it's not going away so a few years ago when I spoke to our staff and someone put their hand up and said but we're change fatigue we've had all this change and there's more change you know what are you going to do about it and I said at the time if you're change fatigue now you probably need to get another job and that's okay it's actually okay for people to not be comfortable where they are but they need to make a choice to leave them so in my most recent rounds of staff talks where people if people are getting up in the morning and dragging themselves into work and saying I'm going to that place again don't come it really is that simple it's a valid absolutely a valid choice work somewhere where you can you know add value and that fits your values and if that's not us that's cool there's plenty of other places that are so the power of your people and what you can achieve because at the end of the day people you can have all the technology in the world and you have governments and boards and but the people on the ground are the ones that give the customer service and make the change so I would say don't underestimate the value of investing in your people and recognize the time that it takes to do it but disruption is a it's just here and there's not an industry that you can look at to go how could this be more efficient and as a personal plea if anyone's got any great ideas about fixing how you get on an airplane you know in a quicker way then I stand in those queues and I think my god where is the disruption when you need it for Jamaica like Canada and Western Australia we're also on the touring system so we have that very secure base in terms of our title I agree with Jody that people is really the problem because you could do everything but if your persons are not properly trained they don't know how to speak to the customer if they don't know how to calm down that customer who comes in then disruption will continue so we regularly put our staff especially the front line staff back into training as to how to deal with the customers because there's always that one customer who will push the staff over the line so we try and make sure that they are prepared from a technical point or a legal point so that they can answer the questions and be calm Mary Tara Oh Pacific Forum CSIS this is related to the question that was asked earlier about fraud as we digitize more of the property information it opens a new area of concern and that is cyber attack which is much beyond the fraud so as we talk about when we usually think about cyber attack we think of like infrastructure and we think of enormous chaos that we create but if property information is also a target of something like that then that would also be a huge disruption to the economy in many areas so how much of the mindset and the process of security were involved in the creation of the digitization process as well as currently ongoing I just want to throw in one example within the United States the OPM Office of Personal Management held all kinds of personal information and they were stolen massive theft and in general that office is not in the mindset of security but they held the data so I'm just wondering if you can talk about that aspect I can start certainly we are in the mindset that it's really important and it needs to be secure so a couple of things one is when we developed our new registry service and it was cloud based we had quite a lot of questions come from people about the security of the cloud and our argument would be if it's in the cloud it's actually more secure than if it's in a data center somewhere which has a single point of failure whereas with cloud have seamless backups so if something went wrong at one area you can move over I guess the other thing is to cyber security is an ongoing issue and the soon issue fix one whole someone clever and smart it goes through another we've made sure we've had independent verification we actually have one of the worlds leading cyber security areas at one of our universities so we've had independent verification as we've built our system every few months come and test you do everything you need to do it's absolutely front of mind will that mean that we're never impacted possibly not but certainly we recognize what we hold and the importance of it so I think in a modern digital mobile world you have to weigh up the pros and cons I mentioned that we have performance standards that are around data integrity, security availability and ultimately we lose the company we lose the contract if that happens so we do take it very seriously I would say it's proportionally in terms of increases in investment over the last 10 years security would be the highest growth in terms of the required investment just because of how technology is evolving and we do run data centers but they run hot hot, they're dual you've got backups we can duplicate we can still bring it back within a day's worth of the records and do that within 24 hours we run ethical hacking so we hire somebody to try to hack our systems and we're audited by government regularly and thoroughly it is a very very high priority it's also a high priority for us we actually back up outside of Jamaica so if anything goes wrong we can pull back down our data and interestingly about two weeks ago we were advised that there were threats on our system so we actually locked down everything for about two or three days until they could sort out what was the problem this is a concern for us because we realize the value of the data that we have and we also realize that going electronic it's going to put us under more pressure to ensure that whatever systems we put in place it can stand to scrutiny because I think people don't want to know that your data is out there they want to be sure that it is in a secure location so it's something that we take very serious moving forward it will increase in terms of our activities in that area another question in the back I'm Michael Brown with the Keemonex International my question was just asked it was responded to but one follow on to piggyback on that is stakeholder perceptions about cybersecurity is this very much a concern in your three countries and thinking of the developing world would you imagine that cybersecurity would be a bigger issue in African countries or Asian countries than it is in northern countries Jamaica might be a good place to start with that just how big an issue is cybersecurity to the various stakeholders that have to buy into electronic registries cybersecurity is a big issue for us lawyers are especially very very concerned that the whole aspect of the whole protection of the data is a forefront of our minds but as I said previously it is something that is fairly new for us we have always stored our data outside of Jamaica because we are subject to natural disasters and so and cyber and cyber threats are they occur so we just need to be aware of what it is we're looking for and to ensure that our staff is also aware that certain things they can do can bring the threats into our agency so we we're working on it I think it's changed over time the perception certainly in the early days when computers were relatively new and lawyers didn't think you could hack into a typewriter so it's evolved though and I think today it's kind of a table stakes they expect that security people will get a health card online they'll get driver's licenses online so there's an expectation around the privacy aspect of the data but I think there's a general concern around the ability to hack and hold data hostage or corrupt data but that would be no different in this environment for other government databases as well in my view and so that's why you do take it seriously My only point would be that I actually think there's an opportunity for developing companies to learn from the mistakes we've made and to leapfrog a whole lot of a whole lot of the processes and systems and things that we've been through so I think security is probably one of those but while people expect their data to be secure they also expect to get the service and to get their driver's license online and to do everything online so it's a balance it is absolutely forefront on the number one thing on what we've our registry is backed by the state so if things get fraud happens the state pays so I can assure you my shareholder they don't actually care what all the other statistics are if my fraud numbers go up I can have the best set of figures on everything else and why am I making a difference I want to a lot of my questions have been asked I just want to put a question to Elgin and Jody we've talked a lot about people and culture and we've also talked about technology technology is not a panacea but it's as we're seeing in this conversation you can't get away from it you're both heading into new geographies Manitoba and New South Wales take your solution and wrap it up I'm just curious how you're thinking about that what technologies you might be deploying of your own or others you're sort of getting reading these cases one struck by the amount of time and effort it takes and now you have a mandate to move quickly so how are you thinking about that and what technologies are going to be a part of it certainly I think the world's changed from what we'll call the pioneer days of electronic land registry in Manitoba I mean we assumed operations two years ago they were partially down the continuum on electronification but within two years we're delivering electronic conveyancing and actually the system looks different than it does in Ontario and that's because the process and the way records are managed is different so it's got to be able to accommodate that so there are elements underpinning that are just comment to every registry system that we can use from Ontario when we are but when it comes to the I'll call it the operational layer the processing layer and the document construct for lawyers that looks different and that has to be customized but the technology lends itself to be able to do that much more quickly and be much more versatile today and from our perspective I guess Advara is the tech partner of the New South Wales consortium so it's very early days and it's I can't actually tell you what will be expected but I can make some observations I guess our new land registry system which Advara has a license to we know is what adds value to Advara and why we were included in the consortium so it's not a great leap to go they'll look to implement that system for us we think that will be you know both an interesting journey we've got a bit of a benefit from the rest of the world because we have a national electronic conveyancing system it means that a whole lot of the lining up lining the ducks up at the front end has already happened so we've developed our system we've tried to even when talking to our own people on what they wanted to create it as vanilla as we could so that we didn't need to do a lot of modification and customisation so we're very confident that we're a very good fit for New South Wales and how that project goes will be a real I guess testament of how we can roll out to other jurisdictions but just as a bit of a historical fact our own old system the Western Australian system that we've just transitioned off was actually the New South Wales system so we know that underpinning particularly New South Wales we have a lot of common elements but it's still going to be an interesting challenge that's what the system was developed for it was multi-tenanted for a reason and that meant that we had to change our own thinking and our own practices so we didn't just turn into a system the things that we were doing that actually weren't best practice so we were very challenging right from the beginning on our own assumptions The other thing to keep in mind is that land registry is it might be the beginning and the end of a real estate transaction but there are a lot of different inputs and there's a lot of different stakeholders there's a lot of different systems that I think the are particularly with other parts of the real estate chain the realtors, the banks the lawyers themselves in terms of the other functions they have to do to conduct a land registration transaction so that's the next evolution that we're seeing is where you're actually interfacing on multiple levels and it's part of a hub of coming in and being able to do a real estate transaction between a realtor and a lawyer and a bank all in one place that unfortunately I think we are out of time so lunch is outside thank you all for your attention and join me in giving a round of applause to the panel okay so I think we're set with yours great I think we're ready to start thank you everyone I'm Pallavi Nuka I'm with ISS at Princeton University I'm just going to introduce the next two cases these two cases about Mozambique and Tanzania focus on rural land titling while the big picture or the big problem in these cases is the question of formalizing land rights in previously informal and customary systems these cases also highlight the importance of building people's awareness of their implicit legal rights the importance of mobilizing communities to map and register boundaries and the importance of developing mechanisms for dispute resolution and these cases also really touch on how important it is to clarify individual rights within the broader communal system the first speaker is Emidio Oliveira of the Community Land Initiative in Tanzania Emid... the initiative or ITC has is an externally driven program that helps rural communities register their rights Emidio has been working in the rural development sector for 27 years with Oxfam, DFID and now with ITC our second speaker is Seraphia Mgembe of the Property and Business Formalization Program in Tanzania this organization is known by the Kiswahili acronym created by the presidency in 2003 is working to formalize land rights and economic activity throughout the country Seraphia has been with that organization for 12 years and she leads its work in building capacity to document rural land rights Thank you So with that I'll pass the presentation to Emidio Good afternoon I don't need to use this one I'm gonna present you about our experience in Mozambique and I hope my Portuguese reasoning don't betray me in my translation to English The motivation to start this initiative came from the context of high pressure over land in Mozambique particularly since 2006 with the biofuels boom and has been increasing so far up to now due to urbanization due to mining discovery of oil etc and then also due to the limited capacity of the government to implement the land law and the series of other I think this presentation is not the one it's not sorry for that I can but after that work sorry will you find the other one yes because the other one I presented yesterday but I can I would prefer the other one sorry for that it has been updated but we can do that no problem there is a way of the government to implement the law the cost or high cost regularization costs for communities that imply not only money but also time it's a really high intensive process and a lot of land conflicts we born to complement the efforts of the government to implement the law and we decided to stop on this statement particularly because of the political sensitivity of the topic particularly because our intention is indeed be constructive rather than fighting against the government as most of the organizations do the principal intention is to protect community rights our core business is the limitation of community land is demarcation of rural associations is the promotion of economic development promotion of citizenship basically most and the core of our motivation the our drive is basically promote the citizenship by providing information to communities and ensure that communities have a notion of the value of the land and their natural resources that they have a notion that only by doing partnerships with investors we can eventually improve their conditions but to a community with proper information is better fit to negotiate actually transactions and contribute to conflict reduction we started shyly and I have to say with the contribution of the European donors I have to refer the Swiss the Swiss Sweden, Netherlands Ireland and Denmark the Millennium Challenge Corporation arrived in 2009 and helped us cover the northern region and then we became encouraged to expand to our resources the results we present here are modest but this has an explanation on the limited capacity of the government to implement the law in 2007 for instance while we were commemorating the 10th anniversary of the land law the government made an amendment on the regulation to establish limits of authority to attribute land because at that time until 2007 a governor could give you 50 hectares of land 50,000 hectares there was no control so they established a limit the big problem that this amendment brought was within the government and how the government officials at provincial district level interpreted that amendment which was positive but they mixed the rule and applied it to communities by the constitution a community has no limits community lives in a place so the boundaries of a community are not limited is limited by their own livelihoods while a private sector applicant for land needs to present a project even if you want to build a house you have to show that you want to build a house so this was mixed and the same demands that the private sector application suffers was attributed to communities we needed about three years to clarify this that's why these are modest today we started with a aim of 25 land delimitations per year in 2006 and today we are able to do 300 delimitations our actual target for 2017 is 354 delimitations there is pressure we started this program thinking on is it relevant is there demand of our services and the demand has been growing today we've discovered oil and gas in Yambani province for instance and the two bridges that have been built in Moputu we have demand from the governors bringing inviting us to expand to these two provinces too in our point of view delimitation is more it's not just that physical exercise is much more we call it delimitation it should have another name it should have a name like building citizenship but in fact we have to start from delimiting and delimitation is an attitude of providing information to communities making an assessment of the resources that they have make them understand that they have to go in partnerships we promote community investors' partnerships the result of our process of delimitation does build of identity of a community a community becomes an ID card a community becomes eligible to exert their rights their citizenship rights there are a series of benefits that the law offers like the 20 percent of the revenue of the law of forest and wildlife there is the 15 percent of tourism there is the 2.75 percent in the law of mining which revenue of that communities once delimited once recognized by the authorities have the right to claim okay the government as I said the law our law is beautiful it's good it has all you need to respect people's rights the basis of the law is already there you have to share information with the community you have to establish internal capacity in the community by building natural resources committees this is an obligation of the law you have to respect limits between communities part of the conflicts that exist are not necessarily brought by outsiders not necessarily that sometimes it's within communities that the problem arises but also inter communities between neighboring communities they can be really you can find terrible conflicts and the law already considers the importance of this exercise and then you have the formalization of the rights we come in bringing social preparation to the process and social preparation is an exercise of formalizing the structures within the community but it's also an exercise of creating within the communities the capacity to sort it comes out by itself so it's a bit of that the law do not take an account that we bring in okay there is an exercise of opening a bank account that I can explain later from the delimitation process you have recognition from the provincial authorities you have a zoning a land zoning that we expect to contribute to the district level so this would be a micro dimension of the need to map a district so you get a certificate and a map that shows your boundaries and then you get the recognition of the communities within the community by the administrator then you get these rights published in the national state gazette and from there you are able to open a bank account so a community has an ID card and can open a bank account and can start claiming their rights one of the most important documents that we produce is what we call community agenda it's what we can simplify saying that it's the profile of the community that can be easily transformed on business plan if needed it comes with the history of the community all the potential and a roadmap of a potential path that the community can take if they decide to do it it's something by themselves we don't work alone we need to partner with the key players in the system especially we keep close attention to the government plans and try to produce to build synergies between the government programs and the communities but we are stretching ourselves and trying to focus on special slots of the system where we can produce more benefit and we created together with other organizations we created a consortium that tries to use the legislation of 2008 to expand the benefits that the communities have namely as I said they now access the communities are represented by natural resources committees but the other laws that I mentioned the mining, the tourism etc. are also channels through which they can benefit so we expect from this consortium to expand the rules of benefits that the community formal benefits that the communities have we have entered in a partnership with Gorongos National Park to focus and stretch ourselves to work on the buffer zones of the national parks but also to contribute to harmony between communities and the authorities of the parks try to focus our attention in conservation areas we are here trying to expand also and build better relationship to the academy all these institutions here are part of the governance system of our organization and make our decision making processes sounder it's not changing I'm being betrayed by this let me say some statements from practice from our experience do I go back okay sorry from our experience we expect to convince whoever it's time to listen to us that the limitation first is an important step particularly for those investors with mega projects there are lots of testimonies of business that fail because you get to a place eventually misled by whoever facilitates your access to land and you don't communicate with the communities you don't respect the rights that are already there and those situations are often result in poor poor poor implementation of your business social preparation is key to ensure that people that communities know themselves know their rights that they know that they have rights have limitations and they are the authors I'm getting a bit English is now becoming difficult that they are authors of their own development the development plans are an important instrument for a forward looking instrument that can as I said be transformed easily on a business plan if some people some if somebody or some organization wants to help to establish a value chain for the communities we adopted intervention in clusters especially to improve our capacity and increase the number of communities today what we call one project one intervention can easily contain five to seven communities it reduces costs and make it more feasible there is an attempt to do an inclusive approach to gender diversity we don't know much about it we are trying to find better ways to improve and maximize the impact with regard to gender and diversity and try to build challenging indicators and get out only of the number of women in decision making costs and consider more diversity within a community there are more needs that are diverse there are sections of the community that are not heard if you don't ask if you are not sensitive to it we do inclusive as I said I showed you a big bunch of organizations they are all part of our decision making process so we keep all of those sensitivities involved in the bringing up the weaknesses as each of the organizations or each of the institution in their own specificity expects well we do lots of keeping systematic cost benefit analysis and outcome mapping is one of the most important aspects that we have introduced in our attitude which is while we go forward we keep attention in going backwards and try to see what are the effects of our work what has been happening after we have passed so right now I think we are in 2010 looking for the results of 2010 and there are beautiful examples of interesting results in terms of challenging opportunities the big challenge is institutional capacity of stakeholders hours the private sector service providers the government donors all stakeholders do need some sort of literacy on the topic all stakeholders need to be kept in the same level in order to produce results but one of the big issues is institutional coordination organizations doing creating separate paths not talking to each other and not producing impact what we have been able to do through synergies is in fact producing bringing different programs together and producing I can give you some examples but I think my time is over we would expect that with better coordination better productivity less land conflicts development of course mature response to problems would result I guess that's all for now thank you and I'm sorry Chish thank you for the introduction so that I can go straight to the business my business this afternoon is to share with you the initiative on capacity building to the law government authorities in regard to formalizing rural land in Tanzania and this has been been done by the property and business formulations program which is known in its very acronym is Kura Beta so I will be referring to the word Kura Beta meaning that the property and business formulations program for Tanzania let's have a bit of background how has Kura Beta been introduced being established Kura Beta is a government institution a government initiative which was aiming at empowering the poor empowering the people who are owning land who are operating businesses in the informal sector and how do we empower them we empower them by transforming them from being informal to being formal to being part of the economy which is governed by the rule of the law how was it established what triggered the government to establish the Kura Beta thing the decision to establish Kura Beta was was basically done in September 2003 and this was done after the third phase government president his excellency Benjamin William Kappa the known economist of Peru Fernando de Soto who explained to him about the formalization and what the president decided he wanted that particular knowledge which he received from Fernando de Soto is being imparted to the people of Tanzania and he called a high level meeting of all principal leaders in the country who I explained in two days explaining what is formalization and what are the consequences of running economy which is a huge huge assets which are informal and after he was convinced that the leaders have understood what is formalization then he declared that we are now establishing the Kura Beta thing so that it can run the transformation process of transforming people who are in the informal sector to the formal sector and the effectiveness of this program was in November 2004 and the target was all Tanzanians who were owning land and operating business in the informal sector. Now how was it implemented? How the implementation was conceived as I said the conceiving of the program was by the help of this Fernando de Soto I talked about him and the way it was that it has to be implemented in four phases and phase one was to undertake diagnosis and the diagnosis was being undertaken between November 2004 up to September 2005 and a lot have been seen from it will be discussing them in the next slide and the next phase was reform design and the reform design started in January 2006 up to May 2008 while the third one was implementation phase and implementing the reforms which were proposed during the second phase and this was done between July 2008 to date and we are still implementing and the first one is capital formation and good governance and we see capital formation and good governance started in July 2010 again to date and now you will wonder why you have two phases running concurrently the reason is that the ultimate goal of the program was to make sure that people own assets can use the assets to make more money to make more wealth so that's why it was capital formation so if you say let us complete the implementation phase then after we have completed we come to the capital formation phase it means there will be some people who will not test the fruits of the implementation phase so we say let them test while we move we design as we implement that's why from 2010 we had this thing implemented together now let's see the magnitude of the informality and you can appreciate why this program was established the magnitude of informality in terms of percentage is around 90% of the assets in Tanzania are informal and the value of the assets which are in the informal business and informal land is about 29.3 billion US dollars you can just imagine 9.3 billion US dollars and where is the breakdown of this on urban land it was noted that about 1,447,000 plus were not registered and this was 89% of the entire urban land in the country while the rural land it was about 6,600,000 hectares of land not registered in this 94% of the land now you can imagine in terms of value both urban and rural land the value is 26.4 US dollars billion so you can imagine if you are a sensitive leader if you are a responsible leader you have to sit down and say let us do something on this in terms of business although not the focus of this presentation but it's worth knowing it about 4.5 million businesses 20% of all businesses were informal so again something had to be done about business which are informal what's the reason? why is this situation? is it that the government doesn't know the meaning? is it that the people who are living in the informal sector don't know the value of it but it was discovered due to the diagnosis that because the laws and regulations which are governing formalization both in terms of land and in terms of businesses we are very cumbersome we are not user friendly it took a long time to implement so people said why should we bother if they are cumbersome if they are so bureaucratic why should we bother? we continue transacting our land businesses transacting our business transactions informally so long as life continues so as a result we are two parallel systems we have the system which is FOMO which is having very few people along with informal line which have a lot of people almost all Tanzanians are in this line of informal transactions so the reason have been known and after that said okay something had to be done in the government now approved that you have to go to the next phase that the second phase we have to design reforms which will take care of all the obstacles which have been noted during the diagnosis phase now because of time you can go to the website and see exactly how the process of reform design was done but for here I will just share with you the reform design framework in the reform design framework has five major areas in one area are the reforms which are related to relasted property formalization because it is cumbersome now we prepare reforms which are making the process friendly and not cumbersome and more economic and we have another block that reforms for allowing economic use of relasted assets as I said that we make sure that people use the assets to make money now we created a specific reforms that will make the ability of people to use these assets to make more money to make more growth of the economy the other two blocks is for business and one is for business formalization and another one is for business growth because we usually say many people are just doing business that is for hand to mouth we don't want hand to mouth business business which are growing so we have to have specific reforms that allow business to grow and the final block the final area is the reforms which are close cutting they are neither business they are no no land issues but they are very important if you want the economy to move forward now we have seen the magnitude of the problem and what do we do now and this kura beta thing I have got very few people the country is very big what do we do so that is when the program management unit chose to use this initiative which I am sharing with you the capacity building approach to the law government authorities and the reason was to make the law government authorities own the process make the law government authorities and have committed commitment to the process be able to finance and own the process so that everything is being done within the local government authority areas and all the three areas as I said the rural land, the urban land and the businesses we undertook capacity building approach to implement it but for today my focus will be capacity building approach for rural land formalization how do we do it the capacity building itself is training but the training was theoretical training and practical training in the theoretical training was very important because we wanted to train trainers who will also train other people to undertake the process and we had three levels in doing this one level was at district council level so the district council level was like they are trainers they are training in the world level the village level so after we were through the participatory land use management team at the district council level went down to the word executive level where we trained the word extension officers in the areas of agriculture community development, education forest and health all those together with the team from the district they went down to the village so in the village level we had village functionaries trained the chairman, the village executive officer the village land use planning team the village education team all these people are in the land law so after we were convinced that this team are trained enough now we went together to the field and now comes the area of practical training and in the practical training the district council was given the mandate to select the villages where the practical training can be implemented so it is two or three villages in the activity which have been undertaken in the practical training is preparing land use plans, undertaking adjudication, undertaking the survey and finally of course giving the certificate of customer right of work for the district RROs again when we were undertaking the practical training we also prepared district formalization plan because the intention is to leave the capacity to the district so that when we are through they continue so we say okay let's prepare the plan together so we left the plan imagine we were doing in two or three villages but the district council had more than one hundred villages so we need to have a plan so that they can use it either to generate funds or to I mean to access funds from donors or from their own source when they have funds they can continue with implementing what was to be implemented. Along with the plan we also constructed village land registries in some areas because existing availability of village land registries is a legal requirement if you formalize a rural land you must have a register at the village level and register at the district level and we had no problem with the district level because at least the situation was you know appealing but if you go to the village the situation was very bad so in areas where we found no registries we had to construct in areas where we found there were some registries but in a very pathetic situation we had to undertake very serious and major innovation so that we have the register in place and again while doing this we have provided survey gears and these gears include the GPS for each district council two computers, one printer cameras, eliminating machines land registry for districts, land registry for villages all these things were given to the district council so that after they are through with these two villages they can just continue to another village. Again the objective is to make sure that all these things after Ankurabita has gone they can continue and come up with a formalization agenda implemented. Now in the course of building capacity the results was that we had surveyed 110,000 firms in 280 villages and over 96,000 certificates of customer occupants were prepared and issued to the owners and the training was done in 53 district councils while also because we wanted people to use land economically we also trained the owners of formalized land so that they can generate capital. But one thing which we can be proud of out of the areas which we visited and implemented this thing about 24 district council managed to start doing it on themselves so they managed to go through 226 villages and surveyed about 17.7 firms. Now you will wonder that Ankurabita did for 208 villages with 110,000 but the district councils went to 226 villages but only 17,000 is because Ankurabita was doing systematic education while the district councils were doing sport education so you can see the reason why. Again as a result of building capacity approach we made to reduce land conflict with farmers and farmers farmers and cattle keepers village and village we also reduced the bureaucrats we simplified the process of doing it. Instead of being cumbersome like we saw during the diagnosis it became simple user friendly, economical and so at the end of the day the local ownership which we wanted was achieved and hence the sustainability of the agenda could be implemented at local government of thought level. As a result of this many people, many farmers who were trained managed to access loans to the tune of about 202 million US dollars and not only that farmers started to join pension funds for their benefits during their old age. Now let's look at the challenges we have a lot of challenges but I'll share with you all these four challenges one of it is the lack of adequate financial resources to undertake formalization but another serious one is lack of finance to undertake study. Nkurabita started implementing this thing in 2008 it's now close to 10 years but if you ask me how much we have reduced the informality I cannot tell you because the agenda is being implemented by a lot of people they are USID doing it, you have box firm doing it you have the ministries doing it so a lot of people are doing it. Now if you ask me as a person who is given this mandate I cannot tell you until I do some studies. So one of the things which if I can get any assistance from here that we look some money we look some money which we want to undertake this study so that I can stand firm and say this is the way how we have reduced the informality in the country and we need about $45,000 to undertake this study so that we have it from the region level statistics. And conclusively I can say this four points that the program is purposely placed under the president's office because of its importance and not only that the program is also in the ruling party manifesto so it is very important and because the ultimate objective is to see Tanzanians running the economy themselves and our fifth government is focusing on industrialization so we want people through their lens they own through their businesses they are operating they are able now to participate in industrializing the country and now we are in the process of doing this study and once again I call upon those who can be with me to get the money for doing this particular study. Thank you very much for listening and the website where I can get all the information and here is my email you can come back to me and my mobile telephone number is also here. Thank you very much for listening. Thank you Serafia. So now I would like to open the floor to questions from the audience. Yes? Another economist question they are all very nasty. I understand that it takes a long time to see outcomes but you have even an anecdotal sense of whether a lot of people who have title or communities who have received title have been able to get credit from banks for investments or land improvements and so on. Actually there was another question also I am just curious if particularly in the Mozambique case have you observed any correlation at all between property rights and control of wildlife crime poaching? I am sorry John Wall from Integra. Yeah question on the case in Tanzania. I am Daniel. We are working in Ghana with a few of the banks to help access lending to those doing land documentation. So I was curious to see that you said one of the challenges was that many banks do not lend who is currently doing the lending that you were talking about. These rural banks who are already lending on these temporary titles or the occupancy certificates and then what is the challenge for the other banks of why they are not lending? Okay so maybe we will let the speakers answer those questions. First was about the outcomes and then it is related to the lending and then the other one was about property rights and poaching. Go ahead. Well thank you. Mozambique land belongs to the state. So it is impossible to use it as collateral. That would be the straight answer to that. There is a question of there is a lot of discussion on privatization that is an attempt to do an amendment in the law that will allow transference of rights but you cannot use it as collateral. With regards poaching and then the crime the consciousness of communities has demonstrated that in some cases they have control they do police and protect their resources. In a recent visit to Cabo Delgado for instance there was a group of people who were arrested by the community first because they monitor the use, the illegal use of their resources. So consciousness is key in these situations. Maybe also to go back to the economist point. For Tanzania the ultimate goal of establishing this particular program is very capital formation that we do all things but at the end of the day we want these people to participate in the economy which is governed by the role of the law. Now that's why we undertake passalling giving them titles on and we can use them to get loan. But I can join this with the question asked by my brother there but there are some banks which do not accept this from the experience and I agree there are some banks which do not accept the CCRO because they said it's customer right, it's not a right it's customer right but the challenge is why some banks is what contains in the law. Because in the law they said in case of default in case of default bankers are not allowed to sell the properties which someone has used it as collateral. Yes it's conflicting that you accepted that you want people to make capital out of it and if someone defaults you cannot sell its property. So bankers were refraining they said no it does not make any sense but since Kurobita has started this particular program they kept on informing the bankers that we need to sit down together and see what can we do so that the citizens can take advantage of building the economy at the same time they are not defaulting and in some cases we go and make a trip a tight arrangement. We say here is the bank the financial institution here is in Kurobita here is someone who want to to get a loan from the bank and Kurobita becomes like a father or mother to this person pushing no how much have we paid so far how much have we done so far did you use the loan according to the requirement so we have proved that this has made the bankers now say okay we are confident that the people who are receiving this are now they can pay back the loans and in fact these banks not only the community banks because we have the community banks we have other big banks we have an extra microfinance bank it's a very big bank and now we have established a Kacharo development bank so that it goes straight to the farmers giving these particular loans but yet there are still some people some banks which do not accept it because of this point in the law other question I think David David Mason the question and then Susanna thanks two questions really in Tanzania are there chiefs and if so how do they how are they involved in land administration how have they been incorporated in this titling process and secondly again in Tanzania are there communal areas where there may be overlapping rights and if so how have you dealt with that in this titling process if it's communal areas it's communal piece of land maybe at certain part of the year one group might be using that land in another part of the year another group might be using that land how does that get incorporated into the titling process Susanna yes I have a question about I guess transparency and avoiding any capture processes at the village level at the local level for example is it the village adjudication committees in Tanzania is that what they're called yes how are those committees selected is what attempts are made to make sure that all sectors of the village like minorities and women are represented in those committees to avoid that type of any capture or land grabbing whatever you want to call it can we take one more question from the gentleman over here thank you thank you both for the presentation I'm Paul Masick with the World Cocoa Foundation and I was wondering if you could answer two questions one is a very practical question regarding the costs of registering land and documenting it how were those costs shared and to what extent did the farmers actively participate in that cost sharing and perhaps at what level happy to be referred to more detailed documentation if that's too granular for this discussion and then secondly I'd also be interested in knowing to what extent you have evidence that farmers who've actually registered their land are changing their practices with regard to that land are they actually changing anything or is it just you know taking what was a traditional customary right now translating it into sort of more codified registered right okay starting from the last if there are changes after titling and the perspective of our program our project we work with communities so it's collective rights and even when it is titling it is for associations what I can share for most positive experiences is that the title for an association or a cooperative is very very important to get support either technical or financial so the best example I have is a community an association that we helped to register 58 actors by a river but they had no means to invest a government program dedicated actually funded by the World Bank dedicated to support irrigation provided them with equipment to irrigate their land a program that promotes commercial agriculture provided a technical assistance to produce sugar cane the harmonization of these three the title, the water and the sugar cane technique upgraded their capacity and the sugar company nearby just buys their products so the chain is closed this is one of the most positive examples yeah I can also add something on this last point you talked about whether registration assist in changing behavior yeah we can say yes and in fact in terms of Tanzania it has changed people's mindset so much because they linked the entire process with the capital formation so since everyone is saying okay I'm registering my land because I get collateral to get loan and if I get loan I will do so and so businesses so from there people started to think about capital formation all the time so it has really changed their mindset so much not only registration with regards to the cost sharing you ask if there is cost sharing or how do they share this cost I can say that in areas where I'm from undertake this capacity building so the government is like investing at the beginning is giving capital is giving a seed for the population to start taking place and thereafter they will thereafter they I mean the village council decides how much someone has to contribute because this money is supposed to be assisting the land register at the village level so it is the village council decide how much this people has to contribute but if you are doing the formalization using private firms then that is another thing because they come up with a business oriented decisions and another point was whether we have chiefdom in the country we don't have everything which is related to land issues they are not about chiefs it's about the law so village land number 5 of 1999 is governing all transactions they get in land formalization in the country with the representation at the village level the first register is the village chairman a village executive officer so the representation is again according to the law because the law says the education officer should be this and this the committee should involve this we have 4 women in the committee so all these things are being done according to the law okay so I am now getting the sign to stop so we are going to wrap up this session for now thank you everyone thank you to Medio and Seraphia thank you there is a bit more in the back we will slide into the next session and then there is a break after this so sitting next to me are Leon and Maya who are the two scribes who actually wrote these incredible cases and if you didn't get a chance to read them hopefully you will read them and share them after this and I requested that we do this session partially because I wanted to develop an appreciation for how much work went into these cases but also to take advantage of all the knowledge in their head so to jump in if you could both just quickly introduce yourselves and give us a quick sense of your background alright sure I will start so I have been working at ISS for 3 years on land and property rights for the last year but before that on a wide variety of issues everything from preventing deforestation to judicial reform to public work and prior to that I worked in Kenya for the international rescue committee and I studied comparative politics at Princeton great so I'm Leon Shriver I'm actually based in Cape Town South Africa technology can do amazing things these days despite being based there I've worked with ISS for about 2 years now prior to joining this project also about a year ago most of my work focused on the Ebola response in West Africa specifically Liberia so we did a series of cases on that fascinating story I also worked previously on how to make power sharing cabinets actually work together in post-conflict settings so that's very far from land administration but you know that's one of the great things about this job is that it really constantly challenges you to learn new things before joining ISS I did a Ph.D. in political science at the Three University of Berlin and prior to that I studied at Stellenbosch University in South Africa or in political science impressive so you both have rich backgrounds before getting into writing these cases and I'm curious from those different perspectives when you got into land and property and you produced these documents what struck you about this area so for me having spent two years working on a whole range of different issues through the same process of writing case studies what stood out when I started getting into the land administration side of things was how many components I was about to have to deal with especially writing cases managing land registries effectively so things like restructuring an institution or improving performance management or developing a digital system are things that we could write an entire case study about just one of them and so finding ways to cover all that ground and for me to wrap my head around it and then to make it accessible to readers was certainly an interesting and challenging process and I'm very grateful to all of the people who I interviewed who helped make that possible for me yeah so what's interesting is that practically Maya and I ended up focusing on slightly different elements of this bigger story so she was working a lot on setting up the registries and the agencies and I ended up working more on the practical titling out in the field type cases and yet I share a lot of the same sentiments I was really struck by how many issues are involved it's obviously focused and defined and that's the focus of the case but it really cuts across so many different elements and one of them is just how political all of this is I think one of the key things to keep in mind is that land is often the most valuable resource in many of these especially poorer countries it's the one thing that the state can leverage for different purposes good or nefarious and therefore the political stakes are often very high in any sort of technical solution or proposal needs to sort of take that political reality into account when coming up with solutions so I think that's something that stands out can you just talk a little bit about the process so maybe just pick one case and give a sense of how many interviews, how much research and how much internal review to get these so the process generally kicks off with sort of a background paper on what the series will focus on and then that involves sort of refining it down to how many cases which ones we want to focus on I know for this case Maya and Jennifer actually did a lot of that more than I did but I can certainly speak about once we've sort of zoomed in on a specific case or topic generally the preparation begins with what we call a pre-trip briefing so this is a meeting where we get together all of the staff from ISS basically and we'd really dig into the background of this issue so if we take the Mozambican case you know what is in that beautiful law that the country has adopted why are there certain challenges in why it's not perhaps being implemented as the government would like and then sort of teasing out what should be the key questions then obviously you go to the country you interview, try to get to about 25 people in two weeks so it's quite a intense process and then I would say it's really quite organic in the actual discussions you have you obviously have the issues you want to touch on but there's definitely a human touch in that whole process when you speak with someone because people are different and I think something to keep in mind in this type of work is that you're going around the world cultures are different people are different, societies are different and finding your feet in that whole process during interviews I think is one of the great learning experiences and challenges of the job and then obviously the writing comes after those two weeks in the field that the whole team would have some input on that I think Leon's giving you a pretty comprehensive view of our process so if I think about that 25 interviews, all these topics background papers and we just have these nice beautifully edited 20 page cases what's on the cutting room floor if you had the time what are the issues that you would really relish the chance to jump into and push forward so one thing that I think has come through a lot in the discussions today is how fundamental property rights are to a developing economy but the fact that it's not going to automatically transform your economy there's a lot of additional steps going forward in terms of accessing credit or capacity building so that people can use those rights as well as maintaining effective registers so that it stays up to date and people continue to be in the formal system after a titling project and so we've seen some of those efforts that the speakers presented but I think that's an issue that it would have been fascinating to dive into where are there examples of sort of linkages or what makes it difficult to run a program with that comprehensive of a view that's one that I think is maybe someone can pick up the ball from here another specific one that was touched on in the discussion especially with Australia and Canada is the nature of indigenous land rights within a western system I found that discussion in Australia fascinating and would have loved to get into that much more than I was able to I actually think that that's one of the sort of shadows hanging over a lot of this is how do you actually accommodate, integrate customary law with what's on the statute books and I know there is research about this out there so it's not necessarily a novel idea but in writing these cases and trying to document current experiences you find that it's still something that in many places goes unanswered it's a very political, very difficult thing for many governments to find this social legitimacy of traditional customary systems of land administration and of basically broader administration in a local community and how you marry that with the statutory and with what are very often very progressive laws which make it tough to integrate systems where it's patriarchal sort of chieftainship so I think these are issues that we need to confront head on and another one that links with that that came up is especially when it comes to communal titling efforts there is this and I think in Mozambique it's very well, it's nicely illustrated I think it does play a very big role when a community gets this ID card that says this is the community you take up your citizenship there is something really powerful to that but I think we should also keep in mind this idea of ethnicity and to what extent are we asking people to self-define on some kind of ethnic identity saying we are the community this is our land and you end up defining yourself perhaps in contradiction to neighboring communities so it's just something that sort of came up that I think is really interesting and I'm not sure how much of that is currently being looked at interesting okay I want to make sure the audience gets a chance to ask questions so I won't dig into those right now but at future property rights our focus is tech and property rights and the different ways we can use tech I mean tech is not a fancy idea but how can we use tech to collapse the time and the cost to remove those barriers so we can spend more time on these other interesting media issues because there are so many things that touch it so just any reflections on technology and land rights things you saw that gave you hope things you saw in country A where you're like oh maybe they should try that in country B always curious to get people's perspective sure so having worked on the set of cases where sort of computerizing systems play a major role I think one of the lessons that all three of those speakers kind of drew out today was the importance of really preparing to do that preparing your people reviewing the business processes and not just slapping a new computer system onto something that still needs improvement as a manual process and I think in all three of those cases people learned that that was fundamental and that there were major sort of efficiency gains in just doing those process reviews for instance with survey checking in Jamaica the way it was described to me it was it used to go from point A point B back to point A point C back to point A and so on and just making that process a linear one without introducing any technology drastically cut the time and then you can put computerization on top of that and make further gains but had you computerized this spokes on a real process you'd still be contending with that now and so I think while technology can do a lot it doesn't stand on its own right I would agree with that so on the positive side I think in the Tanzanian case we had this mass pilot project where basically people were using mobile phones, smart phones to do some of the surveying physically walking the boundaries local people trained actually to do this and that's one area where I do think that you really can save a lot of first of all time and potentially also money because something that came up across the cases is the lack of capacity when it comes to surveyors you often have to wait for someone to be subconded to come in from the private sector it's very expensive, you have to pay for per diems out in the field you have to put them up in hotels so to borrow a phrase from the Australian case I think this is ready for disruption and obviously you'd have to think through very carefully the standards and how you monitor and implement this but that's one area where I do think there's a lot to be gained on the other side though I agree with Maya that there are many areas where we should perhaps wonder first like are there other reforms we need to make before we go into the technology that could potentially be cheaper, easier and yield even greater results and another issue that did come up is if you're going to build if you're going to build a digital register, if you're going to go that route then you have to think through long term after that register up and running who has the license for maintaining that software, what if something goes wrong because frankly in many of these countries you're going to need help from the private sector they're going to need to be in a partnership to get these systems up and running but then building the capacity within the government and making sure that there are no licensing issues that prohibit them from fixing an issue or updating that system as technology evolves I think it's something to keep in mind but if you sit down and plan this I think you really have to be careful about thinking very long term you kind of anticipated by next question if we think about the Tanzania, Mozambique South Africa cases figuring out rights, delineating them saying this person has this right to this space and then you think about the registry case is much bigger private enterprise driven off fees how do you bridge that how do you to make it simple what you learned about in Jamaica in Australia and Canada applicable to the African context do you think it's imaginable you could take the software as a service from Australia not that I'm doing a sales pitch for Jody and the private enterprise and do a PPP in Tanzania or Kenya or if that's not appropriate today maybe it is what are the things they should be thinking about now in the way they design can scale or digitize well one thing that I think has come out as Leon and I have sort of worked together on these cases is that the two are very fundamentally intertwined you can't really think about registry and tenure separately when we've looked at countries that have made a push to formalize tenure rights in order for that to really be meaningful in the long term you need an effective registry that people can access easily that's not unaffordable or too burdensome so that those rights will stay updated that's been a challenge in a number of contexts where there's inheritance and people will split up their land or people won't go back to the registry to formalize a sale and so making registries easily accessible and technology can be a part of that especially in the longer term means that those tenure rights will be usable and at the same time these sort of market driven registries that we found the Jamaica, Western Australia and Ontario cases really rely on the existence of a fairly active formal real estate market agencies are supporting themselves through transaction fees so there need to be transactions and there needs to be a level of economic activity that supports the ability to pay those fees and so I think integrating the formalization of tenure rights with broader economic development and infrastructure in the business environment then leads you to a point where the market can support the kind of registries in Jamaica and Canada I think that's very well put basically all I would add or maybe just emphasize again is that the technology or the partnership itself is should in no way be seen as something that can substitute for sort of the grant work of building the institution so if you're if you want to have registry officers out in sort of main cities in rural areas of Mozambique or Tanzania you need to actually have the human capacity in those offices to manage whatever kind of system you decide to put in place to manage the partnership that comes with the private sector with the PPP basically so all I would really add is to say that let's not sacrifice emphasis on building institutions and taking that long view of the training and the capacity building sort of as a price to pay for what may seem like easy fixes because I don't think they're up there right so I'm asking one more question to the audience one of the things that New America we like to do is get very smart people in as fellows maybe you too would be a fellow and have them write things that as Ann Marie likes to say are readable by anybody books you would want to read so if you came in you passed all those cool books which were all written by fellows and the challenge with land is that it's so nuanced and as Peter Bradley said this morning there's so many complexities see exactly Peter gets that a lot so there's so many nuances that it's hard to write books and engage people and get people to really get excited about property rights until they lived it until they've heard some of the stories we heard today I mean you're both very good professional writers so if you were to write a book about this how would you what would the subject be how would you get people to realize that even though this does take decades not years and there are no quick fixes this is terribly important and it affects people's lives and it can change the course of a country and this is something we need to invest in and think about so I think something that really unique about the cases that ISS writes is this idea of putting the reformer sort of in the driver's seat so making the story about real people and I think that's a technique or an approach that you could extrapolate I don't know how far you could take it if you're going to write a really substantial book that gets into some of the technical issues but making it human and showing how these seemingly technical issues affect people in real life I think is one of the key things to get people interested because anyone can understand sorting out inheritance after a parent has passed away and if it's complete sort of confusion about what this inheritance looks like who owns what where is the land I think that's something we could all very easily relate to and that's potentially one part of what such a book could be like so trying to humanize these stories is one key part of it and I think the interview based approach personally I'm a very practical person I don't like getting into too much theory you need something concrete to draw people in and when I'm doing interviews one of the things that hear someone say it and just go I know I'm putting that in the case is when people describe in very vivid terms the problem so we can say that land rights are fundamental to a functioning economy but when I heard Elgin say we have people lined up in tents outside the office it's just a lot more real and when you we focus on solutions or progress I think that too is something that maybe the space needs a little more of because I think we've all read enough way too depressing things recently Fair enough I would just add that going out and speaking to people and getting these stories is a great way to see just how real and human the impact is of writing these cases is that we get these big concepts and these difficult topics and then you go out and you see wow this is what it really means and I'm spontaneously reminded of all things the Arab Spring I mean in Tunisia the way this all began was someone who essentially had insecure property rights he ended up setting himself a light because he couldn't run his business he couldn't get a foot in the door and that was all fundamentally because of insecure property rights and a story like that as a hook to get someone into this topic I think is important wow that's a great answer it reminds me a commercial break before we take questions there's a website called thisisplay.org that does these stories they have reporters dedicated to a lot of these stories I'm sure this audience is familiar with it checking out so are there any questions for these two diligent scribes that can keep going do we have a mic? Thanks Maya and Leon and it's really I agree with you Mike that it's really interesting to hear the back story of how these case studies were developed and kind of everything that went into them my question is about dissemination so how do we get these amazing examples into the hands of the right people who can actually use them to make policy decisions or make business decisions or make political decisions what have you and I don't know if it's fair to ask you this question but I'm just going to go ahead and ask it anyway because I've been wondering this all day who do you think are the right people who should be reading these case studies and aren't yet and how do you think we can get them into those people's hands so I don't want to completely step on our agenda for day two but one of the things that the cases other cases ISS has developed in the past have been used for is in teaching and universities and essentially training people who are going to be making these policy decisions and giving them some examples to think about as they start their careers and so that's one opportunity and of course this event is wonderful and this is a great audience of people who really are active in this space and can give us feedback and this forms the basis of a dialogue but I don't have perfect answers I think we're also working on developing different types of content based on this because these days you have to have so many different options to meet different people's needs and how they want to consume information so everybody check out the desks basic live videos yeah I mean it is a really difficult issue, a difficult question but I would again agree and say it is a real privilege to have people in the room together here that we spoke to in their place of work looking at what is their passion in all these different countries and to bring them together and to see the interaction between these people is already I think something that will add value to everyone and second of all I mean there's a lot of people here today so maybe the interest isn't as low as we sometimes imagine it's more a question I think as Julia asked of getting it into the right channel I think there's opportunities on social media I think getting the stories out in a way that makes it clear that it's not going to be you know standard technical things although that's obviously very important I think sort of a strategy around that more generally for stories like this I think is something that that we can pursue but yeah I don't think there are easy answers we're all competing with you know huge amount of media out there today it's a question that goes well beyond I think the specific forum Question about is there a book that you know could be you know very popular and easily read one that comes to mind is The Mystery of Capital and none of the sort of but I and many other people are very critical of that book because it provides the silver bullet but it oversimplifies everything and so I want to congratulate you guys you authors on taking the subject that's sort of out of your comfort zone and making it palatable and easily consumable but not falling into the trap the disorder trap somehow you manage to navigate your way through that and I think congratulations to the whole team here because I think it's very effective you got the simplicity of reading but you caught the complexity of the whole area so well done Thank you Hi I'm Scott Justo from Worcester Polytechnic Institute I want to echo the comment that was just made I came to the case studies expecting to see something far less nuanced and sophisticated around the deep complexities and so I really appreciated that I happen to have worked a lot in Monwell BC Park so I was pleased to be returned to that story and one of the things that the cases bring forward to me is the difference between urban and rural areas and in rural areas the land often is the fundamental basis for livelihood in urban areas because it sometimes is but it's much more complex people need a place to live and they need a place to conduct business but they and they want security of tenure in some fashion but I wonder if you have thoughts about other bases for capital accumulation you know we have this you know long historical basis around land and if we focus overly much on land are we sort of looking past some other forms of capital accumulation that we ought to be encouraging and that maybe in fact there might be some synergies between the two you know I think that's an excellent point and one that is maybe the next step for this because as Grenville very clearly pointed out and I agree completely titling isn't a silver bullet when you just give someone a land title and say now you have the rights now you can you know form capital and invest you know that there are a lot of intermediate steps before you actually see the benefit and so I think the example that we heard about the sugar cane and some of the other sort of more comprehensive approaches you know I would like to see more work on that or maybe do more work on that and how you can you know develop a framework that is cohesive and doesn't have too many moving parts so that you can integrate not just land and then investment into the land but especially in an urban setting security of tenure and other opportunities but I don't have a clear cut answer for you unfortunately yeah I just think we talk a lot about dead capital but we should probably also mention human capital I think that's a huge part of this in so many dimensions if we look at the institutions and actually managing a system it's about people I mean at the end of the day that's what it comes down to and having that relationship with communities and I think crucially whether it's technology or setting up a registry getting local people to buy in and to actually become part of the system I think is a hugely important step and that obviously applies beyond I think property rights or registration but it's something that does sometimes get overlooked I mean you can easily sit in the office and have all these grand schemes and plans but there could just be one small cultural or social nuance that you're unaware of and then your whole registry may collapse so I mean one more BC Park I think is a good example of getting into the community trying as much as possible to learn from them about why is it that you know especially in South Africa there is a formal registry that's working the question is why are there so many people who are outside of it and I think tapping into human capital to human experiences I think is the way that we could sort of broaden perhaps our understanding of what the problem is even if you want to go that far and I think it's a good time to mention you know just today was live screen but we'll also be taking these talks and they'll be published up on the Princeton site and on the New Street site so that if you were to use these cases and you wanted somebody to hear Katherine Ewing talk about the park and show those before and after pictures think of all the great presentations we said just those slides I took this picture then three years later there's a playground or here's a crash this is working this is making a difference so those materials will be up and a question for you back to the cutting room floor are there other materials you would put up or that could be put up I'm sure so much if I were to want to teach a class I want to give students background reading or preliminary reading before introducing to the cases I mean it's hard to pull them off the top of my head having spent a lot of time with it but I think there's a lot of reports and laws and analysis that are not in the traditional academic literature just yet I think it'll be interesting to see where people will go with it but you know you spend several weeks reading everything you can get your hands on for before you go into the field for these cases and so a curriculum would ideally include elements of that as well and I also want to add that we do transcribe and publish selected interviews as well on the ISS website when there's someone in a key position who's just said one insightful thing after the next not everything always makes it into the cases and so in those instances there's a recording and a transcript where you hear someone telling their own story and so I think that's a nice compliment in a lot of instances to the cases that look at the big picture of an institution or a program and then you have the story of that through one person's eyes or their component of it I guess one piece of material that would be useful in a teaching context or maybe more broadly or certainly something that I found difficult in every case is trying to get at what exactly is the theoretical system so what exactly does Mozambique's land law say what is the ideal scenario that it is actually painting and obviously if you go read the laws it's written as a law it's not an engaging or accessible thing so it's just something off the top of my mind that if you could at least understand what is the theoretical ideal that we want it could help when you go towards implementation so that everyone's sort of on the same page so something basic that says okay so in this country's system the registered piece of land what if I die how does inheritance work who's eligible for this sort of to inherit or can it be sold what does it mean when the president owns the land but I have a title you know hashing out these sort of legal issues in a way that can be understandable I think is something that could be helpful alright time for one more question is anybody got one Todd and then Seraphine yeah my name is Todd Miller I'm with Chrome away we're a blockchain software provider but I don't want to talk about the technology when I pick up something that Mike said about sort of contemplating systems that these sort of leading edge systems that we saw in Australia and Canada versus the developing world and I guess I had a question about it's kind of about blockchain but about the notion of consensus and it seems that in these informal systems that are they already I think Mike was maybe intimating this that are they maybe incompatible with a computer system that's X or O or one or zero and is there a way that an informal system which we heard you know fabulous presentations this morning about that we need to rethink about how our technology systems and things that are emerging now around consensus I don't know around our official intelligence but how we may be able to apply those to an informal system where it's really about consensus rather than the law of the land because we know in these countries that it's not as well defined and I don't know if you had any thought about were you hearing about in some of the case studies around well there is consensus about ownership but it's a it's a moving target that we have to be able to capture in that way that was kind of a comment in the question so I would say that potentially technology could actually be so the question is whether you want to document you know that which is based on a social consensus and in a lot of these countries there is a movement towards at least sort of documenting what already exists even if it's not creating a new right and that's somewhere where I think technology can be more agile than a based system right because if you write down today this is who owns what and everyone agrees that could change very quickly and I mean I'm not technology expert but you could potentially have something that's way more flexible and could actually adapt to changing realities more but I would say that and this is actually something that comes from the Ebola cases where technology was also something that was being introduced to try to address it that just to give you an example there they used an application in Liberia at some point which of course this is in the context of an emergency but this was the only sort of Ebola tracing application that was out there at the time but it was designed in Uganda so sort of importing the technology into this different context led to very basic problems like the name of the location where I'm at you start typing it and a place in Uganda pops up you know and that completely messes up any kind of data system that you want to build so again I would say I don't think that it has to only be yes or no I think there are a lot of smart people who can work with different options but the key is to really get into how these social networks really work and operate and how that consensus is generated on the ground as you're developing whatever product it is Yeah and I'll just add not an IP expert but having you know talked to the people who've developed some of these cutting edge systems I'm quite confident that they could put something together and you can envision a system that has you know multiple people with different types of rights to the same piece of land that are all entered into a system you know you can envision layers on a map where this is community land this is grazing land this is you know a parcel where someone's farming and they may overlap and I think to Leon's point you can even you know down the road see communities if they're the ones entrusted with allocating these rights updating things themselves but I would just add that you know access to the registry and making sure that there is social buy-in and that it's easy for people to go and update things in the register whether it's you know digital or paper based is I think maybe one of the fundamental steps that we're seeing sort of being worked on in many of the developing world cases I think social preparation is a concept that we can really take to heart in different contexts and giving them a round of applause okay we have 15 minute break and then we have a star studded expert panel and then we have drinks so hang in there thank you hello I like the bat cleanup hi if we could have everyone take a seat and we'll jump into our last panel of the day okay in the home stretch 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 we'll look forward to continuing the discussion afterwards so thank you again my name is Yulia Panfill 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 from working from the global level to the regional level to the national level and across academia the private sector and the non-profit sector so directly to my right is Chris Jocknik who is the president and CEO of Landesa which is a non-profit 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 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 partnerships 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 4 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 right 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 going to throw out a few of the questions that I thought were really interesting that some of the speakers dealt with and you know 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 a 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 stairs 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 way 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 you know 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 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 will open it up if each of you could take maybe 5 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 context in which you work and how perhaps 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 Thank you My 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 and 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 office was known as the deep which meant that you didn't want to 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 Kyrgyz time well I also done some work is another sort of surprise because of overcoming this huge change in 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 you know there's no mechanism to register a communal property which constitutes something like you know 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 go in all the different ways that have 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 in there self declare what their rights are and they are trying to build this from a sort of 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 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 want to 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 there's 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 let me just start first by thanking Jennifer Pauli, Peter and the media 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 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, 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 of much better context for them to understand the process and the applicability of reform that they could themselves undertake to modernise 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 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 going to come from this where as 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 Julia 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 undercutting or sorry 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 going to fall over in terms of where this applies in my context you know 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 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 so for me it's really a process that we need to innovate great well I also want to start with a thank you I'm honored to be on this panel with such expertise I don't consider myself nearly the 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 getting 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 the 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 this 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 when I came 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 Landusa does and a few of the things in particular one is the focus on bottom up solutions which is really heartening and encouraging at Landusa 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 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 land rights crowd in the years and the surveys and 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 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 going to ensure lasting solutions solutions that are really fair solutions where people really feel like they are have a voice in the longer term development issues that come out as their land 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 land 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 going to 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 land 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 land 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 land that is the natural anchor to lots of different services and so we have seen that as the land 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 land 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 you know both from the advocacy side and the tech and policy side how do you make that pitch to government anyone can jump in well I'm happy to take a quick look back at it so Landesa got its start actually by making the pitch in Vietnam during the Vietnam war that providing small holder 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 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 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 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 much about this work I think is finding people within governments that can become champions for whatever reasons it appeals for them I think it's probably required a 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 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 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 commodities that's a starting point where you have the CoCo 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 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 titling projects and so 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 individual 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 businesses 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 Terrasigura 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 for the Ontario model for example be transferrable to some of the context in which you have worked or why not I think partnerships are critical definitely the capacity is not there within government in an age where we're trying to downfire government and the one group which I think wasn't meant in there which for me is ultimately going to really underpin a lot of work in developing countries and civil society groups a lot of organisations 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 methodology and testing new technology and processes for them as well Sri Kedastra we did some support work for Landesa in 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 so 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 are the 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 up of Noel's comments in India was that the working with communities which many peoples here 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 but we should look for them where the 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 simply a shortcut to or an alternative to stronger governance 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 the participation that we've been talking about and who does it who masters that process because it's complicated it's time-consuming, we respect about all those things but I just think that the four P's are the thing 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 in formal settlements and I think that 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 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 what 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 with many more case studies that need to be brought to light I'm working on some of that right now and actually my 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 talk in 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 this journey and governments shouldn't be afraid of that but it's really been executive leadership that agencies as well through these case studies that shone through was owning it and dragging people on along on this journey and letting them jump off the ship if they need to so from an interest of government agencies perspective I think that's what they would want to see how do they resource and develop the strategies around that and there would be others that you would want to focus on for land rights security I think the challenge 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 the person who's on the register could have died 15 years ago the kids are on the land 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 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 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, you know our 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 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 all 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 so my 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 a stated 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 they become 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 one question 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 alone that's outsourcing 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 and 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 one last question from Amidio and then we'll have the panel answer both questions 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 4,000 communities in five years and 5,000,000 individual titles well our experience in land delimitation puts a lot of weight on social preparation information to communities and we became more worried with the fact that 5,000,000 in the Mozambican context can become more target in terms of numbers rather than doing titling with quality we raised external funds to our program and proposed to the government to enter in a partnership so it's 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 and a standard of land delimitation and demarcation 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 a few years showed that they were reporting accurately because people were having their garbage taken away they were seeing streets being cleaned they were seeing services 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 land holder 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 we're going to break 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 get to the whole idea of titling being panacea 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 because 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 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 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 wrong 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 tax authorities also offer an opportunity to consolidate government services and data where they have rich data sets that land agencies could use in place of 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 no 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 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 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 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 I've just been totally scooped so I am not going to offer the questions that we can use to structure tomorrow I think you've just gotten an excellent set and they mimicked the ones I've been dutifully writing all afternoon we will give you a written version of those tomorrow though so I just wanted to weigh in a little bit on the broader politics question which I think is an important one and we have thought about a bit and we'll pick up in the cross cutting documents and then I want to get back to that assignment that everybody had before thanking you all on the politics side this is from a political scientist perspective an especially challenging issue because finding a or getting building support for this crosses more than one political term so if you're a president you want to do things that you're going to complete by the end of your term as everybody does obviously but if you care about public opinion then you want to do something you're going to accomplish during a term and inevitably these things are very complex and they take a long time so you're not going to get a lot of high level presidential and prime ministerial support out of sort of conventional political calculus so I think we need to think about other ways of generating support I want to pick up the comment that Chris made at the very end because it was really the comment I was going to make these things change a lot as demographics change and I think we're perhaps at that sweet spot right now where you have an opportunity to make a difference that could help a lot of people's lives wait too much longer and the pressure on the land is going to be so high that the conflict levels will be much higher and maybe heads of state get some benefits or some public support for Wayne in then but by that point it's very hard to make a big difference so I think we're at that point right now where we can take advantage of people's perception that there are land grabs going on we want to protect ourselves against this there may be rising levels of conflict as a result of any number of things like climate change so this is a moment where one can act and it may be possible to persuade some heads of state or some politicians that this is a time you want to move I have a strong advocate of trying to generate local support too and I think advertising successes at the local level can build local support and that one community observes that another has succeeded I think from this and so they want to learn from that and emulate that so you can build from the bottom as well and I like that approach I do think to do that you need to be able to tell stories well and not the kinds of stories we're necessarily telling these complex cases but simpler stories that make you into local radio and local newspapers and I was talking to somebody earlier today about how one might write some of those but one can go into this a lot more and we won't do that right now that assignment that I gave you this morning tomorrow the goal is to actually develop some materials that would accompany cases so if you were in the shoes of having to teach a staff in a staff college about these kinds of issues and you were going to use one of these cases what would you want to know more about students inevitably more staff members inevitably ask questions that the case doesn't address and you've just seen a whole lot of now so what questions would you want to prepare that instructor to be able to answer what kinds of core concepts would you want to pull out of the cases and talk about in a more general sense and I think this panel has helped with that but what other questions would you add to that list so if you have a piece of paper before you go to the reception you could scribble one of these questions down or I thought you've got a name tag here which does have a blank back and even though we probably need these name tags tomorrow jot your question down there at least you'll remember it tomorrow the other way you could fulfill the obligations of this assignment would be to give us a country or a case within a country that you think is one might call an outlier that is if most places struggle mightily and don't really succeed with a lot of this we do find a few that do and or that achieve partial successes we just talked about some in Colombia a few other areas that might be in that category that may deserve to be case studies if you have a case to suggest that's the alternative to the question assignment so that's the ticket to the reception this evening and doesn't take long to do I know I've been hearing all these questions come out during the conversation today so I just like to thank those of you who are here today we've learned enormously from you and I have been writing furiously trying to get some of these things down so we can move on them in the cross cutting document but I also want to thank New America and I owe me to your network for all of the support it's given now tomorrow we hope that most of you will return or a lot of you will return and help us with this larger tax of trying to figure out how you would amplify these build materials around them so that we can get them out and into the hands of people who make a difference directly so that people are right at the cold face whether those are people in government people in NGOs or a rising generation students in public policy programs and just to say one thing about that question which arose earlier today there is more going on out there than I think people believe I use this example often but just right now a lot of the cases that are translated into Burmese and are being used to train civil service in Myanmar but that's true in a lot of other parts of the world they're being used in English or Spanish or whatever and so you do get out through these networks and through the training colleges and through assemblies of civil servants who come together from around the globe around a particular issue I think it's a little bit easier to reach people than we think so this is your chance to make sure that future cases build these questions in or that our cutting documents build us in or that teaching notes surrounding these will build in questions that you think are especially important so I'm going to turn it over to Mike you can give us marching instructions I've been scooped and scooped and scooped so I'm going to keep this really brief the first is just a reminder of what Anne Marie said this morning is all about networks and at New America we like to think of ourselves as a hub so just an invitation this land community for me is so fascinating because it's people who are smart and tenacious because if you're not tenacious you're going to go find something easier to work on and if you're not smart you're going to get confused but if you're smart and tenacious and you're hard working you're probably in this room struggling with this really fundamental issue and asking really hard questions which are welcome because they push us forward so just a reminder so that's one this land network that we're all apart of is a really exceptional place and if you haven't met everybody in the room try to in the invitation in the reception which is two if you're joining us tomorrow if you're not please come to this reception afterwards have a drink try to meet a few people see what they're doing tell them what you thought of their work keep positive and then just to end thank you all for being here thanks for your contribution for listening for appreciating the speakers for giving them space and their attention I think we've all learned something today and hopefully well not hopefully certainly good things will come out of today so thank you so much to the speakers to Princeton everybody else I've forgotten to thank to my own team and just before you walk out the door there's a lady in the back corner with fabulous pants on all the work today was behind the scenes was really driven by her so thank you to her and to everybody please we'll see you for drinks thanks for being here totally different yes let me in this room yep