 So this project has been going on since 2014, and this webinar is pretty much the final step. The project is called Passway to Accountability in Global Land Rush, lessons from West Africa. This is an initiative that took place in Cameroon, Ghana and Senegal to help rural communities harness the law to have greater control over decisions that affect them. That's a process commonly called legal empowerment. The first part of the project was developing frameworks for understanding accountability and evaluating opportunities and barriers in the national framework of each country that also include participatory legal assessments. You can see the outcome of that work in the bibliography which is on the last slide and on the whichever slide after the event. The second part was about implementing intervention to improve the accountability of the public authorities responsible for managing land and improving investments in each country, which each country having different contexts and panels will tell us more. Finally, the project teams recently met at the right shop in Cameroon to do the lessons learned and write them up. A report presents the result of that work summarizing insights from firsthand experiences and there is a link to that report again on the slides. The project involves three countries, Senegal, Ghana and Cameroon. We have three panelists with us today. Mamadou Ford from Innovation, Development, and Africa who will be discussing the piloting of locally negotiated land charts with ground rules on how local governments should perform their responsibilities from a very participation report to their constituents. Community partners were involved in the facilitated dialogue and Mamadou will tell you more about this. In Ghana, Mark Kakrava Ampe from the Long Resources Management Centre will discuss supporting consultative communities representative diverse local groups to promote more inclusive decision making. The project also produced learning materials to help the communities perform their role. Finally, Samuel Edgifo from the Centre for Environmental Development will hopefully be discussing if we manage to sort out the connection, selecting and trading new low graduates called junior lawyers, seconding them to local organizations and helping them to assist rural people in legal matters. So we've prepared three questions and each has a list which we'll answer there starting with Mamadou, Mark and Samuel. So answering briefly, Mamadou, if you could tell us what was the problem and what you did about it in your part of the initiative in Senegal. Okay, thank you very much Cherry and welcome to all the participants to be part of this webinar. Thanks also to IIED to give us opportunity to share our experience on this process and I will try to give you a quick overview of what we are doing in Senegal during the last two years regarding this project. So regarding the first question, so as you all know in Senegal, land is considered has a very important resources and this consideration is a consequence of the fundamental place that agriculture occupies in the Senegalese economy. So the national law, called it Lua-Sigla Domain National, is a main legal reference as far as land is contained in Senegal. The law was voted in a context market in the rural area by the lethargy of the traditional land system which only benefits a minority of individuals, especially the big land owner, called it Laman in Senegal. The national land domain covers more than 19 land in Senegal and in principle important land is under it. When we talk about Lua-Sigla Domain National, they are classified into four areas, urban area, local area, peony area and classified area. And this process, this project, aim to have interest in the local area. With the local land law, management of land falls within the competence of the state and rural council on the basis of equity and profitability. Indeed with decentralization since 1972, state established the local governance has an important organ for land allocation and revocation. But in accordance with law, the decisions of rural countries are enforceable only after being approved by administration authority. As for the condition of land allocation, there are two main points. The first one is the possibility to use land by inhabitant localities and the second one is land is allocated to individuals who could provide proof that you can exploit all this. Unfortunately, implementation of land law is far from being perfect more than 50 years after its promulgation. In addition, during the last 10 years, the surge of large-scale land acquisition interests have been increasing. Unfortunately, rather than improving land exploitation, decision-making around allocation creates several conflicts. This has precipitated a rise of human-right violation and environment degradation. Most important land allocation are frequently done without knowledge or consent of community and they are enabled to hold governance to account for the negative impact they suffer. In these issues, we noted a lack of mechanism to ensure transparency, accountability and equity in the decision-making process and this situation undermines governance of land. And it is in this context that the project was implemented in order to develop mechanism to strengthen accountability and empower affected communities to challenge implemented investment process. And for Senegal, we developed a local land charter that has cherry reminders in two areas, Dodel and Medina Dahab, and we work with local paralegal and I will have the opportunity to come back on this. Thank you. Thank you very much, Mamadou. We will also put you into the minutes. So we will now move to Mark. Mark, again, same question to you. What's your problem? What did you do about it? Thank you, Therian. Good morning to all participants. And also let me thank IED for this opportunity to share our experiences on this project. First of all, the common problem of lack of an acquisition for agriculture investments is a problem that is phrased in Ghana. And so this project sought to understand what the fallouts are and also to provide some measures that would ensure that these fallouts are adequately addressed. Now, through our engagement with three communities where large-scale land acquisitions have taken place and investments, some investments are already on the ground, we identified that the lack of transparency and inclusion of all stakeholders in the land dealings and that resulted in situations where Indians lose their lands and get no compensation at all, where benefits are distributed but only for the benefits of the rich and powerful members of the community and where investors act with infinity valuing the rights of individuals. We also realized that these occurrences resulted from lack of capacity on the part of the communities to be able to, first of all, appreciate the processes that they have to go through when granting land for large-scale investments. Issues such as assessment of the communities' land needs currently and also in the future to ensure that where lands are being given out, the land needs of communities are taken care of. We also realized that the communities also lack the capacity to be able to access what is the fair value of the land that they are given out and so therefore to be able to negotiate for compensation or payment that reflects the size and value of the land that they are given out. They also lack the capacity to appreciate who and who might be involved because their interests would be affected when the lands are given out. And there was also lack of understanding of leading processes prescribed by these big laws and standards that must be ensured when leases are being prepared. And so working with the communities, we first of all looked at establishing what we call the Community Land Management Committees which are committees involving a large range of stakeholders in the community who previously wouldn't have been part of land decision-taking processes at all. We also developed guidelines for granting land needs that ensure that communities are able to assess the land needs, engage with investors appropriately to ensure that negotiations result in fair terms and conditions for all. And then we also used these tools that are the guidelines for granting lands and the checklist for ensuring that... Right, we seem to have lost Mark. Do you want to deal with the second question which is the steps you followed and what did you achieve? So what were the steps we followed that we first of all tried to carry out extensive decision-making and awareness creation within the project community, taxing on the ongoing large land acquisition, what benefits they tend to bring and also the problems that aid care is not taken could bring to communities and through such processes we are able to get the communities to come along. We appreciated the issues we were raising with them and through that process we worked with the communities to establish the land management committees. Now these land management committees are not intended to replace the existing role of the traditional authorities because in Ghana, about each percent of the lands are vested in traditional authorities and these authorities have various structures. But at the community level you don't have representation of the various groups and people who have interest in the lands. When decisions are being taken and so the project starts to expand the range of people who would have to have their voices heard when it comes to decision-taking on land and also we ensure that membership included migrant farmers, women groups, youth and even religious bodies where the communities themselves thought that it was prudent to include such interest groups. Now having established the committees we also tried to work on the gaps in terms of capacity to engage in land dealings which led to the development of what we call the guidelines for accountable land governance in the community and the guidelines include first of all what processes do we have to follow through when investors have approached us to grant them land for agricultural investment and what are the things that we need to look out for when we are negotiating the terms and if we have to document the transaction what are the key features of the lease that is prescribed by law. Having developed these tools for capacity building we also carried out the needs adjustments of the various land management committee because of the dynamics the land tenure dynamics are different in the various the three different project sites and so we needed to understand the peculiar capacity gaps where in the various communities and based on that we developed a training package and carried out training to build the capacity to be able to use the tools when engaging with investors. So these are the processes that we followed through and let me say that we were successful in doing that and based on the results that we saw in terms of the ability of the communities to sometimes renegotiate some of the terms that they previously have agreed with the investor and in some cases the community were able to engage an investor who obtained land with India community through the government and ordinarily wouldn't have held themselves accountable in any way to the community but they were able to sit down with the investor to negotiate for the investor to agree to provide some support to the community on other basis and these are some of the things that we were able to achieve under the project. Thank you Mark. I'm online now so hopefully someone can address the first two questions and I'm sorry the process is not as successful. Can you hear us? Can you hear us? Good afternoon everybody. I would like to start by also thank you for being here and very quickly going through the first question what was the problem? We started in Cameroon working with junior lawyers and the main reason was that we realized that there was an increase in investments on land based investment land and resource based investment we had already a lot of logging operations going in Cameroon for many years now at least 20 years and we started experiencing a lot of demand for mining activities and for infrastructure building and all these effects land and natural resources but if you put logging, mining infrastructure, protected area all together the major consequence that you have is increased land scarcity a lot of restrictions for communities in access to land and natural resources and possible conflict between communities and the state between communities and investors so this was the context that we had in 2012 approximately one fourth of the country, one fifth of the country 20% of the country was allocated as mining concessions and this is huge because it was done only in four to five years in addition to that access to justice was an issue in court the the judges are not trained to address issues related to investment foreign investment or issues related to community rights, they are not used to that this is not part of the curriculum in the law school and in the training schools for the judges, the magistrates generally the policies in the country are very much in favor of investments they are all in favor of trying to attract investors almost at all cost and at the local level people who are fighting for their rights are not always aware of the content of the law, they don't know all the rights that they have that are recognized and protected by the law and they don't know how to use the law so if you put all this together and you add the fact that we have a bunch of students going out of the law school they are very jobless they have some legal knowledge very good legal background sometimes but there is not enough job for them in the capital city at the same time there are a lot of people at the local level who are desperately looking for legal knowledge seeking legal support so our opinion was that there is a possibility of bringing these two segments of the society together bringing the students the student graduated in law to bring them to the local level where they could provide some support but also learn and gain experience that will be useful in the future for their own personal career this was our question how to bring local knowledge legal knowledge at the local level how to make sure that those who go at the local level with legal background have an incentive for doing so how to make sure that we have a process that will be mutually beneficial for both the communities and the local NGOs and the lawyer so this was our question what we did was to try to start using these junior lawyers and first bringing we had a selection process it was quite a long selection process approximately 250 original applications with 10 finally selected at the end of a process through which we had interviews training and further selection by the trainers and by the trainees themselves we had 10 at the end there were training things that they don't often learn at the law school this is everything having to do with rural law land law, indigenous people's law, issues related to investment and things like that and also some few things that they used to learn at school but we did it we did the training with a different perspective this is environmental law land law for example this type of things at the end of the day they were posted in communities in local NGOs working with CED we already knew the local NGOs we also already knew the issues on which they were working we knew the communities that were affected who were fighting for their rights here and there so they were sent transferred to those NGOs and the purpose was that they provide support and at the same time they increased their knowledge on local issues they received support from more senior senior lawyer from the team in CED but also from other non-legal experts from the team in CED providing support at the local level to the junior lawyer, to the local NGO and to the communities what we also did was to make sure that they have a rotation so you don't stick on the same location forever you start there and then you can move and from time to time all the junior lawyers will come together to share experiences to share knowledge so that they can learn from each other on all the various experiences that they have been having here and there I don't know if I have to go to the second question or if I can stop here if you would mind very very quickly because over the time just in a couple of minutes we have time afterwards to expand on as more detail questions just very quickly very quickly what we did the second question is what steps we follow and I already said part of it but what we achieved I will very quickly call three achievements to me the first achievement is with the lawyers themselves I think that they gain a lot of confidence by knowing the difference between what they learn at school and what they learn through this process they also gain a lot of political knowledge that has nothing to do with what they learn at school they have a totally different social perspective they are much more open to issues around injustices and things like that they want to do something to fix the world they want to solve the problems and I think this is a major achievement because this is something that you can learn at school you can always receive skills but you will not receive the attitude that is needed to get involved into this type of work at school so what I saw in some of them is the right attitude now at least for the type of work that we do and they are ready to spend more time, invest their energy into trying to solve the problems that they have seen that they are learning about the second achievement is that in some places and some specific issues the junior lawyer was really important in trying to address some issues and to work towards finding a solution so they were able to be efficient in addressing an issue in using the law as a tool to protect community rights and I think this is a good achievement and the third type of achievement is has much more to do with the type of questions that came from the lawyers we are in type of iterative process the process, the content but we also rely a lot on feedback from the lawyers to know what we have to improve on and if we have a next batch of junior lawyers there are some few things that we will be doing differently on the grounds of what the junior lawyers have brought in terms of feedback to us thank you Mamadou will now ask the answer the second question okay I miss your last sentence so I will try to sum up the two questions and to share some lessons and also to try to share with you also some achievement during the process so the first thing that I would like to share is in the both two sides we have already developed the land charter and with the process a local platform of negotiation and discussion was set up for all the local community and now the community are the willingness to take part of all the decision making regarding land issues and mainly local governments now take more attention to the decision when they take decision on land because they know that for each decision they have to be they have to be account during an annual meeting which bring all the community to ask question about how they manage their land and for this issue I think it is a relevant achievement during this process so established land charter is very complex process with necessity to be very patient and to take into account the diversity of stakeholder it is not a single method or process for develop the adoption it is not a straight way to achieve this this result and it is very sensitized the process could be generally quite long and take many months sometimes many years they demand a lot of methodological slowness for example involvement of representative of all group of stakeholders it is really critical to ensure that involvement of all stakeholders avoid to take decision which would be incompatible with the legal system during all the process paralegals who facilitated the process for training for give opportunity to all the stakeholders to take part of the process and to conduct consultation process it could be very difficult sometime if we underestimate power of relationship and diversity of interest because in general you could have some question about representative issues who is actually legitimate have a negotiation for the local community do some stakeholders really defend the interest of those they present to represent so we have several questions like that that bring us to know that we have to take account all the points and to start and the most important thing is to start to improve our understanding and ability to act the right question and take effective action on land matter in all the country so quickly that is what I would like to share about so the second question and the third question so in terms of achievement and also in terms of learning during the process thank you right in terms of lessons that we learned and which also will include the tips that we can offer to others who would be engaging in similar processes in the future what we learned is that discussions centering on land are very sensitive issues and usually communities are very skeptical about the intentions of projects some may take it to be that you want to understand what they have so that government could touch them or introduce some forms of law and other legislation that could be provided and therefore are unwilling to open up and so the lesson here is that if you continuously engage in a transparent manner you are able to build tracks and therefore get communities to engage fully in the project activities the second lesson that we also learned is that when communities are given the right direction and guidelines and help to appreciate land issues in terms of land mis-assessment land value assessment and appreciation and what the law and policies regarding land within their environment say then they are able to work things out in a more inclusive manner and that helps to promote accountability. They are also able therefore to demand their rights. For example in one of the project communities that we work the community was able to get the investor to come out with a community and sign up an agreement with the people which makes the investor contribute $25,000 annually to the community for the life of their investment which is about 50 years and because they also were giving training to understand what benefits sharing arrangements must be so that all interest groups are very well taken care of. They have also agreed to use part of the $25,000 support to establish a scholarship scheme that is supposed to benefit a wide range of people for education purposes but in another community they were also able to engage the investor to renegotiate the terms of the agreement and get the investor to shift the boundary about one kilometer away from the community because they now realize that the land that they initially granted did not take into consideration the future expansion of the settlement. The other lesson that we have also learned is that when communities own the processes of the project they get much very well committed to that and they are therefore able to stand for their rights when they realize the benefits that the project would bring to them and even in the phase of the powerful they are able to stand for their rights and I'll give an example where a member of parliament who initially did not participate in the project and when the land management committee was formed he perceived it to be an arrangement to undermine his political authority sought to dissolve the committee the whole community stood up and insisted that the committee must remain and realizing that he was unable to defeat them he now selected his own representative to be on the committee so that the committee would have a better community and that we think that community ownership of projects is very key for project success Thank you very much Mark and if Samar would like to answer the third question if you would like to answer the third question the lessons learned I would really like to go through five lessons the first lesson is that it's really important to provide a good supervision to the junior lawyers they have good legal skills often but they are not very familiar with the context and with the issues and to avoid mistakes that they could make it's really important to provide a good supervision both on legal and technical issues non-legal issues that we really have to carefully select the battles that we want to fight there are some issues on which they could be useful but they will not see they are not likely to see the end of their effort by the end of the project or there are other issues which will really be I think too difficult for them so we don't want to get them involved into battles that are too high for them the risk is that they can get discourage at some stage and the third lesson is very much related to that their engagement is for a short term it's like two years and they will stay in a different location for six months only so in six months time even if the issue is not very big they are not likely to see to have final success they are not likely to see the end of the process so we have to carefully define steps according to the time frame that they are spending on the project in a specific location so that by the end of their term in that place they could have achieved something they can go out with something positive even if it's not yet the end of the problem in the area they can see the step that they have achieved and they could be proud of that the fourth lesson is that we have to always insist on learning learning is key here because we also keep in mind that the purpose is to share legal knowledge the purpose is to use the law to protect community rights so at the local level they should share their knowledge they should spend some time making sure that people have access to the laws and regulations that they have answers to some of their legal questions before the lawyers go out and people mean staff of the local NGOs but also community members we should insist on learning by the junior lawyers and part of this learning will come from their interaction with actors at the local level but also with their supervisors from CED and finally between the junior lawyers themselves when they meet, part of the reasons why they meet is to share experience to learn from each other and the last point is to keep in mind that one of the reasons why the junior lawyers spend time doing this is also because they expect to learn, they expect to have after they have completed their their term in the project they expect to have better skills that they can sell into brackets and get a better job so we have to provide exposure to the junior lawyer an exposure could be in terms of participation in meetings, events seminars where people can see what type of skills they have but also know that they exist exposure could mean contributing in publications exposure could mean sitting next to the communities in discussions so that other actors can see them and see that they have good skills and there could be potential workers for their organisations. Thank you Out of time so I'm very, very quickly to vision the fact that as usual there will be a blog after which of points I will discuss and I will give you the slides and the slides have a link to all these publications we will mention if you are the one that Louisa just mentioned now and also I will send a survey to all participants who are going to complete just to ask if you can fit back on if you could complete the survey but thank you to all the panellists and all the participants