 It's really great to be here to share our experiences and to hear and share with others who facing very similar challenges I think to what we are. The way you pronounce the company is pujli sani, 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, when 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 right holders reluctant to invest their labor 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 recorder systems which enhance local control and which are backed by legal reforms that provide legally secure rights. 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 who've been living on this land 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 dispossession 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 a naval 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 1834, most farm labor was based either on slavery or on restrictions, vagrancy with restrictions contained in the various Koi codes and vagrancy ordinances. Many of the Koi San settled on mission stations which became established across South Africa and they did this to resist the pressure of 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 when 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 a formula apartheid in 1994 we introduced a land reform program which was based in the property clause in the Constitution and it has three legs of the land reform of 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 had never had any access to land can apply and get access to land for a variety of needs and the third is tenure 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 tenure 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 under utilized. Importantly the majority of this land is held by communal entities land property entities either trusts 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 1490 of these entities were compliant with the law the rest were not. 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 Ibn Isa's history. The Ibn Isa community descended primarily from the Khoi people the indigenous people of South Africa and when the whites arrived in that area in the early 1800s they found the community there. 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 that the first time the Ibn Isa community got access and rights formal rights to land was in 1837 but that land access was under the management of the church the Rainish 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 what 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 in the late right at the end of the 19th century. For Ibn Isa this focus 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 Ibn Isa 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 to 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 rights holders remains today. So there's still 153 plot holders with 1.6 hectares of land and eight grazing camps which are subdivided into sub camps for rotational grazing purposes. The community in the meantime has grown to 2500 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 Ibn Isa 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 Ibn Isa there are two land reform processes. One is restitution for the land that they were dispossessed of. The 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 act and that really is focused on all these mixed race or colored reserves of which there are 23 in South Africa and it requires the community to decide who will be 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 Ibn Isa decided to do. They established what's called a communal property association. So there are two focuses of our interventions who one is on the ground developing local tenure arrangements at Ibn Isa. The second focus is at a national level a broader policy intervention to develop a national record system which recognizes communal land rights within a land rights continuum. So there were three processes that we then undertook at Ibn Isa. The first was to manage a land rights inquiry process to clarify who has what rights to the different portions of land. The second was to facilitate the design a participatory design of a new tenure of new tenure arrangements at Ibn Isa which would be under community control. And the third was to design an appropriate local land rights record system on the land. The land rights inquiry involved five processes. The first was the enumeration of rights 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 in 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 and in adjudicating did the person have a certificate? Who's actually using the land now? So who has the 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 is 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 their agreed place? Yes and we took the coordinates and then got them to sign an agreement that that is where it was. 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 firstly we researched and provided technical detail about each of the different land parcels on the land. We then conducted a community process which involved people dividing up into two 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 Putlissane then wrote that up into 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'd been involved in a process and they 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, communal 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 deed. That if they wanted to sell or transfer that land it had to go to a member of the communal property association. 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 right was agreed to. And then finally it was around management. How should this land be managed given its community land? So in that process the CPA appoints a manager but there is an association of users that works with the manager. With regard to the recorder system 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 tenure 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 working very closely with the GLTN. The objective is that this recorder and management system of rights will be locally controlled by the CPA so that there's community control. This requires a recorder 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 interventions to find remedies against elite capture. South African property law does not easily accommodate communal land rights and the absence of such a law is one of the reasons that the rights of people in such circumstances are so vulnerable. Pujlisane 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 registered rights but which cascades up through the municipality into the national deeds office. The intervention is located within a national titling debate where individual title is 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 where over 30 million people live in contexts where their rights fall outside of the formal property system. So our aim has been to avoid capture of land by elites in communities and to achieve the land security, land tenure security objective which is espoused in our constitution and the key lessons that we've drawn from this experience of firstly within with land rights inquiries we must really spend time to understand the nature of the rights 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 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 record 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 elites to appropriate resources beneficial to the poor. Finally the record systems must link into national formal record systems otherwise the nature of these local rights will be undermined and relegated to secondary status second class status. So these have been our experiences at Ibeniza. I'm really putting it out there we're in the process of establishing these the days are still early and but really looking forward to sharing and hearing some more on the the processes involved in other areas. Thank you.