 My name is Yulia Penfield. I'm the director of the Future of Land and Housing Program at New America, and it is my pleasure to welcome you to today's webinar on innovative approaches to secure women's land rights held in partnership with USAID as part of USAID's integrated natural resource management activity. The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development includes important goals related to ending poverty and promoting gender equality. We know that securing and promoting women's land rights is key to reaching these goals and to promoting women's empowerment and security globally. Yet we know that social, cultural, institutional, and even legal barriers prevent us from helping women document and defend their land. With seven years left in the 2030 Agenda, much remains to be done to promote women's equal land ownership. One strategy to close this implementation gap is to leverage participatory approaches and cost effective digital technologies to expand land documentation for women. Over the past eight years, USAID has partnered with civil society, traditional authorities, and local governments to create innovative approaches that deliver land documentation to women in customary land areas. This work is known as mapping approaches to secure tenure or masks. And so to celebrate and recognize the 67th session of the Commission on the Status of Women, USAID and New America are thrilled to be convening this conversation to explore gender-related outcomes and lessons learned from the agency's land documentation work in Malawi, Mozambique, Tanzania, and Zambia. We'll open today's discussion with some opening remarks from Jamila Bijio, USAID's senior coordinator for gender equality and women's empowerment, followed by a short video from USAID Zambia's mission director, Peter Wiebler, on what Zambia is doing to promote and secure women's land rights. After that, we will move to a moderated discussion followed by audience Q&A. And with that, it is my pleasure to welcome Jamila Bijio. Prior to joining USAID as a senior coordinator for gender equality and women's empowerment, Jamila served as a senior fellow on women and foreign policy at the Council on Foreign Relations and as the director for human rights and gender on the White House National Security Council. Jamila, it is our pleasure to welcome you over to you. Thank you so much. It's such a pleasure to be with you all as we celebrate progress on such a critical issue. As you heard, my name's Jamila Bijio. I'm USAID's senior coordinator for gender equality and women's empowerment and I'm so pleased to be here today to open this session on innovative approaches for women's land rights as we celebrate the 67th session of the Commission on the Status of Women. Creating and delivering innovations for women's land rights is a topic of special interest for USAID. We all know that women around the world continue to face widespread legal and social discrimination when it comes to accessing, using, and controlling land. We know that still today in 2023, 40% of the world's economies limit women's property rights. Discriminatory laws are one part of the problem, limiting women's formal rights to land and natural resources. But even when women do have land rights, discriminatory social norms often push women into less desirable marginal lands to support themselves and feed their families. These barriers have far-reaching implications, as land is one of the most important economic assets for many women, especially rural women, who are a focus of this year's Commission on the Status of Women. Improving women's legal and practical access to land is critically important to promote food security, to address climate change and biodiversity conservation, and to enable inclusive economic growth. That's why it's an area of focus for the US government. In January, at the launch of the US government's new global strategy on women's economic security, Administrator Power said a New Year's resolution that I hope we all can adopt, ending the economic oppression of women. She did it recognizing that we can't tackle the world's most pressing challenges without women. We wanna tackle the mounting food crisis that is devastating communities around the world. We need the contributions of women farmers and women in agribusiness. We wanna reverse the first increase in the number of people living in extreme poverty in two decades. We need the contributions of unemployed and underemployed women. Helping more women access, use, and control land is one ingredient in unlocking women's economic contributions. With more secure land and property rights, we know that women pursue new entrepreneurial activities. They leverage their land to farm and build new green businesses. This opens up pathways for them to participate in the economy, which strengthens livelihoods for their families and communities and improves their future opportunities. That's why it's one of our strategic objectives for USA's 2023 gender equality and women's empowerment policy, which we will be releasing shortly. We're seeing progress, which is important. We've found that by leveraging innovative digital technologies and participatory methods that we can scale the impact of our investments to increase women's land rights and access and use of land, we can reach more women. These are women like Jubeta Mariano Mousufu. Jubeta is 35 years old and the mother of two children. She lives near the coast in Mozambique. Until recently, Jubeta did not have access to her own land. Instead to feed her family, she used to go out at night and plant and harvest food crops on land that a local company owns. Hundreds of other women were in the same situation using the company land to feed their families and support themselves. For all of these women, this was risky. They might have lost the plot and crops at any moment if the company chose to kick them off. And it posed an enormous time burden on each woman as they sought this piecemeal solution to growing the food that they needed. USA was able to partner with the local company, Grupo Madal, to leverage digital technology and help address this problem. So what we did was we used the mapping approaches to secure tenure. And Madal, together with USA's support, identified parcels on company land for 1,300 people, 85% of whom are women. So with these parcels mapped out, Madal provided these 1,300 women and men with long-term land use rights, with extension services, and with seeds and saplings to grow commercial crops as well as food crops. Madal also agreed to purchase the commercial crops from these newly recognized in growers, creating, at the stroke of a pen, new economic security, a new income stream, and improved resilience for these rural women and their families. As you'll hear, this work has reached tens of thousands of women in Mozambique. In Zambia, we've worked closely with traditional leaders like Chief Dinesse Muezwa, from whom you'll hear today, to use digital technologies to secure land use rights of local women and men, helping to make sure that 52% of landholders in our project areas are women. In Malawi, we've partnered with the government to use fit for purpose technologies and gender responsive methods to quickly and efficiently map and certify land claims. Mr. Masita Mbano from the Land Reform Implementation Unit will talk about these experiences. And in Tanzania, USAID started with a small project to test the use of mobile technologies community driven data collection and engagement to secure rights, and then built on that work. We've delivered over 70,000 certificates of customary rights of occupancy to community members, 49% of whom have been women. The World Bank is now scaling this work of cross Tanzania in rural and urban areas, multiplying the impact of the earlier USAID investments in gender responsive land registration. Leveraging these technologies and these participatory approaches, we've been able to do the hard work to support more secure land rights for women, to shift discriminatory gender norms, and in that process to improve women's confidence and status within their households and communities. Over the past five years, USAID has helped over 260,000 women to document their land rights, using these digital technologies and participatory approaches we've talked about. We are committed to continuing and scaling this work, including through USAID's Gender Equity and Equality Action Fund, a fund committed to advancing women's economic security that USAID manages, and that's implemented by USAID and the State Department. In fact, in February of this year, we selected two new investments for the Gender Equity and Equality Action Fund with a total of $9.3 million subject to the availability of funds to support women's land rights. These include an Angola. We will be supporting a $5 million investment to secure land rights, to improve literacy, and to increase agriculture production for women in the rural workforce, participating in the private agricultural market. And in Burundi, we will support a $4.3 million investment to strengthen women's access and rights to land while strengthening their economic empowerment. As USAID continues to strengthen the land rights of women around the world, we're pleased to share the experiences we've had with you all. We look forward to learning from all those in the audience from this dialogue so we can continue to strengthen our approaches to address systemic barriers to women's empowerment and to enable many more women to benefit from enhanced economic security and well-being. Thank you again for the opportunity to be with you today, to open today's session. We're so looking forward to an informative and inspiring conversation together. Thank you. Thank you, Jamila, for those opening remarks. I will now turn it over to a short video from Zambia's mission director, Peter Wiebler, on what Zambia has been doing to promote women's land rights. My name is Peter Wiebler. I'm the USAID mission director here in Zambia. I'm very happy to be here virtually at the UN Commission on the Status of Women. So here in Zambia, according to the National Rural Agricultural Liability Survey, 81% of farmers have no documentation of the long-term rights to their land. So how can farmers be expected to invest in their land if their long-term rights are not secure? This vulnerability is particularly compounded for women. So although the Zambian government aspires in its policy that 50% of all land should be owned by women, and legislation provides for equal inheritance rights, this is far from practice. In the event of divorce, death of a spouse or a choice not to marry, women are often at the whim of others, and can be pushed off the land that they occupy. So USAID is working in partnership with the Zambian government to change all that. Through our USAID integrated land and resource governance program, we've supported low-cost, gender-inclusive land documentation, documenting the rights of over 160,000 people or approximately 45% of which are women. To create a model that's increasingly being adopted by chiefs across the country. We are also focusing on traditional leaders since they deeply influence what is socially acceptable and the cultural norms that allow women to exercise their rights. USAID supported the first cohort of chiefs to participate in the two-year diploma in traditional leadership, which focused on inclusive development and has worked with CSOs or civil society to carry out gender norms dialogues with many community leaders across Zambia. When women feel secure in their land rights, they're more inclined to farm, build, and invest in their land. When they invest in their land, they invest in their future and the future of Zambia. And with that, let's turn to today's panel. So we will have approximately 45 minutes of panel discussion, following which we will open it up for about 15 minutes of audience Q&A. Please drop your questions into the Slido box that you should see at the bottom of your interface and we will address them towards the end of the session. I will start by very briefly introducing our six panelists and then we'll jump in. First, I am so pleased to welcome Carol Boudreau, Senior Land and Resource Governance Advisor with USAID Washington. As part of her role, Carol supports missions, bureaus and offices to design, develop, and implement activities to secure land rights and create policies that reflect the key role that land plays in promoting development objectives. Next, I would like to welcome Mr. Macedo Bono, Acting Team Leader within the Land Reform Implementation Unit of Malawi's Ministry of Lands. Mr. Bono is a chartered and registered land surveyor who has served in the Department of Survey of the Ministry of Lands for over a decade. Next, it is my pleasure to welcome her Royal Highness, Chief Denis Mouazwa of the Itetsi-Tetsi District in the Southern province of Zambia. Chief Denis Mouazwa is a conservationist and a gender champion who has been instrumental in highlighting the impacts of climate change and advocating for the rights of women. She's a member of the House of Chiefs in Zambia where she has been instrumental in creating awareness among fellow traditional leaders about gender equality and addressing issues such as early marriage as well as access to land for women and girls. And finally, to round out the panel, we have three members of the Integrated Land and Resource Governance Activity Team, Ms. Gavilette Mazenbe, Country Coordinator for the ILRG Program in Malawi, which aims to improve women's economic empowerment by promoting women's meaningful participation in customary land registration and land and natural resource governance across the country. Ms. Patricia Malasha, the Gender and Social Inclusion Advisor for the ILRG Program in Zambia. As part of her role, Ms. Malasha provides technical leadership on gender integration in institutional and community land and resource governance, including in forestry and the wildlife sector. And finally, Dr. Taiz Bessa, Gender Advisor for the ILRG Program globally. As part of her role, Dr. Bessa leads the strategy and activities related to gender equality and women's empowerment across eight countries. So welcome to our wonderful panel. I'll start with a, apologies. Yes. I'll start with a question to her Royal Highness. Your Royal Highness, we will start with a question for you. You're a traditional leader and a champion in Zambia and internationally on women's land rights and gender equality. Could you speak about the importance of women's land rights in your work? Thank you. Good morning and good afternoon. I'm Chieftain S. Muerswa-1. I say Chieftain S. Muerswa-1 because I'm the first Chieftain in the Muerswa Chieftain since inception in 1750. My ascending to the throne has encouraged women in leadership roles and in fighting all the vices. So my role there is to encourage women because a long time ago, there were no Chieftainesses in my Chieftain. I'm the tropes on the throne and the first one. Now in my Chieftain, we access land through head persons because in Muerswa Chieftain, there are 70 head persons and we have six zones headed by senior head persons. So these are the ones who give land. For a long time, we have lived in a patriarchal society. So to change the mindsets of the communities, we have to work hard. But we know the importance of land to women and even when we are giving awareness to women, we involve the men so that we work together. It's important for women to own land. By women wanting land, we are going to reduce their cultural practices, that's the bad cultural practices, but there are some practices which are good, which we retain. And when we provide women with land, then we will have land security. And we know women and mothers, they work hard on the farms and provide food to their families. And when a woman owns land, he is going to keep that land, unlike men who would, after a short time, sell that land. Now, how do we provide awareness, sensitization and capacity building? At the House of Chips, we developed gender guidelines, which helped us not only talk about land, we talked about climate change, forest, water, and other things which bothers in the community. And apart from that, we also undertook a course at Chalimbana University, traditional leadership and governance. And I was part of the people who even developed the modules for that course. And I also took part in that course. And these all emphasize gender equality. When we talk about gender equality, they should be equity. Women should be taken on board. As I said earlier, because of my leadership role, most women now are taking up leadership roles. And we have a number of head persons in the chiefdom. From the inset, they were very few. When I just took over the throne, I think there was just one. And also to secure the land for women and other members in the domain, we have started the process of customary land certification. So we are just waiting that we are going to do the mapping. And then on my request, all these to work, all the stakeholders should work together. Traditional leadership, the government, the stakeholders should collaborate and coordinate the events so that no one is left behind. And then you will help the men, women to come on board. Because that's why we are there as traditional leaders. And apart from that, when these stakeholders engage traditional leaders, they should not only engage the pockets of traditional leaders because this will not make a change. Even when you talk about land ownership, if you only talk about Moeswa chiefdom and you will leave the rest because we are about 288 chiefs in Zambia. Thank you. Thank you very much for the comprehensive overview of the different ways in which you're working politically, legally, culturally, and also using innovative tools and approaches to secure the rights of women within your chiefdom and nationally. So with that, I'd like to turn it over to Masita, building off of what the chiefdom has described from your experience within the government of Malawi, what are some of the approaches that you have been using to promote women's land access, ownership, and control? Thank you so much for the question. I think from the previous panelist who answered the previous question, I think what is very important in Malawi is to say that we have encouraged women to participate in all these areas. The most important thing which Malawi has done is to put these in the laws because once when we say someone has registered a piece of land, it means they should have a piece of paper which shows that that piece of land belongs to them. So what the Malawi government has done is to make sure that all these processes are put in the land laws. So we have the land laws which were passed in parliament which encouraged these women to access land. Actually, when you look at the laws, when you're talking about the control of land, there are committees, for example, at group village level. There are committees which are composed of six members and what the law says is at least 50% of the membership of that committee has to be women. So it can be a committee of all six women or at least three women. And also when you go to the next level of the chiefs themselves who are controlling a bigger area, the membership in the law is six members, at least six have to be women. So the government of Malawi is doing a lot of sensitization. We have people on the ground almost every day doing sensitization, encouraging the men to understand issues of registration and promoting the women to register land. So there are sensitizations on the ground in the villages, sensitizations are on the radios and also sensitizations on the TVs, encouraging women to promote land. But what is most important is all these things which are happening now are backed by the law. Thank you. Thank you and you're echoing something that the chieftainess touched on as well that it's not enough to just sensitize women on the importance of women's land rights. It's also critical to work with men in the community to ensure a holistic understanding. Thank you. So with that, I'd like to turn it over to Carol. Carol, obviously this is a critical issue worldwide and USAID is doing so much around the world on women's land rights. Could you provide an overview of the role that the US government is playing in the global action to strengthen women's land rights? Thank you so much, Julia. And it's just great to be here today with this panel and with our speaker, opening speaker, Jamila and mission director, Weaver. Well, I wanna start by saying how proud I am of what our partners have achieved on this issue. You'll hear from them in just a few moments and you've heard from some of them already. And I wanted to note how grateful I am for our partnership with the GenDeep team at USAID. That team has done so much to support this important work and we're really grateful for their support. In a way, I think the chieftainess and Mr. Ambano have answered the question for me, but I'll expand on it just a little bit for USAID. This is an absolutely critical issue. You heard that from Jamila. And it's one we've been working on for many years. So I think to say, what is it that we're doing in terms of global action? We're taking a very holistic approach to these issues, something the chieftainess emphasized. First, we work with government partners to do exactly what Mr. Ambano said, which is strengthen the legal framework for women's land rights and rights recognition. That happens at the national level. And so we've worked in a number of countries to help make sure that legal frameworks are gender inclusive or gender responsive. Next, we work very closely with local partners that might include local level government, but also importantly civil society to advocate for and help secure these rights. This can be done through the kind of capacity strengthening that's oftentimes helpful at land ministries or land directorates to integrate gender responsive practices and processes into the kind of land administration and land governance work that Mr. Ambano and his team do. But it can also be through the kinds of participatory and inclusive mapping that the chieftainess was talking about. You'll hear more about these today. Doing sensitization work and awareness raising is always a part of our work. And we do that sensitization and awareness raising with men and women, with husbands and wives to make sure that we're exploring and addressing norms that might influence women's ability to exercise their rights. And I would say importantly, we're paying much more attention to the problem of gender-based violence and how gender-based violence can influence women's abilities to exercise their rights. Sometimes we'll be supporting dispute resolution processes because women may face challenges exercising their rights, whether that's through inheritance or through land allocations. And then I think another thing that's unique that USA does is we work really hard to build the evidence base around what works to empower women by providing more secure rights to land. And so we have a number of robust impact evaluations that speak to these outcomes. And finally at the global level, we do engage as part of the global donor working group on land, which is one of the work streams under the global donor platform for rural development and we engage in dialogues like this with other folks in the land sector. So I would say we take a pretty holistic approach and love working with partners like the Chiefness and Mr. Ambana, as well as other civil society groups to help achieve these outcomes. Thanks, Julia. Thanks so much, Carol. And thank you for summarizing so concisely what I know is a huge body of work that USA does. So over the next few minutes, we'll dive a little bit deeper into what exactly USAid is up to in each of the four countries that are being covered by this panel. So first I will turn it over to Patricia and Gavilan to tell us specifically what USAid is working on in Zambia and Malawi. So if you could each provide a one or two minute overview of the land programming happening in each country, that would be wonderful. We'll go to Patricia first and then to Gavilan. Thank you very much. In Zambia, first to start with, we have a dual land tenure system that's existing in this country. So that means that some of the land is held under customary and some of it is under state. And unfortunately, the big chunk of the land is about 90% is held under customary tenure. And for us in Zambia, we are working as integrated land and resource governance program. We are working with the traditional leaders because they are the ones who are in control of the big chunk of land to try and support the rights of women. So our work involves land documentation under customary land tenure. And for this, we work using participatory enumeration processes and mapping. We work with communities and with the traditional leaders. We've been working in nine chiefdoms so far to register land rights and interests. So far we've registered about 170,000 land rights of which 42% of that is actually women. Most important to our land documentation process is our focus on the land rights of women. And for us, this is where we have invested a lot of energy because our social norms in this country are very strong and automatically hands over power and control of land to men. So our land documentation program isn't successful unless we are able to put in deliberate efforts to engender the land documentation process. And this is what we've been doing. We've also been working quite strongly to support the capacity of the organizations that we work with that are working in the land space to have that capacity to engender the land documentation processes and the land governance processes. And then with the traditional leaders, we are working with them to support them, gain the knowledge and the understanding of how they can empower women through land documentation, how they can give the rights, more rights to women to on land, how they can overcome the social norms and the cultural barriers that have kept women behind for a long time. And then with government, we are also working together to come up with policies or to advance policies that can strongly empower women to access land and on land under customary tenure. So basically that is what we are doing and to achieve all this and to make sure that women adequately participate and have access and control of land. We use simple mobile technology that can allow women to effectively participate in the processes. So in a nutshell and under two minutes, that's basically what we do. Thank you very much. We'll dig into some of that work in just a moment. Gavila, over to you. Thank you very much, Julia. So for Malawi, the USH Integrated Land and Resource Governance Activity is partnering with the Ministry of Lands through the Land Reforms Implementation Unit to support the gender responsive and socially inclusive land documentation process. And this is taking place in a traditional land management area, which is called Tiamat Sambo in one of the districts in Central Region in the Dakota Water District. As Mr. Bano highlighted, the Customer Land Act requires that custom land models should register their land in order to formalize ownership. So this is the context that we are working in. But although the law provides for gender equality in the provisions, but the reality is that when you go on the ground, there are underlying factors, the social norms and the gender norms that undermine women's rights. And this is exactly where Integrated Land and Resource Governance in Malawi is focusing on to make sure that as we do land documentation, we just won't only focus on the technical and legal framework, but we will go beyond the technical and legal framework to address the issue, to address the norms, social norms, to address the gender norms, to address the cultural norms that are undermining women's land rights. So we are working with this within this context. And like Zambia, we are also working a lot with traditional leaders because these are the custodians of culture. And so the cultural issues are happening within the context of culture and the traditional leaders of the custodians of culture. So we are working with the traditional leaders to make sure that they understand the gender inequalities that are existing in their communities and how they can help to ensure that women are able to take part in the land registration process. We have also partnered with the government structures. So at this level, working with the gender office, working with the land's office, to make sure that we coordinate with them and support the efforts that the communities are doing in the land registration process. We have a number of tools that have been developed that I can talk about a little bit more later as we go in the discussion. But in a nutshell, this is what we are working on in the Malawi land and social governance activity. Thank you. Thank you so much, Gavalette. And with that, we'll turn over to Carol and Taiz. USAID has implemented gender-responsive land programming in Mozambique and in Tanzania as well. Again, in just one or two minutes, if you could please tell us a little bit about the work done in these two countries. We'll start with Taiz and then move to Carol. Thank you very much, Yulia. As a context, in Mozambique, even though all the land is officially owned by the state, individuals, communities, and private sector companies can hold rights to use and access land. And the main challenges to women's land rights in Mozambique I think are very similar to the challenges that my colleagues have alluded to in other countries where we work, mostly overall land tenure security and gender inequality. In Mozambique, the land insecurity is very high and it's estimated that over 75% of rural land in the country is undocumented and women face many additional barriers. For instance, they have less access to information about the documentation process, they have less financial resources, and of course the discriminatory gender norms that place men in charge of making decisions about land. There are some differences about women's access to land and ability to document land in their names in matrilino and patrilino areas, but we have found that in both setups, men retain control over the decisions, any decisions about land and also the income derived from it. So to decrease the land insecurity and strengthen women's land rights in Mozambique, USA through ILRG has been working with different organizations to implement participatory and inclusive process to document land and to transform the systematic barriers. As my colleagues mentioned before, this includes working with different organizations to strengthen their capacity on gender equality and social inclusion, integrating gender into every step of the documentation process with technical support, and also for instance, in the process of documenting community lands, we create community associations that will be responsible for the governance of the land, and we try to make sure that those associations are inclusive and participatory and representative. This includes broad sensitization with the communities involved, not only on the importance of documenting the land, but also on gender equality and social inclusion and also working with women so they have the technical skills but also the social emotional skills like confidence, public speaking, so they can meaningfully participate in these associations. And this ensures that women are involved not only in every step of the documentation process, but also later on, they are able to meaningfully participate in the governance and decisions about lands at the community level and at the household level. So as a result of this work over the past five years, USA has supported over 340,000 people to document their land rights, and this includes about 330,000 people out of which 54% are women who had their community land rights formalized, but also about 10,000 people and 62% are women who had their household parcels documented. Thank you. Thank you very much, Tais. Over to you Carol. Oh my gosh, I love hearing what the ILRG program is doing. It's just such inspiring and impactful work. Really, really pleased to hear that from my colleagues. I'm gonna talk really briefly about our work in Tanzania which was done under a different program. But in Tanzania, we've been working with the government since 2014 to create and then deploy a participatory approach called mapping approaches to secure tenure. We call it MAS. And the MAS project or processes allowing us to deliver customary certificates of rights of occupancy. I'll use the acronym CCROs to rural women and men. So this work really involved testing out an innovative approach that I would say marries local awareness raising or sensitization around land rights in Tanzania with a targeted digital technology that uses local staffing drawing on local people including women who take on the role of para-surveyers to collect geospatial and demographic information. This information, it aligns with the needs of the government of Tanzania and is then shared with the government of Tanzania to support the process of issuing documentation. But we also go through a community level verification process so that community members see the results of the participatory mapping approaches and can speak to that process. The end goal is to have not only an inclusive and participatory process, but a more timely and cost effective process to help the government of Tanzania meet its goals around delivering certificates. So we started in three villages in Runga district with this pilot project. It expanded and became a full blown activity called the land tenure assistance activity or LTA that worked in another 36 villages in Tanzania. And between 2016 and 2021, the project actually delivered nearly 100,000 CCROs to local women and men. And just about 50% of those certificates, the certificates in Runga particularly were held by women. And you'll hear this is a common thread throughout our programming that when we work on land documentation, we're working towards gender equitable land holdings. So we're super pleased that other donors have found this approach useful and have adopted it on their own. But we're also really excited that other organizations including conservation organizations and civil society or environmental organizations are also adopting the MAST approach and using it to meet their needs. And finally, and maybe we'll get a chance to talk about this later, Yulia. We're really pleased the process has had positive outcomes for women. It helped increase their perceptions of tenure security and we find that it's having positive impacts in terms of empowerment. So I'll leave it there and hand the floor back to you. Thanks, Yulia. Wonderful. Well, thank you so much, Patricia, Gavilette, Taiz and Carol for expanding a little bit on what is being done across the four countries. Hard to recap, but a little bit of what I'm hearing is a strong emphasis on sensitization to raise awareness and budge longstanding norms working across multiple levels of governance and government structures, both formal and customary and only then turning to the documentation and relying on some new tools to make it quicker and more efficient. So we'll keep moving and we'll dive a little bit deeper into these activities. We'll turn to Masita. In the past few years, the government of Malawi has partnered with USAID on a pilot to systematically register customary land with a strong focus on gender equality and social inclusion. In just a minute or two, please, if you could tell us a little bit about this pilot and why the government thinks that it's important to include gender-responsive approaches within this work. I think I will start with the second part, why we think, why as government, we think it's important to include gender issues in the work. I think it's important because of the current scenario in which we are where women and the children, especially, suffer from run-grabbing and things like that, especially here in Malawi and mostly in some parts of Africa, I would assume, when the husband dies in our culture, in most of our cultures, it's assumed that the land belongs to the man. So when the husband dies, so the video just said the wife has to go back where she came from and the children and there is a lot of suffering and there are a lot of issues which are involved. So looking at that government decided to include in all work we are doing gender-responsive approaches so that we can empower these women to register the land just as the men are also empowered. So that at the end of the day, everyone has equal rights of registering their land. So talking about this project, which we did with USID, this project, we chose that area because it is predominantly an area which is the paternity. So in that area, it is only the men who own the pieces of land. The women just come according to the villagers to get married and then when the husband dies, they have to go back. So we chose that area and with the help of USID, we make sure that we have an approach where the villagers are taught the importance of registering the land for everyone, both the men, the women and the children. So we did a lot of registration and a lot of work was done there. And just in brief, I can tell you that we have been amazed at the registration the way it happened because everyone thought that all the parcels will be registered in the men according to the catcher there. But when we finished registration, actually 40% of the pieces of land have been registered jointly because we encourage them to register jointly. We would have left to have even 100% and then out of those pieces of land which were registered individually, about 21% of the women registered individually and 28% of the men registered individually. So in total in short, it's about 63% of the pieces of land which have been registered in the names of women which is very encouraging. And we can see that these approaches of including gender issues in all the works which is done should be encouraged in all other places. And that's the approach which government of Malawi has taken. Thank you. Wonderful. Thank you so much. Gavilette as an implementer working alongside Masita, can you share a few brief reactions or perspectives on any of the challenges and benefits you've seen within this activity from the inclusion of women in this activity? Thank you very much. Let me start with the benefits. As Masita has already highlighted, the first benefit that we've noted is the inclusion of women in legislation of land. So that's very encouraging to see that 63% of the certificates have women names on them. That is very encouraging. We have had a pilot before in a different village in the same area, which had registered about 38% women being on the certificates that were registered. So you can see the difference and this is the benefit that's noted of including women on the legislation processes. The other benefit is that we've seen might change among women themselves. So the time we're getting into the community in T-1 Samo, we could visualize women that were not coming forward to express themselves, especially in the presence of men and also participate in the committees. Their participation was very low. We talked about the laws providing for inclusion of women in the committees. So the minimum of three women in a committee of seven people. But when you come to participation, there was almost zero participation while the time we're starting the project. But when they went through the trainings, the women empowerment and leadership training and also the gender norms dialogue sessions, it changed the mindset. And women started coming up to say, I can now stand in front of me. I can now contribute in the committee and my voice is heard within that committee. It's because of the empowerment and the social emotional skills that they gained through the training. So that's the benefit that we see. We also see the benefit of including the girl child. So the 16% we're talking about, it's looking at women, but also the girls who are included on the certificates. So that alone is also an encouragement that this is a benefit that we are noticing within the project that women and girls are being considered. They can own land, they can have their own land, they can own land jointly with other family members. So this is what we think can be, it's very good and can be sustained. And as government is rolling out, which is the plan going out other districts in the land documentation process, these are the lessons that we can share and play and be able to build up on other interventions. In terms of the challenges, it hasn't been easy to penetrate for people to understand that we need to include women in these processes. So it has taken a lot of civilization with the communities and other stakeholders within the community, including the traditional leaders and the men themselves. So that we get a buy-in from the men and the rest of the communities that it's really important to include women. When we include women, as the Royal Highness said at the beginning, women are at the center of everything. We'll have improved economic situations and status within our communities if we put women in the forefront, because they have that part to make sure that things, they can push things. So it's been helpful to have women in the forefront and this is the benefit that we've noted. We've also seen the benefit regarding men, big gender champions. Men have led to go in front and fight for women, in terms of including women in land registration. So that has been a benefit. Of course, it's a challenge because other men still are resistant to take up that challenge and resistance to include women. So that has been a challenge as much as the gender champions have helped us to benefit, to be able to reach out for more women and include women in land registration. So that's what I can highlight in terms of the benefits and the challenges that we've noted. Thank you. Thank you so much, Gewerlach. Well, turn to your Royal Highness. You noted, in your opening remarks, as noted your very influential voice on women's rights. What do you see as the biggest limiting factors within Zambia on promoting women's land rights and how have you worked to overcome some of those barriers and limiting factors? Thank you. As Eriah alluded, it's important that women's rights should of importance. Now, yes, we have challenges, but what we have done like in the chief firm, for every meeting that we have, whether at a village level, at zone or level, they sensitize the community and give awareness for all devices. But most of the chiefdoms are the far-fung area of Zambia. So it's very difficult, even when we talk about awareness. Like we are sitting here now, most of the parts of rural Zambia cannot be accessed. But we have not sat down just to sit because we have those challenges. We still work. That's why we need the government, the traditional leaders and the stakeholders to help us with this. As you have said, we're still working hard to work on the traditional norms which are negative. And we also have to work on the traditional customs which help for the women to still retain land. And because of those awareness, for now, most of the widows, because of the awareness, the widows retain the land when a spouse dies. But we still have to go around when they are divorced. And it's not practical that two people have divorced. Then you let them stay in the same area. So what we have done is maybe if they are divorced, then you have to look for a piece of land for the women so that they don't stay together, that we are working on. But still more because mindset takes a long time. So there are still some men or some families who would chase the widow when a spouse dies. But because of their awareness and sensitization, most of the communities or most of the people in the communities, when such a thing happens, they will report to the Royal establishment so that something will be done. Or they will report to the police because we told them that there are things which can be taken to the police. The customary land should be to the traditional leader and the criminal issues should be taken to the police. So they know. And apart from that, because of these limitations, we have also used radio, drama, and so on. But even with the radio, there are very few people that own radios. So they do not get the information. So that's why we depend on the stakeholders to help us for sensitization and give awareness to the communities. And it's not only giving awareness to the communities, but the awareness is also needed to be given to the traditional leadership. Because if the traditional leadership do not know what is supposed to be done, then it's difficult to talk to their communities. Thank you. Thank you very much. Patricia, the chief dentist touched briefly on cultural and social barriers to women's land rights. Could you touch very briefly, just in a minute or so, as an implementing partner, on what ILRG has been doing in Zambia to help address some of those barriers? The USID strategy in Zambia builds on just what Arroyo Hanes has tried to explain there. The biggest challenge that we have are the social norms that keep barring women from owning land. So our strategy as integrated land and resource governance program has been to build a cadre of champions among the traditional leaders and among the organizations that are working in this land space. So one of the things that we've been doing is to work very closely with the traditional leaders to work very closely with the likes of Arroyo Hanes, but we are also going down below that because as she has tried to explain, it's the head persons that actually initiate or start the process of giving out land. So for us, that is an important cadre of people that we need to target so that once we win them to our side and they can help us bring about the change in the communities. So we reach out to them, we engage them in social norms dialogue so that they can understand the negative impact that some of these social norms are having at household level as well as at community level. So we have invested a lot of resources in trying to work around social norms change. Besides that, we are also working towards building the capacity within the key players knowing that USRA is not going to be here forever but there are institutions that are working in land. Whose capacity we need to build so that they can work around promoting women who land rights. So we've been working with a number of organizations as well building their capacity in terms of how they can mobilize communities to support women to have rights to land. And the other thing that we are also trying to do is to work with the traditional leaders now at national level. How can we support them? As she says, they do not have the capacity. How can we support the capacity of the chiefs who are at national level and where they're able to influence a lot of things. So we've been working with them, we developed the guidelines with them for them and the traditional leaders themselves like Royal Highnesses herself was very instrumental in putting together these guidelines with us providing that technical support which has become a tool that they are using in building their own awareness at community level. And this has proved to be quite effective. Our Royal Highness has implemented this in a chiefdom and she can attest to the changes that we are seeing on the ground in terms of women embracing that. For us, our strategy also involves reaching out to the women themselves. Much as men are usually the ones who are not willing to give land to women because it's in their power, you find that in our context here in Zambia, even women themselves sometimes because of the social norms that they've been accustomed to are not willing to actually own land. And we have this experience in our land documentation process where the women were the ones refusing to actually have their name enlisted on the certificate. So we've really been working reaching out to women as well trying to empower them through the women leadership and empowerment training, trying to empower them and help them understand that the social norms are there, yes, but there are things that can change over time. We need to look at the positive side of owning land, what will it do to you as a woman? How will that empower you for the betterment of your family and for the betterment of your community? So we've really tried to pursue a strategy that does not just look at men, but also looks at the women and how we can help them break out of these social norms. Thank you very much, Patricia. We will turn to one final question to Carol. Carol, you touched in your remarks on USAID's work in Tanzania. And over the last decade, USAID and its partners have used tech-enabled participatory mapping approaches to register hundreds of thousands of parcels in Tanzania and elsewhere. How has the use of technology for large-scale registration helped to improve women's land tenure security? Thank you, Yulia. And I know we're running short on time, so I'll be super quick and say that we did have the opportunity to carry out an impact evaluation of the land tenure assistance activity in Tanzania. That study, which can be found on our landlinks website, did find tangible and important benefits with regard to women's empowerment in Tanzania as a result of receiving CCROs. One of the things that we found is that in our treatment group, the group with whom our impact evaluation was working and our implemented partners were working, 83% of women who were primary spouses did have CCROs compared to control groups where only 13% of primary spouses actually had that documentation. Okay, so the documentation may be important for women to have for a number of reasons. So if you have the documentation, you might actually feel more secure insofar as other people, neighbors, people in the community, people outside the community may have a harder time taking land from you if you can prove that the land is yours through the documentation. And in fact, we did find that perceptions of tenure security improved, especially for female-headed households and for wives, and the level of improvement for those women, both female-headed households and wives was generally on par with the improvement that was observed for male-headed households who also received documentation. So documentation was making everybody feel more secure. We also did find that as a result of receiving the CCROs, as I mentioned just a moment ago, people felt like they were less likely to face a boundary dispute with their neighbors. And for women, that was reduced by as much as 32% looking forward over the course of the next five years. One thing that might be interesting for folks to note is that we were doing LTA to test to see if it would be a quicker, more cost-effective manner. And in fact, what the impact evaluation did find is that adopting this technology-centered approach as participatory of a technology-centered approach did decrease the cost of issuing CCROs from about $40 a parcel to just under $8 a parcel. And so particularly for women, if they have lower levels of income, reducing that cost might make it much more likely that they can actually access and hold those CCROs. So I'll leave it at that, Julia. Overall, it did help women increase their tenure security and we would, I should say, anticipate over time that will translate into increased investments in land. Thank you. Thanks so much, Carol. And I think this brings us back to something you mentioned in your opening remarks about how USAID invests in the evidence base, which then allows you to really back up these statements with rigorous evidence on how the projects have benefited women. So with that, we will turn to audience Q&A. I apologize that the conversation was so rich that we only have a few minutes for Q&A before we end at 10, 15 Eastern. But I see our first question is around the role of the private sector in promoting women's land rights. I'd like to direct this question to Taiz. I know that in Mozambique, USAID has worked with agribusiness company Grupo Medal. I'm curious if you could tell us a little bit about that partnership and how that work has benefited women's land rights in the country. Thank you. As Jamil mentioned in her opening remarks over time in Zambia, which is in central Mozambique, about 50,000 people moved into Madal's land to produce subsistence crops. And most of these people are women and they were tending to their crops in the night with the risks that come with it. And Madal wanted to implement inclusive business models. So he partnered with USAID to have an innovative and inclusive approach to solve land conflict, increase land security for the smallholder farmers and to promote an economically viable use of the land that could benefit both the rural families and the company. So instead of evicting these people that encroached into the company's land, this partnership is working in two fronts. First is mapping community lands of 14 communities around the Madal property, but also working with the people that encroached into its land, which is about 1,300 people, 86% are women, to formalize their land use rights. So the land continues to be owned by Madal, but the smallholder farmers can now use the plots to produce both subsistence crops but also commodities for Madal. And both farmers, the outgrowers in the communities around Madal property and the ingrowers in the land that belongs to Madal are receiving from the company agriculture inputs, extension services and purchase guarantee for certain crops like coconuts, beans, sesame. So in addition of the peace of mind for especially women and the land tenure security, this is the first time that these women are able to produce beyond subsistence crops and access commercial value chains. And this leads to additional income to the households which has been used for investments in better nutrition and education for the children. So in parallel to the land formalization aspect of the work, USAID is also supporting Madal to revise and develop gender responsive internal practices and extension services that are gender responsive and also to ensure that the women have decision-making power over this new income and the land. We're working in extensive community sensitization and also trainings on gender quality, harmful gender norms and gender-based violence. So this approach can serve as a model for other private sector partnerships to solve land conflicts with local communities and strengthen women's economic security because it demonstrates that investments by the private sector in land tenure security and in gender quality at the same time can benefit both a company's bottom line but also the communities and especially women. Thank you. Thank you, Thais. There, the next question I would like to direct first to Chieftainess Moeswa and then open it up to anybody else who would like to jump in. Is there any work being done on examining climate change, the impact of climate change on land tenure security for women? Oh, you're on mute. You're on mute. Thank you. As I said earlier, because as we were working on land, like in Moeswa, Chieftain, we worked on the gender guidelines and also a private sector which is working on the restoration of the cafe flats and all the partners or the stakeholders we are working on, they are all working on climate change. And I'm also on the National Advisory Committee for Voices for Just Climate Action. So in the gender guidelines, apart from land, there's also climate change. In the diploma in traditional leadership and governance there was also a component on climate change. And even the other partners who are working in the Chieftain, like International Clean Foundation and Comarco, because when you talk about agriculture, we talk about climate change. And the women in particular are being taught about smart agriculture because for them to increase their yield, they have to change the methods of farming because of climate change. So we are embracing all those who are coming on board to work with us, but we make sure that there's coordination and collaboration for all the partners so that there's no duplication of work. That's why we need more people to help us because we have meeting with the head persons but sometimes the information is distorted because the head person do not understand but there is work being done on climate change because even when we started the restoration of the Kafeer plots and the gender guidelines, they were asked a question, what is climate change? Some didn't know, some knew, but as work went on because when we started the gender guidelines, the community made their own action plan and then we invited other stakeholders to help us on awareness, on empowerment of women. So far, we have USA, we have Omako, we have many other stakeholders and this is what is even happening in other shipments. Thank you. Thank you very much. We have just one more minute if somebody would like to jump in very, very quickly with a few quick remarks, please go ahead. So Yulia, I'll jump in really quickly and say out, we do see an important linkage between women's secure land tenure and climate outcomes, whether those are related to the incentives that more secure land provides women to do things like uptake climate smart practices that the chief dentist just was talking about. We do see evidence of that happening in Zambia through one of our more recent impact evaluations or whether it's encouraging women to participate in agroforestry, which has longer term benefits and does usually require secure land holdings for women to participate in that. Importantly though, it can enable adaptation practices when women have that additional asset of secure tenure. So that's like three very, very quick things. Super excited to be able to pursue more conversations around the importance of tenure security for women to both adapt to and mitigate the impacts of climate change. Thank you so much, Yulia. Thank you, Carol. And with that, it is my pleasure to thank all of our panelists for a really stimulating and wide-ranging discussion on the importance of women's land tenure and what's being done across multiple countries to help improve tenure security for rural women. And we will be, the video of this event will be posted in the coming days. It will be circulated to the audience. Thank you very much for tuning in. And with that, we will close the session. Thank you and have a great day.