Nitidae, l’Observatoire National du Foncier Burkina Faso (ONF-BF), Oxfam Burkina Faso and the Netherlands Enterprise & Development Agency (RVO) are excited to announce their partnership for a LAND-at-scale project in Burkina Faso. Starting this year, the project will run for three years focusing on strengthening land governance for women and youth for increased food security, focusing on the Liptako Gourma region.
Burkina Faso’s land challenges
Burkina Faso is a country dealing with many crises: food insecurity, climate vulnerability and massive population displacement. Land plays a critical factor in all these crises. The fast-growing population, degradation of land as well as widespread migration of the population across Burkina Faso are putting pressure on land. The country is heavily dependent on agriculture, which employs 80% of the population. Despite this, the country deals with significant food security issues. With emerging patterns of high temperatures and pockets of drought, the country is very vulnerable to climate shocks.
As is observed in many crises, vulnerable groups are hit hardest by the consequences. Women and youth particularly, suffer disproportionality. Together, the two groups constitute a large majority of the entire rural population and reportedly make up the main food producers in the country. However, they suffer from marginalization through customary practices, which leads to increased vulnerability to the factors above and has led to decreased access to land, or even land dispossession.
LAND-at-scale objectives
This LAND-at-scale intervention aims to improve food security and the resilience of women and youth in the country by securing their access to land and by strengthening land governance and management practices. This will be done through implementation of four interconnected components of the project, namely:
- Raising awareness on land rights among relevant stakeholders;
- Participatory registration of land titles with special reference to women and youth;
- Optimizing land management practices of secured land of women and youth to address challenges related to land degradation and/or food insecurity; and
- Monitoring and learning on the experiences of the other components and formulating recommendations for more sustainable land governance.
The project will build on experiences from previous projects in Burkina Faso, learning from their experiences in setting up land registrations at the local level combined with tried and proven methods of social inclusion of women and youth in patriarchal communities with traditional norms and practices. Subsequently, the capacities of women and youth with secured land rights to sustainably use their land will be strengthened, leading to more effective food production and mitigation of farmland degradation.
“All three project partners bring their own expertise to the project,” says Mr. Jules Gaye from Nitidae. “ONF-BF has a longstanding and strong reputation in the area of land registration and capacity strengthening at local level, whereas Oxfam has worked extensively with the target groups and Nitidae brings in expertise with regard to sustainable use of agricultural land”. The project partners are well-connected with the land actors in the country, both government and otherwise, and will ensure embeddedness of the project in ongoing dialogues and processes.
This project has been developed in close cooperation with the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands (EKN) in Ouagadougou, and will build further on other EKN-project in the Liptako Gourma region.
Want to know more about LAND-at-scale?
The Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs funds LAND-at-scale. This project in Burkina Faso is funded for two million Euros. The project will start in February 2022 with an inception phase of six months, during which several baseline studies and needs assessments will be conducted to inform the intervention strategy. To stay updated on this LAND-at-scale project and others, please sign up for our quarterly newsletter.