Secure land rights and empowerment for indigenous communities - experiences and good practices from Peru | Land Portal

After almost six years, the Global Programme Responsible Land Policy completed its activities in Peru in late 2021. Thanks to the hard work of the ProTierras Comunales project team and partners, we can look back on interesting lessons learned and several good practices ready for replication (here you can find the final publication).

 

One of our two action areas was the improvement of the institutional framework and procedures to secure land and resource rights of indigenous communities (comunidades nativas) in the Peruvian Amazon. Given the increasing presence of large infrastructure projects, protected areas, production forests, informal mining and colonist settlements, the legal recognition of indigenous territories is of crucial importance.      
When our activities started in the Ucayali and San Martín regions, there was no consolidated official information on the number of communities, their territories, and their legal status. For this reason, we supported our counterparts at national and regional levels in the creation of a digital rural cadastre system to improve the land titling procedure and the monitoring of land tenure security. Here you can learn more about the rural cadastre system, its approach and how it can be replicated.

Another important step was the introduction of a conflict classification system. Given the increasingly complex and violent situation in many parts of the Amazon region and the overlapping claims regarding land, effective conflict management is crucial. Our conflict classification system has enabled the systematic analysis and adequate management of land-related disputes, which is also a prerequisite to  progress in community titling processes. 

 

In our second action area, we focused on the participation of the Peruvian civil society, especially indigenous organizations, in developing and implementing responsible land policy. Priority was given to capacity building and the empowerment of indigenous women and youth, who are particularly discriminated against in terms of access to land and natural resources.
Currently, there are only few indigenous professionals qualified to become active in the land governance sector. As a contribution to the empowerment of indigenous youth, we developed an Indigenous Professional Internship Programme together with our partners. The programme was successful: 85% of the participants found work or study opportunities after their internship, many of them as technical or legal advisers to indigenous organizations.

When the COVID-19 pandemic further deteriorated women´s access to information, based on previous experiences and contacts we implemented workshops for digital empowerment of indigenous women. Here you can find out more about these workshops and read our recommendations for replication.

 

If you want to find out more about our work, please visit our official website or our Land Portal project page. Currently, we are implementing further projects in Benin, Burkina Faso, Cote d’Ivoire, Ethiopia, Laos, Madagascar and Uganda.

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