WASHINGTON, December 7, 2018 — On December 4, 2018 the World Bank approved $100 million for the Government of Mozambique’s Land Administration Project. The project directly supports the Government’s Terra Segura Program and its effort to strengthen and protect the rights of all land users and to ensure the efficient and effective provision of services to institutions and citizens. The project will strengthen land tenure security and create the conditions for responsible land investments that assure the recognition of rights and the flow of benefits to communities and to the poorest rural households.
Mozambique has made significant progress in the past twenty years to improve access to land and security of land rights for all citizens, particularly by strengthening its land-related policy and legal frameworks and the functioning of its land administration and management system. Albeit fundamental, these reforms have yet to generate the desired benefits. Also, the land sector’s capacity to delimit communities and to issue and monitor land use rights titles (DUATs) to individuals in general and investors in particular remains extremely low, with an estimated ten million land parcels not formally registered yet.
“Pressure on land resulting from the expansion of urban centers, the construction of public infrastructure, the development of land-based projects in rural areas, and new pressures on land from climate change all make the goals of this project extremely important,” said Mark Lundell, World Bank Country Director for Mozambique, Madagascar, Mauritius, Seychelles and Comoros.
Expected results from the project include increased number of communities with delimitation certificates registered in the land information system; increased number of rural beneficiaries, including women, with DUATs registered in the land information system; improved satisfaction of beneficiaries with land tenure regularization; and public access to the national land cadastre data.
“This project addresses the lack of formal documentation and registration of land rights in priority districts that has proven to be a serious disadvantage in protecting land occupancy rights when pressure on land increases due to density and urbanization, in situations of conflict, or when negotiating with potential investors or establishing community based productive associations,” said Anna Corsi, the project’s Task Team Leader. “The project targets this by adopting a systematic approach to land regularization and community delimitation, by strengthening the legal framework, building institutional capacity in particular the land information system, and by promoting awareness of rights and of the value of formality and availability of tools for land use management at the community level”.
This project was developed in close collaboration with local and central government officials, local communities, and civil society, as well as the Food and Agriculture organization of the United Nations. The project will benefit 700,000 rural beneficiaries and 1,200 communities in the targeted districts across the country’s ten provinces (the recipient households in the Project area constitute about 12% of the rural population). Other direct beneficiaries include key government institutions at the national, provincial and district level, specifically from the Ministry of Land, Environment and Rural Development, and the Ministry of State Administration and Public Function.
