Vacancy: Research and Communications Officer

You’ll play a pivotal role in project reporting, research, and stakeholder engagement, ensuring timely and high-quality project deliverables. With a focus on access to land and the land-people relationships, you’ll collaborate with our global project teams. If you have at least three years of relevant experience and a keen interest for professional growth in international development, we want to hear from you!

The Grant Facility of MRLG is the leading implementation facility for the four-country program working with more than 50 implementing partners in civil society, government, and academia.

The Mekong Region Land Governance Project aims to improve land governance in four of the Mekong countries, by empowering local reform actors, building alliances, and supporting policy influencing activities. The Project takes a regional approach across Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar and Vietnam to support cross country learning and to facilitate and open up space for dialogue and alliance building. The Project has been designed to deliver the following key objective: Smallholder women and men farmers in CLMV countries, especially those belonging to ethnic minorities, have secure and equitable access to and control over agricultural land, forest and fisheries.

One of my recent tasks has been to conduct research into the benefits and disadvantages of joint titling for gender equality. Joint titling refers to the practice of documenting the names of both members of a couple as the legal owners of property obtained in the course of their relationship, in the context of a land titling program. It has become a popular mechanism in the development space in avoiding the default position whereby only the male, or husband, as the household head is registered as the owner of the land. My research found that joint titling can be a really useful tool in securing women’s rights – for instance, in preventing a unilateral sale of the land by her husband, protecting widowed women from losing their house upon the death of their husband, allowing women greater access to credit, and empowering women in both formal and informal decision making processes related to the house, the land, and its uses. Despite these promising advantages, the research suggests that mere titling is insufficient. The ‘stickiness’ of patriarchal custom in some jurisdictions has prevented the benefits of joint titling from being realised. For instance, a case study in Cambodia on joint titling showed that some women felt that despite being formally titled, they did not have the power to assert their rights if a dispute were to arise. This highlights the important difference between the de facto and de jure existence of joint titling. Legal title is only effective if the processes and regulations that underpin it are followed. Therefore, special consideration must be borne in mind when implementing joint titling systems to ensure that women’s rights are actually realised.

MRLG seeks a Communication Consultant to support communication at the end of phase two of the project. The position may be home-based or located in Vientiane, Lao PDR. The anticipated start date is October 2022 with a contract duration of three months. While the position is short-term, the project anticipates a third phase from 2023 to 2025. Subject to mutual agreement, the contract may be converted to a long-term contract for the duration of phase three, with competitive remuneration and benefits.

We are looking for an experienced social safeguards expert who can use their stakeholder and community engagement experience to improve land governance scenarios during infrastructure investment.  This opportunity will see you build solutions with LEI staff for improved land tenure results in the infrastructure sector, expand your networks and work across Africa, Asia and the Pacific with a range of clients. We are initially seeking a consultant role, with potential for more permanent employment arrangements.

We are looking for our next dedicated colleague with experience in land tenure recording and registration, survey, and geospatial solutions for land administration.