LEI Secures a Contract to Manage the Mama Graon – Vanuatu Land Program

The importance of land, its role in custom and the land issues facing the people of Vanuatu were highlighted during a National Land Summit held in 2006. To work towards addressing the issues raised at the Land Summit the Government of Vanuatu requested support from the Australian and New Zealand Governments. LEI have been involved in a number of interim support initiatives through both AusAID and NZAID. Following a bidding process for implementation of the Mama Graon – Vanuatu Land Program , LEI signed a contract with AusAID in December 2010.

According to the World Bank’s Doing Business Report 2011 it takes an average of 81 days to register a property in Malawi. This places Malawi 81 out of 183 jurisdictions for this Doing Business indicator. While this represents an improvement on the 2010 results, the Government of Malawi (GoM) recognizes that continuing modernization of land registration process will act as an incentive to business investment and growth. It will allow those in the real estate market to make decisions and carry through their land transaction intentions promptly and with confidence under the law. Under the auspices of the Business Environment Technical Assistance Programme (BESTAP) the GoM through the Ministry of Industry and Trade is using an ODA grant funds to modernize the current paper based land registration system.

After 9 years and two phases of the Philippines-Australia Land Administration and Management Project LEI have sadly closed the project office on 30 June 2010. Much has been achieved on this project with some of the most notable accomplishments including:

LEI have been managing the Land Administration and Management Project (LAMP) for AusAID in the Philippines since 2001. The project has focused on institutional reform, policy development, improving tenure security through land registration, and introducing valuation reform.

As LEI’s successful and committed team of national and international staff close project operations of Phase 2 on the Lao Land Titling Project we reflect on the impact of over 15 years of donor assistance.

This short article is written to raise awareness of the ever present theme of gender and the making of inroads towards positive social development by Kate Dalrymple. After a pleasing response to the Laos Community Education and Gender Lessons presentation made at the Knowledge Sharing Workshop, I’m following up with some general discussion for practitioners in our industry to consider. Conveniently, this coincides with the Global Land Tools Network (www.gltn.net) forum discussion on gender responsive land tools (Sept 8 – Oct 15, 2008) which I encourage you all to visit.

LEI is supporting the US company ARD in implementing a USAID-funded project aimed at addressing property rights and land tenure issues in Timor Leste. Land tenure has experienced a rather tenuous history in Timor-Leste. Formerly known as East Timor, the country was occupied as a colony of Portugal for some 450 years, experienced three years of Japanese occupation during WW2, some twenty five years of Indonesian occupation following its first attempts at independence late 1975, through to formal acceptance of independence in May 2002. During each of these occupations, some property rights were granted. However, since independence, no property rights have been issued and no former rights are recognised, as no land law under the new Government yet exist.

For the last two and a half years I have been based in Leyte with the LAMP2 operations as the International Adviser for Systematic Adjudication. Over these years there has been some tremendous achievements made.

As our Phase 2 draws to a close, plans for various extensions are on the drawing board. Since our last newsletter, LEI has submitted a plan to AusAID for a small restructure of the technical assistance team. This will see all our national adviser positions extended up to the official end of AusAID’s Phase 2, in November 2008. It will also permit some additional international cadastral inputs, to help the TA team to finalise its capacity-building program.

The Project is now in its fifth year of Phase 2 and there are encouraging signs that the host organisation, the National Land Management Authority, is committed to continuing the project into the next decade. Initially they will seek an extension of Phase 2 and then a third phase! This is good news for our technical assistance team, as we are in the last eight months of our inputs. Although the Bank-funded project continues until 30 June 2009, LEI’s contract with AusAID finishes in November 2008.