Support for community land and forest tenure security by village Land Commissions in Mali

Project Overview 

The project’s main objective is to help secure community agricultural land for sustainable, equitable, and peaceful land management. 

To achieve this goal, CNOP in collaboration with HELVETAS Swiss Intercooperation will consolidate the capacity and effectiveness of the 17  village land commissions established in the pilot project. They will support the creation of 100 new village land commission across three regions of the country, and they will implement activities aimed at resolving and preventing future land conflicts. Through these actions, the project hopes to achieve important advances in securing villages and families’ collective land rights. 

The project will also focus on training community leaders on land management tools and helping improve relations among people and authorities involved in these efforts. Through its different activities the project will also encourage the inclusion and participation of women and vulnerable groups in land governance. Finally, the project also will encourage sustainable management of natural resources by promoting agro-ecological farming activities.  

Impact:

The project now completed helped promote environmental protection, climate change mitigation, social inclusion, and peaceful collaboration and co-existence.  

CNOP and their partner NGOs supported 127 village land commissions (COFO) in 21 municipalities in their efforts to resolve land conflicts and issue preliminary land certificates in villages. While the government has yet to issue formal land deeds to land certificate holders, the customary land security gained through COFO has provided important development in villages and has protected them from encroachment.  

The capacity building processes conducted in the project increased awareness of the customary land boundaries which turn out crucial for peaceful development in villages. Additionally, due to COFO basing their actions on the LFA provisions and due to the conciliation mechanisms, at least 120 various villages have prevented conflicts from escalating.   

Finally, beyond securing customary tenure land, 10,000 hectares of forest were mapped, and the project’s classification processes enabled the successful protection of this forest land. 27 COFO areas conducted participatory mapping in almost 29,000 hectares, and 13 villages received provisional certificates from COFO in around 18,000 hectares of land. The provisional certificates issued are awaiting a formal process to be adopted.