Scaling up the community land value chain (CaVaTeCo) approach in Mozambique

Mozambique’s constitution, land laws and regulations contain clauses that provide important opportunities for local communities to document their territories and enjoy their land rights. Despite these rights are embedded in law, most rural farmers still struggle to obtain documentation that proves the existence and extent of their land rights. Without such documentation, their lands remain vulnerable to re-allocation by the government to other actors, leaving rural communities in a fragile position.   

Mozambique’s current approach to document land rights follows a formalistic and centrally driven process that envisages the issuance of formal state titles by the cadastral authorities. Projects to address land issues have been developed in the country like the national “Terra Segura” programme, launched by the Ministry of Land, Environment and Rural Development that aims to document and map rights over some 5 million land holdings. However, these efforts have been slow, costly and sometimes inconsistent. 

This project aims to address these land rights issues by testing the community land value chain (CaVaTeCo) approach in different social and agro-ecological settings and by developing an independent platform of integrated tools and technologies that would allow communities in a low resource context, to register and document their land holdings as part of a process that is both legal and legitimate but unfettered by bureaucratic inertia or lack of political will. 

To read a brief overview of Mozambique, click here.

For a timeline of land and forest rights in Mozambique, click here.