Project Overview
Around half of Kenya’s land area is thought to be community land. Through colonisation, rights over communal lands were subordinated to the interests of the state and private rights. The process of land seizure, sub-division and selling continued in the post-colonial era, however in 2010 Kenya’s new constitution recognised community lands as a new classification equivalent to freehold. A process for registering this land was then laid down in the Community Land Act (CLA) of 2016.
Building on this event, this project -led by CLAN!, aims to support local communities to formally register their community lands. The project will achieve this goal through implementing an array of actions including raising awareness, supporting communities map their lands and increasing community capacity to register their lands. The project will also strengthen the capacity of community institutions to effectively govern their lands.
The project’s partner communities’ ancestral lands include forests and arid regions where traditional nomadic pastoralist, and agro-pastoralist livelihoods adapt to the harsh, unpredictable environment. However, land transitions and external pressures for conservation, mining and energy projects have restricted access to their lands. These shifts have disrupted traditional resource-sharing systems like transit and grazing rights, leading to competition and conflicts between communities. For this reason, this project will also contribute to conditions that allow for more sustainable land management, including security of tenure, stronger plans and institutions of land governance, negotiation of land-sharing agreements and mediation of conflicts between communities.
The project will also contribute to Kenya’s climate change efforts. By improving tenure security, communities will be able to invest in more sustainable land management practices, reducing soil degradation and forest loss, while increasing the resilience of communities to extreme weather events and long-term change. The project is also committed to promotion of gender equality through its constitution.
The project will be implemented in 17 counties in Kenya. These encompass the majority of counties with significant areas of community land holdings and are representative of the full range of Kenya’s ecological zones. Thus, the project is relevant at a national level.
Finally, it should be emphasised that CLAN! is a land network comprising more than 80 communities, community-based organisations and civil society organisations. CLAN! is the first of its kind in Kenya and is uniquely placed to bring grassroots voices to county and national policy and law-making levels.
By its completion, the 50 project communities will have greater tenure security and securer land rights.
