THEME: The land rights of women and other disadvantaged groups may fare better under a local bargaining process than where redistribution is pushed by external interventions.

A December 2000 rapid impact assessment of the IFAD supported Agricultural Development Programme (LADEP) in The Gambia provides insights into the issue of land access and control. The project focuses on sustainable improvement of traditional rice production in order to enhance food security for impoverished households. The priority target group of the LADEP is traditional smallholder swamp and tidal rice growers. They are mainly women.

Overall, the evaluation found a positive programme impact on incremental rice production, household food security, beneficiary incomes, poverty, and asset ownership. While improved rice technologies were also involved, soil and water management is playing a key role. The programme has relied on simple technology and mobilization of community male and female labour for reclamation of land , improving access to land, and improving the water retention of land. Activities undertaken include the rehabilitation or construction of dikes, spillways, bridges, and causeways.

Because LADEP is demand driven, the sites that are selected for development vary by rice ecology and size. Communities become eligible to participate in the programme only if they are willing to provide unpaid construction labour.

Contrary to practice under many similar development projects, LADEP made a conscious decision not to interfere with existing land tenure or impose rigid criteria for redistribution of developed rice land to the poor or to women farmers. Instead, it relies on community decision-making, and a bargaining process between community members with traditional institutions such as the kafos playing a prominent role. The assessment notes that this strategy recognizes the villagers' culture and contributes to their self-respect and dignity. Surprisingly, the results are also better than under earlier projects in The Gambia.

The programme

• empowered the weaker sections of the area population by improving their access to land
• did not weaken women's traditional access to rice land.

What happened was the following. Large areas of lowland rice land, including the best quality land, were controlled by founding lineages that had established the villages in the historical past. Other villagers could only obtain rights to use land through these founding families. Under the project, these founding families needed the labour contribution of the entire community for dike construction to improve the land. The poor in turn negotiated payment in the form of a share of the land. Land conflicts have been minimized and access to land has become less skewed. Had food-for-work been used for dike construction, it would have weakened the owners' incentives to share the land.

Two previous rice development projects in The Gambia had unwittingly undermined women's traditional pattern of access and control over swamp rice and land on which it is grown. Therefore, the planning stage of LADEP noted that one of its possible negative effects could be a decline in women's control of rice land and rice harvest and a decline in women's personal crops (kamanyango). The impact assessment found that this did not occur. The programme actually reinforced women's traditional access to and control over swamp rice and land by:

• Relying on women's self-help labour for dike construction. Labour input, as noted, was found to be directly related to strong claims to land.
• Ensuring that construction of dikes did not affect customary field boundaries.

The assessment found that where bantafaro schemes (rainfed rice fields found on gently sloping land on the edge of flood plains) had reclaimed new and therefore unallocated swamp land from former riverine mud flats, as in the villages of Kinteh Kunda and Alkali Kunda, women who cleared such land could get land rights in their own name. In villages of Mamasutu and Baati Hai, where men had started to grow rice alongside women, women still continued to control the harvested rice, including from the men's fields.

The LADEP positive experience challenges the view that programmes should take it on themselves to ensure increased access to land by women, women household heads, ethnic minorities or other poor or disadvantaged groups, even when this requires ignoring local tradition, social structures and culture. First, as recognized by the evaluation, a programme's land eligibility criteria are rarely fully applied in practice, because of the difficult requirements of data collection on land holdings. Secondly, such criteria and procedures may be counter-productive where they undermine the local bargaining process. The study also suggests that food-for-work should be used carefully as an incentive. It could provide a short-term benefit for the poor at the cost of a greater long-term benefit, such as access to land.

Adapted from:

FAO Investment Center, February 2001, THE GAMBIA: Lowlands Agricultural Development Programme - Rapid Participatory Impact Assessment. Rome.

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