ILALASIMBA, Tanzania, (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – Y olanda Ngunda has every reason to smile now she holds a title deed recognising her as sole owner of a disputed plot of rugged farmland in Tanzania’s remote southern highlands.
For the past decade, the 51-year-old widow, who lives in Ilalasimba village in the rural district of Iringa, was embroiled in a family feud as her brothers-in-law tried to grab her land and kick her out of a brick house she built with her late husband who died after a short illness.
“I have been living in fear all those years because I did not have any document that supported my land rights claim. I have now won the battle,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation, proudly displaying her certificate printed on pale-green paper. Ngunda, who has four children, is among hundreds of Ilalasimba residents who have secured land titles thanks to a pilot project funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).
Ngunda said her brothers-in-law had even threatened to set her house on fire. “But I stood firm to defend my children’s property,” she said proudly.
Iringa is one of many areas in Tanzania where there are cases of property grabs involving widows, rights activists say.
The prevalence of HIV/AIDS in the region has made many widows susceptible to losing their property as family members who know little about the disease accuse them of killing their husbands to inherit property.
Tanzanian law grants women the same rights as men to access, own and control land, and allows them to participate in decision-making on land matters. But only 20 percent of women possess land in their own names, according to USAID.
Customary norms have made it hard for women to obtain land in their own right. Instead many access it through their spouses or male relatives, meaning they often end up losing it if those men die.
In an effort to help Tanzania’s authorities secure village land rights, USAID launched a project to map geographic and demographic data using mobile phone technology, with the aim of speeding up land rights registration.
The “Mobile Application to Secure Tenure (MAST)” project enables villagers to identify property boundaries and gather the information officials need to issue land ownership documents.
TECH-SAVVY MAPPERS
Launched in 2014, the $1 million project, implemented by the Cloudburst Group, a U.S.-based consulting firm, has simplified the process of documenting land rights while making it more transparent and effective, USAID officials said.
Land registration in Tanzania is a cumbersome process, riddled by corruption and mismanagement, which is why most people lack formal rights to their land, according to Tran-sparency International’s 2013 Global Corruption Barometer.
Karol Boudreaux, a land tenure expert with the Cloudburst Group, said the MAST project is designed to be participatory so that it raises awareness among women about their right to own and inherit land, while equipping village leaders with skills to resolve disputes.
“We have recognised that these rights have not been well understood in some places,” Boudreaux told the Thomson Reuters Foundation, noting that widows in particular face barriers to owning and inheriting land.
