Land governance critical to SDGs

Land provides anchor to all development. No sector can flourish sustainably when issues of tenure security, land use and conveyance aren’t well managed. This is why land governance has become of major concern and got prioritised in regional and global discussions. It’s in recognition of this that the 2030 Sustainable Development agenda escalated worldwide in 2015 identifies land governance as critical and a direct or indirect driver in the delivery of six of the seventeen goals agreed upon in this global agenda. This is why multilateral and bilateral partners are no longer keen to endorse development protocols and agreements without assurances that pertinent land governance issues would be incorporated.

Good land governance is key for the growth of other sectors

Here in Kenya, besides the global goals, the sector and its management will directly influence success in delivering the related and prioritised pillars of food security, housing and manufacturing. Availability, planning and use of land will be critical to these pillars. But land can be very difficult to thump in development discourses that discuss it as a standalone sectoral issue. Indeed, the land sector has traditionally suffered small budgets since policy and budget planners haven’t been able to effectively align it to development pillars and statistics. This has had consequences. The land sector has not been able to enjoy an appropriate budget in order to adequately serve other development sectors. But once land is linked to agriculture, housing, infrastructure and other sectors of development, policy planners and Finance Ministry mandarins quickly thump and incorporate it in budget allocations. It then becomes easy for parliament to vote in funds.

So in planning to ensure that food security is guaranteed, the land component, which is responsible for ensuring tenure security and land use enforcement, needs to be incorporated and sufficiently resourced. Great agriculture incentivises agro-processing and other agro-related manufacturing such as textiles. In planning to deliver on affordable housing, the land sector will play a central role in identifying and providing suitable land, be it under the national or county governments. Where such land isn’t in the public realm, it will have to be acquired and compensated. It will need to be surveyed and incorporated in land use plans. All these need big budget.

Need for planning data

At the higher level, the country continues to suffer information gaps on land holding patterns. While for instance we keep advocating the need for equity and land ownership by women, we have little data around which to do plan. So how many of our women own land currently? And how will this number change in a decade, given the ongoing countrywide sensitisation? We also would want more youth to get into our national food chain. But how many of them own land, or are willing but unable to access land for production? We are also yet to get accurate sampled data on the distribution of registered land countrywide. In the rural areas, the pre-independence generation has been gradually passing on. Financial and process limitations have in many cases left the titles in the name of the deceased owners for very long, yet beneficiaries long subdivided and settled on the land. How many such cases do we have and how do they distort our land registry data? Is the trend broad enough to affect planning? Land fragmentation has been happening rapidly in the highly populated areas and parcel sizes have reduced a great deal? To what extent does this threaten our food security? Do we have pertinent data to study the trend, mitigate and plan accordingly?

How national census could help

The above questions call for base data. And while one would expect that our land registries and lands offices would easily provide answers, this isn’t necessarily so. Computerisation, data categorisation and extra field data collection would be needed to do so. But a good partnership between the Lands Ministry and the Treasury, currently responsible for planning, could help to gradually bridge data gaps. Unavailable data or data that’s not easy to collect under the Lands Ministry could perhaps be easily collected through the routine national census conducted by the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics. The Bureau has both the capacity and resources to facilitate the collection of countrywide land data far more efficiently and faster by use of its national census methodology and tools. But the technocrats in the Bureau must be well guided by knowledgeable land experts. A good structured partnership between the two ministries, incorporating inputs by key stakeholders, would ensure this. Other sector Ministries that consume land data or statistics should be able to indicate upfront what extra data they need collected for their policy and project plans. I am sure data statisticians would be able to harness such comprehensive data to analyse and provide answers to some of the above questions.

It’s instructive that the next national census happens next year. This would be a good point to start. Collected during every census, land data would gradually make it easy to continuously aggregate and analyse land data for more effective policy and project planning. And the costs of data collection may be lower.

Dated 8th December, 2018