Sector Results and Learning:
Land

This Land Sector Results and Learning page is a repository of evidence generated by all MCC-funded land interventions. To promote learning and inform future program design, this page captures monitoring data from key common indicators, showcases recent and relevant evaluations, and includes all agency lessons from completed land evaluations to-date.

What Do We Invest In?

MCC has funded $408.5 million in land interventions as of December 2022. These interventions fall into the following categories: legal, regulatory and policy reform; institutional strengthening; clarification and recognition of land rights; and land use planning and natural resource management.

Legal, Regulatory and Policy Reform

These programs address the land governance environment by strengthening the laws, regulations, and procedures for the recognition, administration and transfer of land rights.

Institutional Strengthening

These programs address weaknesses in land administration by investing in records management and transaction systems, business process change, infrastructure, equipment, and human capacity.

Clarification and Recognition of Land Rights

These programs address weak tenure security and weak understanding of land rights by clarifying and recognizing use rights, rights holders, and parcel boundaries.

Land Use Planning and Natural Resource Management

These programs address inadequacies in land use and management by clarifying land use typologies, demarcating village boundaries, and establishing land use plans.

What Have We Completed So Far?

MCC and its country partners develop and tailor Monitoring and Evaluation Plans for each program and country context. Within these country-specific plans, MCC uses common indicators to standardize measurement and reporting within certain sectors. See below for a subset of common indicators that summarize implementation achievements across all MCC land investments as of December 2022.

135

legal and regulatory reforms adopted

399

land administration offices established or upgraded

320,722

land rights formalized

361,634

parcels corrected or incorporated in land system

What Have We Achieved?

MCC commissions independent evaluations, conducted by third-party evaluators, for every project it funds. These evaluations hold MCC and country partners accountable for the achievement of intended results and also produce evidence and learning to inform future programming. They investigate the quality of project implementation, the achievement of the project objective and other targeted outcomes, and the cost-effectiveness of the project. The graphs below summarize the composition and status of MCC’s independent evaluations in the land sector as of November 2022. Evaluations of land investments that were part of a broader agriculture or irrigation project will be reflected in the Agriculture and Irrigation Sector Results and Learning page. Read on to see highlights of published interim and final evaluations. Follow the evaluation links to see the status of all planned, ongoing, and completed evaluations in the sector and to access the reports, summaries, survey materials, and data sets.

Go to our List of Evaluations to see the status of MCC’s land sector evaluations

Highlighted Evaluations

October 11, 2022 | Cabo Verde Compact II

Investing in Land Management Systems in Cabo Verde

Land sector work helped improve the property registration process

  • Evaluation Type: Performance
  • Evaluation Status: Final

MCC’s $65.6 million Cabo Verde II Compact funded the $17.5 million Land Management for Investment (LMI) Project, which aimed to reduce the time for establishing secure property rights and establish more conclusive land information on four islands in Cabo Verde with high tourism development potential: Sal, Boa Vista, São Vicente and Maio. The Legal and Institutional Foundations Activity established a series of national legal, regulatory and procedural changes and created the new Land Management, Information and Technology System (LMITS). The Rights and Boundaries Activity worked to populate LMITS with up-to-date property rights and boundary information.

Read Evaluation Details or the Evaluation Brief

A man with a red hat stands with another man looking at a topographical map

October 1, 2022 | Indonesia Compact

Land Use Planning for Sustainable Growth in Indonesia

Low utilization of spatial planning tools, despite high stakeholder interest

  • Evaluation Type: Performance
  • Evaluation Status: Final

Read Evaluation Details or the Evaluation Brief

Two men stand on either side of a door covered in a celebratory opening ribbon.

April 22, 2022 | Lesotho Compact

Land governance reform for equity and growth in Lesotho

Legal and institutional reform catalyzes land and credit markets

  • Evaluation Type: Multiple
  • Evaluation Status: Final

MCC’s $358 million Lesotho Compact funded a $17.9 million Land Administration Reform Activity within the Private Sector Development Project. The activity supported land policy and regulatory reform, streamlined land administration procedures, created the Land Administration Authority, conducted public outreach, and supported systematic land regularization. The activity was based on the theory that strengthened tenure and efficient land administration would reduce land conflict, drive formal land transactions, and increase investment and use of land as collateral, which would contribute to private sector development, especially for women.

Read Evaluation Details or the Evaluation Brief

Go to our Evaluation Brief page to see all completed land sector evaluations

What Have We Learned from Our Results?

To link the evidence from the independent evaluations with MCC practice, project staff produce an MCC Learning document at the close of each interim and final evaluation to capture practical lessons for programming and evaluation. Use the filters below to find lessons relevant to your evidence needs.

  • MCC’s rural development projects are often built around interdependent multisector investments; however, in practice, separate implementation of these projects often occurs as they move at different speeds with distinct stakeholders.

    MCC’s rural development projects are often built around interdependent multisector investments; however, in practice, separate implementation of these projects often occurs as they move at different speeds with distinct stakeholders. MCC should remove dependencies except when absolutely needed or consider how to structure these investments to ensure alignment. In Ghana, the Agriculture Project expected that complementary investments in farmer training, land access, access to credit, and rural roads would support agricultural productivity and farmer access to markets. However, in practice, the implementation of roads, agriculture and land programs were distinct and occurred in different locations. The agriculture and Land Tenue Facilitation (LTF) efforts were not advancing at the same rate, and the LTF selected a district in a peri-urban rather than a rural agricultural area. This led LTF to spin off from the Agriculture Project and act as a standalone project. In the end LTF did not lead to the project goal of improving agricultural productivity though it had standalone benefits of increasing off-farm incomes.

    Similar occurrences have happened in other land interventions. In MCC’s Participatory Land Use Planning under the Green Prosperity (GP) Project in Indonesia, the land activities moved forward at a quicker pace than the rest of GP and areas selected were distinct from those of GP investments. At other times, the interventions have occurred in tandem. In Senegal, the land and irrigated infrastructure activities implemented in tandem in the same irrigated perimeter.

    The key is understanding the critical issues, including whether an interdependency in fact exists or whether there are really separate but related interventions that should stand on their own. The best strategy may be to reduce interdependencies where possible and structure these as standalone projects with their own evaluation assessment and economic rate of return. In cases where interventions are dependent on one another and key to obtaining results, MCC should consider how to best structure these multisector investment to maintain alignment of all project activities.

  • The significant investment by the Compact to ensure the achievement of the Participatory Land Use Planning Activity (PLUP) targets may result in interventions that are too expensive for the government to take to scale.

    The significant investment by the Compact to ensure the achievement of the Participatory Land Use Planning Activity (PLUP) targets may result in interventions that are too expensive for the government to take to scale. MCA-I and MCC are considering ways to improve the efficiency of PLUP activities, based on the differing implementation models employed by the various PLUP implementers. The experience so far indicates that targeting local, rather than international, firms to manage PLUP implementation would have been a more cost-effective option.

  • Qualitative data can help clarify and provide insights on unexpected findings.

    Qualitative data can help clarify and provide insights on unexpected findings. In MCC’s early evaluations, such as the evaluation of the Peri-Urban Rangeland Project (PURP), MCC employed largely household surveys with little qualitative analysis. As such, there was no way to obtain an understanding of some unexpected findings. More recently, MCC has used mixed method data collection methodologies, including impact and performance evaluation elements with triangulation of data from qualitative, quantitative and administration data sources. Allowing time for analysis of the household data sets to inform the qualitative instruments and add perspective on some of the results finding in household surveys could be beneficial as well.

    Severe weather can create difficulties in evaluating aspects such as mortality rates and control of animal numbers. In Mongolia, the year of the baseline data collection (Phase 1-late 2010 and Phase 2-early 2012) followed a dzud (2009-2010). This left lower animal numbers and stocking rates on the land than there would have otherwise been and higher than normal mortality rates when measuring animal deaths over the few years prior to the baseline. Although control herders faced the same severe weather issues, it still was difficult to interpret some of the data findings and related causes. For example, animal numbers increased in all areas for both treatment and control herders between baseline and endline, but animal stocking rates of program herder groups remained largely within the carrying capacity of the land that was determined by the PURP implementers in 2009 during parcel mapping activities.

  • Capturing tenure status requires triangulation of data between administrative, survey, and project data.

    Capturing tenure status requires triangulation of data between administrative, survey, and project data. Due to outdated official records and lack of awareness by households on differences in land rights documentation, these different data sets often provide conflicting information on a parcel’s tenure status. Tenure status drives key outcomes like perceptions of tenure security and conflict. When administrative data and survey data do not show the same tenure status, land program implementation data can also provide missing tenure information, including what may be driving the inaccuracies between statutory and perceived tenure status in program areas. An early review of land office databases, along with sharing of project documentation from collections of land records in the field for program areas, can help clarify tenure status and which tenure status is best to use in the analysis. Perception of tenure status drives tenure security and related outcomes while land administration data provides official figures and can provide key information on land transactions rates over time.

    The administrative data and self-reported tenure status often do not match due to gaps in administrative data/outdated or non-matching records combined with misunderstanding of tenure documentation by households. These differences in tenure status can lead to variances in interpretation of findings. In Mongolia Special Hashaa Plot Survey, the evaluator used the General Authority of State Registration (GASR) official tenure status as the main data source and noted the large discrepancies between perceived tenure status and official tenure status. GASR administrative records and self-reporting of registration only matched with 73% of Mongolia survey respondents. This could have been due to respondents confusing the certificate of governor’s decision with a registered title or outdated GASR files due to someone previously holding a title and transferring it informally to a new owner. Those who perceived they had title had higher land values. By comparison, in Ghana the evaluator used the survey data to determine tenure status. Later MCC evaluations try to triangulate tenure data where possible to understand outcomes. In future evaluations, it will be key to coordinate with the land project implementation team to obtain and use both land administrative data and land implementation data in addition to survey data.

  • When establishing a comparison group in land, care should be taken to avoid splitting communities which are under the same land administration unit.

    When establishing a comparison group in land, care should be taken to avoid splitting communities which are under the same land administration unit. During Land Tenure Facilitation, a road was used to form program and comparison groups. The road split left the community split in half. Although the split was good from a statistical point of view as the households and land were comparable, it created problems at a practical level as these households were all under the same land administrative unit. Beyond the practical issues, when looking at effects and longer-term sustainability of land governance systems, it is helpful to have your whole administrative area mapped and registered. Two divergent systems of land rights are difficult to manage and sustain.