Breaking new ground: application of the MSD approach to land certification in Ethiopia
BEAM Grab the Mic webinar
Date: 25th January 2022
Speakers:
Andy Smith, DAI, Team Leader for LIFT
Ignacio Fiestas, Nathan Associates, Market Systems Advisor for LIFT
Solyana Amsalu, Consultant, Team Leader, Market Systems Component, LIFT
Enrico Neumann, Nathan Associates, Monitoring and Evaluation Manager, LIFT
This webinar provided insight into the first ever application of MSD to a land certification programme and how it increased its overall effectiveness and sustainability.
FCDO’s Land Investment for Transformation (LIFT) programme in Ethiopia is the largest land certification programme world-wide, providing 14.3 million land certificates across Ethiopia’s most populous regions.
Through market systems interventions, leveraging the newly provided land certificates, LIFT introduced innovative products in the access to finance, land rental and dispute resolution markets. This allowed farmers to invest more and increase their productivity, leading to higher incomes and more resilient livelihoods.
New benefits, such as allowing farmers to access formal credit, created demand for land certificates and incentivised farmers to register land transactions to keep the land register up to date.
The webinar gave an overview of the challenges of applying MSD in Ethiopia’s current political economy, and to the new context of land certification.
It focused on LIFT’s work in the access to finance market - where the first land certificate-linked loan product in Ethiopia was introduced - discussing the process and policy changes.
Examples of how farmers’ lives were changed illustrated how the new loan product improved livelihoods, contributing to a more sustainable land administration system.