We recently spoke with Dr Elizabeth Daley, Independent Land and Gender Consultant and Thrive Law Changer in Australia, about her work leading Mokoro’s WOLTS project to promote inclusive land governance and foster community-led Gender and Land Champions in pastoralist communities in Mongolia and Tanzania. In this interview, we explore the impact of this project on land rights and gender relations in communities, and how this model can inform future practice in the sector.
Hi Liz, welcome and thank you for joining us today. To begin, it would be great to understand more about the context for this project. What were the aims when you first started, and what was your long-term vision for the project?
Hi Ruby, and thank you for the invitation to chat about WOLTS. The project has grown a lot. Stage 1 was a research stage. WOLTS began as a research project, where the idea was to strengthen the evidence on issues around access to land, and involvement in land governance, land management and decision-making about what gets done with land. This was based on identifying threats to women’s land tenure security and then exploring what can be done to address them.
From the start, we had a long-term vision that it would be action research and we would use it as a process to build capacity of our local partners and the communities that we were working with. This meant working with both ordinary people and their local governments, to try to build consensus that you can’t protect the whole community’s land if you don’t protect women’s rights within the community and the land rights of all vulnerable community members. You have to have everyone participating in deciding what to do with community land if you’re going to have a chance of sustainably protecting it from outside investors or damage from climate change, for example.
So there was always this second strand of capacity building towards empowerment, hence action research - which is research for a purpose. Our Stage 2 was a training programme, as we didn’t want to just go somewhere and do a bit of research and then leave, as many projects do. We wanted to leave behind a situation where change for the better had actually taken place. Then by the end of Stage 3, which focused on disseminating our findings, we were hearing things from the field about new initiatives and new wins for the communities. So the project has taken on a life of its own, which is really exciting to see.
So that was our initial three-fold vision - evidence, action, impact. But our vision has continued to grow, because, as a team, we started to feel like we were doing something that’s really working, so our vision has got bigger and bigger. We began to realise that if this works in fragile pastoralist contexts, maybe it can work in communities living in forests, or in fishing communities on shorelines that are degrading as sea levels rise, in other contexts and countries.
Another point is that we started off with land and natural resources as our entry point, and over time changes in social norms started to appear. This included men’s attitudes towards women, not just in terms of their land rights but also around gender-based violence and practices such as early marriage – there were a lot of shifts in social norms and attitudes. Once again, our vision for WOLTS grew as we realised that this approach of working in communities, listening to people, gathering evidence, being really rigorous in our approach, conducting repeat visits and building relationships - it filters into so many aspects of people’s lives.
I’m guessing those additional impacts and the changes that you mentioned were a result of the Gender and Land Champions Training Programme. Can you tell us a bit more about that, what it entailed, and some of the methods that you used?
When we were doing the Stage 1 research, once we’d done our baseline survey and participatory research, we put it all together and took the results back to the communities and said - “Here’s what you told us, have we got the issues right?”. We asked them - “If these are the issues, what needs to be done?”. The demand for the training programme came from the communities. To understand relevant laws they needed legal empowerment training. They needed to know how to engage with outsiders who were asking for land, how to deal with mining companies who had started digging on people’s grazing land, and even how to talk to their local government. This part of our training concentrated on boosting knowledge, capacity and confidence. The other aspect of the training responded to women reporting that they were not being heard in meetings and that men in their communities were not listening to them. So we decided to support capacity and confidence building through integrated training with men and women together that strongly addresses gendered social norms, using the communities’ feedback to design it, and asking them to choose who among them should be trained. We were looking for about 30 people in each community, and they had to be people with the capacity to then use the training to support their community. We asked community members to nominate people who they thought of as good citizens, with a request that we hoped for a mix of genders, ages, traditional leaders, disadvantaged people, but essentially that community members could choose the people who they thought would be best – and they did! We have great groups of Gender and Land Champions in all four pilot communities. And they aren’t all elites! For example, there are young women who have done really well at school, maybe from a poor family but are highly respected in the community because they have the capacity to solve problems. That was great!
We have four main steps in the training programme. We have basic training on land rights and gender, a module that focuses on investment, another focused specifically on mining, and then a final module on gender-based violence and facilitating participatory meetings and public speaking skills. In between these training sessions we have catch up sessions and the Champions are asked to go and share what they are learning with others in their community and report back on it next time. For example, in Mongolia, one lady, while waiting at the collection point for selling milk to local traders, used that opportunity to share with other women what she had learned about their rights to question mining companies who start digging in the area. Champions would come back and share all these examples with each other, of how best to pass on what they were learning, which was really exciting. So the interactive training with our facilitators and the Champions is very much demand-driven and very participatory. For example, Champions reported that it was good to know the laws but they also wanted to know how to articulate them, so in the final sessions there is a lot of public speaking and participatory facilitation practice.
After all the training finished, in our Stage 3, some of the Champions in Tanzania, together with our CSO partners, HakiMadini, went to 12 other communities, where they joined meetings with Village Councils and shared what they had done to protect their community’s land rights. Most of our champions in Tanzania are Maasai, who are a marginalised group, and they went to some non-Maasai farming communities where people were really impressed, for example, by seeing an elderly Maasai woman speak so confidently on these topics.
It is amazing to hear that detail and I liked what you were saying about selecting people that members of the community had chosen. As an outsider, you can see those with high profile and status but actually it’s the members of the community who know who’s going to have the most impact and going to be the most inspiring.
Yes, absolutely. In two of the pilot communities we did two rounds of training because we were trying to work out how we could train some of the Champions to become Mentors to new trainees, to make the project more sustainable and impactful. The first round of Champion selection was quite broad – we put the word out to everyone who was at the community feedback meetings and who had been engaged in our Stage 1 research, and we asked them to nominate and suggest people. We also approached people who seemed to have a lot of local knowledge to ask them who they thought we should include in the training and who they would want to nominate. We got a lot of suggestions that way. When we did the second round of training in two communities, we got all the trained Champions together and asked them to decide on who among them should mentor a new group of trainees. They had to choose among themselves based on who they thought had learned the most and who would be the best Mentors on behalf of them all. Then we asked them to nominate 30 new trainees. It was great to watch – I was out in Tanzania for one of those sessions and it took about two hours and there were all of these names popping up. You’d see a feisty older lady, who would have been really timid before, actually speaking up to a former village leader, challenging his nominations and making new suggestions. It was a really dynamic process once they all got behind the idea. The Champions are from and for the community. There are no active local government members in the training, but they are not against the government. Essentially, the Champions are a cohort of community supporters who help the community and the local government at the same time, with all their extra knowledge and skills that can be a really valuable resource for the community as a whole. Champions in all the communities really got behind the idea. The groups in Mongolia even set up their own facebook groups to keep in touch and share information between and after the training sessions. It’s developments like this that are really exciting for me to see!
I’d be interested to hear more about how the gender dynamics changed broadly within the communities, could you share more about that?
Yes, I can give two specific examples on that, and some of our WOLTS blogs elaborate on these particular examples. A powerful example from Tanzania, that we saw quite early on, was that when we first started working there women didn’t sit on chairs in village meetings. They would just stand around the edges or sit on the ground, and the men would take the chairs. We were told in our research that this was normal, and the same in all village meetings. But in our meetings, we said - “Everyone needs a chair, let’s get some more chairs”! Then we got to a certain point where one of the local men told one of our team members that since WOLTS started coming regularly, women have to have chairs in village meetings, and that if there’s only a limited number of chairs then the young men have to stand up and let the older ladies sit down, which is the opposite of what it was before. We couldn’t believe it at first, and my colleague, who is a Maasai woman, also couldn’t believe it. However the local women confirmed that they do get chairs now and also that they can and do ask men to give them a seat and get it. They also get invited to speak in meetings now. So it sounds small, but that’s actually a really big change for that community in Tanzania. And my colleague, Joyce Ndakaru, wrote a blog about it.
The second example is from Mongolia, where gender-based violence was not talked about much in public when WOLTS started. It was somehow taboo and we had to handle it very carefully. It actually got raised by the Champions during a role play they did during the training. We then piggy-backed off that, to ask if people knew what Mongolian law says about gender-based violence, what the international conventions that Mongolia has signed up to say, and what they thought about it themselves. The Champions said they wanted to know more, so we explored the topic with them further. Then in the next meeting, a man Champion brought in an A3 size poster he had made with all of the relevant local hotline numbers for reporting gender-based and domestic violence, which he proudly told everyone that he had already put up in the district office and in other prominent places around the community. Again our team was wowed!
In Tanzania, we also have some older Maasai men in one community who really got on board with the idea that gender-based violence is wrong, especially practices like early marriage. One is a member of the traditional local Maasai council. He told us - and this has been corroborated by other people who were there - that he stood up in those traditional all-men council meetings and told all the other traditional leaders that they are breaking the human rights of their daughters if they marry them off too young. Where that activism has come from, as he explained it, is from taking part in the WOLTS training programme that brings men and women together. This is different to other projects where women are usually trained separately and sometimes men are not included at all. People sometimes think that you can’t get good results in a project about gender if you put men and women together, because of the discrimination and gender bias that’s already there. But it’s not true. It depends how you do it. And our WOLTS team facilitators are really good!
In WOLTS training, we use a lot of role play. For example, we have one scenario in Tanzania where a widow is about to lose her land because her deceased husband’s family is going to take it. We usually give that scenario to the men and women in the training group separately. This means that some of the women have to play men coming to take a widow’s land, and one of the men has to act the role of a widow, and then they perform their role plays for each other. There is always riotous laughter, but then we have a discussion about it and the men begin to see that maybe that situation is really hard for the widow. Role play is so powerful if you create a safe space and make it fun. The Champions are always asking - “Are we doing role play today?”.
That’s so nice, role play is great to be able to visualise and it’s nice that they’re so receptive. That’s something we try to incorporate into our workplace training but because it’s quite a formal environment sometimes people are hesitant so it’s great that you’ve had that reception. It’s also great that you have those in-community champions for gender equity as well.
Absolutely, role play is really powerful. We saw that in our dissemination stage too, in Tanzania when some of the Champions went to neighbouring communities, and in Mongolia when some of them came into the capital city and met up with regional and national level civil servants in the Mongolian Land Agency (ALAMGAC) and shared with them what they’d been doing. In Mongolia, the Champions took part in a workshop with government officials where they all did a role play, so you had Champions and government officials in groups doing it together, and we got really fantastic feedback from everyone involved. Actually at that government workshop, officials from different regions of Mongolia spoke about the need for the same training programme in their area as well, because they saw that the Champions are now a resource to help the government and the community to come together to protect everyone’s land.
I wanted to ask you a bit more about that dissemination stage and how you shared your findings beyond the communities as well. How did you do that and how were the communities involved in that process as well?
We did different things in each country, and at different levels. But one of the things we did in both countries was to have two Champions from each community, who the other Champions had nominated, to write a blog. We arranged a video call with our strategic communications advisor and she talked them through the process of telling a story that they wanted to share with the world. These were published on global platforms and the Champions who have got mobile phones have seen their blogs and photos on the internet and shown them to others in their communities, which caused a lot of excitement. That was one aspect of our dissemination stage, to elevate Champions’ voices directly up to national and global policymakers.
Then we focused more on the national level in Mongolia because we already have a strong collaboration with the Land Agency, ALAMGAC. We organised a workshop and asked the Mongolian Champions who they wanted to attend to represent them. Immediately they decided - “We need to send one man and one woman!” We didn’t have to suggest that. They nominated people to go from both pilot communities, and our CSO partners, PCC, arranged for them to meet for a couple of days before the workshop, and they prepared together and exchanged a lot about what they’d done in each of their communities. They also arranged meetings after the event so they could feed back to the Champions who hadn’t taken part, and we heard really beautiful comments about how they’d chosen the best people to represent them. It was also exciting to see the Champions grow in confidence, to know that they can actually have an impact and they are now speaking to national policymakers.
In Tanzania, we decided to do our dissemination work at a more local level, to have a more effective impact. We visited different districts and Champions again selected among themselves who should go to represent them all. In Tanzania, you have to go through various protocols before you can actually hold a meeting in another village, so Champions were meeting the relevant district officials and village leaders with our team members, and then going to present about what they have been doing with WOLTS at different Village Council meetings. Our HakiMadini team was there as well, and they would facilitate a participatory discussion and Q+A afterwards. Again, we had further meetings back home for the Champions to feed back on their trips away – where they had been and what the reaction had been, and they also shared their blogs aloud. It was fantastic! We would love to scale this process up and take it into more communities because it’s been wonderful to watch.
And what has the response been then from policymakers and senior officials, are they quite receptive to the work?
Yes they are! In Tanzania we’ve had a lot of support at district and local levels, in the mainly pastoralist areas of northern Tanzania. In Mongolia it’s a different environment. Population-wise, it’s a much smaller country, and about half of the population lives in the capital city so it’s easier to get access to national government officials . As we started WOLTS in Mongolia, ALAMGAC had just started piloting an approach to participatory national land management planning. However, it didn’t have a specific gender element, so a couple of years into our project, our local partners initiated a collaboration with ALAMGAC to develop Gender Guidelines to complement their planning process. PCC and WOLTS signed an MOU with ALAMGAC to jointly develop and test these in one of our pilot communities, and it has since been published within a reprint of the official participatory land management planning instruction book. This means the Gender Guidelines now comprise one chapter - a gender module - on how to run participatory consultations with the community that are inclusive and gender responsive. As part of our dissemination stage, and this was during COVID, we organised a series of 30 workshops online to introduce the Gender Guidelines. There are 330 rural districts in Mongolia and ALAMGAC’s district land officers came to those workshops and our PCC team facilitated everything in Mongolian and walked them through the Guidelines. Since then, PCC, through funding from other projects in Mongolia, have done some face to face workshops on the Gender Guidelines in a small number of districts, but on a really small scale. So that’s one of the things we’ve thought about in terms of scaling up, because when you’ve got a strong cohort of Champions and a set of Gender Guidelines to support land management planning, then you have a really knowledgeable and engaged local population and a respected, equitable and participatory process - so you can get the best and most sustainable outcomes. It’s just a question of how you roll that out for the whole country.
Amazing, that draws us to the end of the interview. But it would be nice to finish on what some of your future plans are, I know you mentioned maybe exploring options to scale up?
We don’t have any definite plans at the moment. We’ve been lucky to have had grant funding through all our research, pilot training and dissemination until the middle of last year. Since then, we’ve been putting together a menu of different concept notes for discreet activities that could be scaled up in different ways. We’re having conversations with prospective new partners and funders, as well as doing landscape mapping to look at where there could be synergies for us to collaborate. At a small scale we’ve been doing a few different activities but nothing at large scale yet. My main job at the moment is exploring the options and fundraising, so that we can keep building from all our WOLTS work to date. The demand from the communities is there!
Thank you for your time today, it’s been so interesting to hear about the impact this has had in communities and the forward-thinking approach that tackles many different community issues. It is particularly great to hear about the changes it has made to gender dynamics in communities.
To learn more about WOLTS and Dr Elizabeth Daley’s work visit the WOLTS website at https://mokoro.co.uk/project/womens-land-tenure-security-project-wolts/
You can find their latest report here: https://mokoro.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/Confident-Gender-and-Land-Champions_WOLTS_23May2023.pdf
Comments