Land tenure and land management in the districts around Mount Elgon: an assessment presented to Mount Elgon Regional Ecosystem Conservation Program (MERECP)

This study reviewed historical and current fa ctors and trends affecting land use, land tenure, resource access, human settlement, and conflicts over resource access and tenure in the districts around Mt. Elgon in Kenya and Uganda. Government officials and other sources were interviewed in the districts as well as at the Agricultural Development Corporation (ADC) farms and a development agency, Vi-Agroforestry. Ma ps on land tenure and general characterisation of the programme area are based on information from a variety of sources such as interviews, paper maps and existing GIS databases. Complex historical processes in Kenya and Uganda have led to the current state of land management in the two countries. In Kenya, most of the small-scal e farms in the study ar ea are under freehold tenure as a result of a land adjudication programme that started in the 1950s. On the Ugandan side of the mountain, customary land tenure is common. Although this form of land tenure was recognised in the 1998 Land Act, few customary tenants have obtained certificates of occupancy. Several academic dissertations and papers written in Uganda on the 1998 Land Act were consulted for this report as were vari ous papers about the land reform in Kenya. A common finding from the reviews was that th e land policies in both countries have not resolved and will not resolve the land issues they were intended to address (such as low economic growth and agricultur al production). A large number of studies conducted in an attempt to find correlations between land tenure types and investment show very few correlations. For instance, spatial differences in tree cover in the Mt. Elgon area are the results of complex issues related to history, ethnicity and tradition, farming practices (such as oxploughing) and development projects. Th e study revealed the following problem areas in the current setting of land tenure and land management: Landlessness, settlement conflicts (Benet and Chepyuk, and Namatale), insecurity on the northern side of the mountain, fragmentation of farmland and sma ll land size due to population pressure affecting land management. Other problem area s are women’s lack of tenure rights in practice (tree tenure and land rights), conversion of customary land tenure into freehold (multiple rights to land that are not accommodate d by the law, e.g. wife’s position), resource access to forest products, especially on Kenyan side where joint management of forests is only starting in 2007, and, in the case of Uganda, land offices that do not function.

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DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5716/WP15942.PDF

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