Illovo Sugar : 2016-10-18 Major support secured for Illovo Land Rights initiatives

Major support secured for Illovo Land Rights initiatives 18 October 2016

Illovo Sugar, in partnership with Landesa, an international NGO specialising in land and land rights (http://www.landesa.org/), has been successful in securing support from the UK Department for International Development (DFID) to facilitate an intervention aimed at building the group's capacity to implement its Land Guidelines and Roadmap.

Through capacity building programmes, the project also aims to equip local organisations surrounding Illovo's sugar cane estates to deal with land rights issues and further, looks to assisting the private sector with tools and problem solving aids in order to effectively tackle land challenges of its own. Says Larry Riddle, Illovo's Advocacy Director: "While structurally, due to their skills and expertise in Land Rights and managing DFID funded projects, Landesa is the lead partner, the project is based around approaches and tools aimed at solving some of the challenges we face at Illovo when dealing with our own land issues and implementing our road map".

Formally, the project is known as:- 'From commitment to practice: Supporting the operationalisation of private sector land rights commitments through a pilot of the New Alliance's Due Diligence Tool', or 'C2P' as a working title. The due diligence tool referred to here is the Grow Africa New Alliance Analytical Framework for Land Based Investments in African Agriculture which provides a step by step guide to managing new land investments but requires interpretation and assistance when dealing with existing investments and with long-standing legacy land issues.

Addressing land issues

The project will physically address land issues in Mozambique, Malawi and Tanzania, although it will also incorporate advice and roadmap implementation experiences from Illovo's land "champions" in its three other countries of operation. It will also promote an approach that aligns Illovo's Land Guidelines, along with its Road Map on Land Rights, with the principles embodied in the FAO Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forests (VGGT) and approaches to responsible agricultural investments in land as set out in the New Alliance Due Diligence Tool.

The project activities will focus on all related stakeholders - including, and particularly women - who stand to benefit or lose by virtue of land-related investments, and will also guide and assist Illovo, as well as other investors that may subsequently use the project outputs, to make good on the obligations set out in Land Guidelines and similar commitments. Equally, the project will also produce a monitoring and evaluation approach that will increase accountability, provide for adaptive refinement of project activities, and generate and add learning and knowledge to good and best land governance practices through the dissemination of project products.

Landesa's Jolyne Sanjak and David Bledsoe will serve as its senior technical managers, with day-to-day technical input coming from a number of Landesa land tenure and gender

specialists. David has worked with Illovo in Malawi and Tanzania. The Illovo project lead will be Kate Mathias who specialises in advocacy and particularly, land rights issues within the countries in which we operate.

Whilst the implementation of the C2P project will result in a delay to delivery dates published in our roadmap, it will certainly result in more comprehensive, participatory and effective land assessments and strategies to manage land tenure along the supply chain. In the meantime, we can report that steps 1, 3 and 8 have been completed and that once the project planning has been completed, an updated version of the roadmap will be published.

For more information, please email Kate Mathias on [e-mail] or Chris Fitzgerald on [e-mail].