Impact evaluation of the Feed the Future Tanzania land tenure assistance activity : endline evaluation report

This impact evaluation examined USAID?s Land Tenure Assistance (LTA) activity, which was implemented in Iringa District, Tanzania from 2015 to 2019. LTA assisted in land use planning and delivering formalized documentation of customary rights to village residents, known as Certificates of Customary Rights of Occupancy (CCROs), through the use of the Mobile Application to Secure Tenure application. The evaluation randomized treatment assignment across 60 villages, with half receiving LTA?s activities. The five evaluation questions cover the following household outcomes: documentation and tenure security, land disputes, land use and investment, empowerment, and economic wellbeing.

The evaluation team conducted data collection via a panel survey of 1,361 households over three stages (two baseline phases, an interim midline phase for a subset of households, and an endline phase). The evaluation found that within three years of CCRO receipt, LTA had a large and significant positive impact on household tenure security and documentation of land rights, reduced the likelihood of current and future land disputes, and had a smaller positive impact on use of communal land. LTA did not appear to impact the likelihood of fallowing, crop diversification, household land investments, access to credit, or other indicators of household economic wellbeing during that timeframe. Qualitatively, results suggested tangible and important improvements to women?s empowerment, including women?s increased access to land resources and tenure security. The evaluation results help confirm aspects of LTA?s theory of change and align with literature on the impacts of customary land rights formalization on tenure security and other shorter-term outcomes along the envisioned causal pathways. However, the results also highlight a need to revisit expectations for the time required to achieve downstream impacts in rural smallholder settings as a result of customary land formalization on its own. The lack of downstream impacts related to land investments, agricultural productivity, diversification, and broader economic wellbeing highlight the need for USAID to consider coupling or synchronizing future CCRO provisioning programs with agricultural extension and market linkages support to villagers within identified value chains, and financial literacy, financial services, and business development support, once CCROs are obtained.