Land & Rural Development Performance Evaluation – Colombia
USAID’s Land and Rural Development Program helped the Government of Colombia (GoC) improve its ability to resolve the many complicated land issues that must be resolved to achieve a lasting peace.
I was hired as an evaluation specialist to conduct a mid-term performance evaluation with a team of evaluators. This included a six week data collection process with approximately 1500 household surveys, 100 stakeholder surveys, 65 key informant interviews and 10 focus group discussions. I worked on the development of these surveys, led in-country data collection efforts and managed the development of the final report.
Program Components & Objectives
- Restitution Component: Improve capacity of the GOC at the regional and national levels to restitute lands to victims of conflict.
- Formalization Component: Improve capacity of regional and national GOC institutions to formalize rural property rights and to allocate public lands (baldíos).
- Rural Development Component: Improve capacity of regional and national government entities to mobilize and execute public resources for rural public goods.
- Information Sharing and Management Component: Improve information available and efficiently used to deliver land rights services.
Colombian Context
After four years of intense negotiations between the GOC and the FARC, both parties signed a peace accord in the final months of 2016 with the intent of ending more than 50 years of civil war. Although several controversies swirled around the final terms of the agreement, they did not center on the agreement’s commitments to strengthen land tenure security and rural livelihoods, giving the program significant latitude to continue collaborating with the GOC to facilitate land restitution, strengthen smallholder land rights, and mobilize the provision of public goods and services in historically neglected rural areas—and thereby create the conditions for sustaining peace.