Mama Graon – Vanuatu Land Program Taking Shape

After initial preparatory work involving intensive consultation the key Program steering committee has been formed and has established clear functions that will assist with seeing the Program progress. In line with Land Equity International’s commitment to the principles of aid effectiveness our approach to the Program is to maximise local partnerships and encourage national appointments to our adviser team. We strongly believe the Program should be nationally driven and led and as such we are very pleased to announce the recent appointment of Mr Russell Nari to the position of Deputy Program Director/Customary Land Adviser. Mr Nari, a ni-Vanuatu, was previously the Director General of Justice and a previous Director General of Lands. He brings a strong level of national ownership and invaluable cultural and technical understanding to program implementation.

Land Equity International’s flexible and responsive approach to our Program partners has resulted in a further initiative to bring forward the land registration activities to the first year of the Program. At the request of the Department of Lands we have revised the work plan and commenced work on improving the land registration procedures to address the backlog of thousands of unregistered land documents, some of which date back at least 10 years. After the re-engineering of some of the land registry processes, temporary staff have been contracted to work collaboratively with the existing Land Registry staff to accelerate the processing of unregistered documents. Since mobilisation of our contract, LEI’s Program Director has worked closely with both counterparts and donors to enable flexible and mutually agreed responses which are already making positive contributions towards the Mama Graon Program.