Abstract
D.Litt. et Phil. (Development Studies)
Since independence, land distribution patterns in Malawi have remained highly skewed, supporting land ownership concentration in the hands of a few rich individuals. This reflects land and agricultural policies adopted in the colonial times, which have continued in very similar ways in the postcolonial epoch. As part of a process developing a solution to this problem, a pilot land reform project called the Community-Based Rural Land Development Project (CBRLDP) was implemented from the year 2004 to 2011. The project redistributed 33,428 hectares of land to 15,142 landless people with the aim of addressing inequality and poverty.
The US$29.8 million World Bank funded land reform project gave the beneficiaries transitional group title documentation that could be converted to customary estate using the evolutionary property rights theory. The CBRLDP was established in the context of the heavily contested discourse in Malawi about the future of its agrarian land tenure system; the Land Bill (formulated under the aegis of the World Bank) which was drafted in 2003 was only passed into law in 2016 because it did not get approval of the Chiefs and other stakeholders. This thesis therefore investigates the effects of the World Bank’s efforts by comparing the social relations of the CBRLDP and non-CBRLDP beneficiaries. Qualitative multiple case study method was used, and was based on thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews, focus group discussions, and documentary research. A total of 124 individuals participated in this study.
Findings from the study show that the project was successful in redistributing land to the rural poor; sixty-eight per cent of the project beneficiaries were indeed formerly landless households. However, land in the non-CBRLDP was inequitably distributed, with one chief owning almost half of the village land informally, while some households were landless. The study thus brings out the issue of inequality in the customary lands. In addition, neither CBRLDP nor non-CBRLDP made appreciable material gains during the period under study. Subsistence farming with hoes remained the basic mode of existence, and they failed to graduate from food aid and poverty. This was partly due to the selection criteria, which considered poor, vulnerable, orphans, women and disadvantaged people – overlooking factors such as experience or capability of farming. These findings challenge the World Bank’s assumption that customary tenure systems are evolving to efficient, capitalist, forms of land holdings.