East Timor – Strengthening Property Rights Project

Mitigating Conflict over Property Rights and Land Tenure

Land titling is a key element of economic development and security in any country. In East Timor, a country that only gained independence in 2002, conflicts over property rights and land tenure have been a major cause of civil unrest.

ACDI/VOCA, under a subcontract with Associates in Rural Development (ARD), implements the Strengthening Property Rights Project, which supports the East Timorese government to strengthen property rights and resolve conflicts under a five-year program.

To achieve this, ACDI/VOCA implements public information awareness (PIA) and conflict mitigation and reconciliation activities. The PIA program includes a multimedia, national campaign reaching urban, rural, literate and nonliterate populations. Under its conflict mitigation and reconciliation programming, ACDI/VOCA mediates conflicting claims to land, immovable property and natural resources, ensuring that the necessary procedures for resolving and mediating conflicting land claims are in place throughout the cadastre, registration and titling phases of the programs.

In addition, ACDI/VOCA helps improve access to legal justice for all Timorese and legal non-Timorese land claims. A full-time gender specialist employed by ARD supports ACDI/VOCA’s activities to improve legal recourse for women in current and future land claims.

For the past three years, ACDI/VOCA has been working in East Timor on a separate USAID-funded program called the NGO Sector Strengthening project. ACDI/VOCA’s local partner on this program, Belun, is a Timorese intermediary service organization. Belun will play a key role in the new Strengthening Property Rights project, building on these related initiatives from the last few years.

This project was awarded under the Prosperity, Livelihoods and Conserving Ecosystems (PLACE) IQC contracting mechanism, under which ACDI/VOCA is a member of the ARD consortium. To read more about the PLACE IQC, please click here.

For more information contact Helen Palfreyman at hpalfreyman@acdivoca.org.

Updated: 11/08

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