Verde Azul recently received the award of GESTERRA, a Training Program for Land Administration and Management in Mozambique that has already started. The program will run for five years, ending in 2018. GESTERRA is designed to provide ongoing support to some of the activities launched by the MCA’s “Access to Land” project, which ended in late 2013. Verde Azul was one of the key actors to this successful project and delivered 180,000 land use titles, also improving the capacities of land authorities in the five provinces of northern Mozambique.

GESTERRA’s focus is on developing Mozambique’s institutions for land administration, implementing a unified data system and creating pilot projects and reference models for land access, land delimitation, land-related rights and land use planning. It has two main components:

• Improvement of land management by the Land Consultative Forum, the district land authorities (SPGC) and the National Land Authority (DNTF). In this field, the project strives to link land delimitation, regularization of land tenure and land use planning with local planning and development processes and investment promotion services;
• Consolidation of land administration and establishment of the national land registry, expanding the provision of land administration services to the ten provinces of Mozambique. Verde Azul will develop methodologies and knowledge applied to regularize land tenure in priority areas.

GESTERRA is financed by a donor consortium that includes the Government of the Netherlands, DfID and Sweden’s ASDI.