The issuance of individual certificates to customary land holders as part of the Tenure & Global Climate Change (TGCC) project in Zambia is intended to “promote, strengthen, and eventually ensure the consistent application of law as it relates to customary land” (TGCC, 2014).

The lack of a legislative framework that explicitly authorizes the documentation of customary land rights in this way means that the piloting of certification to be undertaken in 2015 by the Chipata District Land Alliance (CDLA) will be operating in a legal ‘vacuum’. On customary land, the chiefs hold land in trust for their subjects, and are tasked with administering customary land in terms of land allocation, dispute settlement and usage restriction. There is no specific state legislation to guide customary land administration per se and nothing that regulates how land holdings can be certified.

There is, however, nothing that explicitly prohibits a certification process, implemented by the chiefs and aimed at documenting the traditional allocation of rights to land within their jurisdiction. Indeed, the piloting of this methodology by the CDLA will not be the first time that this has been undertaken in Zambia. There are a number of other initiatives being implemented by various organisations, both from civil society and the private sector. The TGCC project and the CDLA hope that the current exercise in Chipata can, along with these other initiatives, feed into a national policy discussion about securing tenure on customary lands and the design of an appropriate methodology for achieving this.

The current lack of any legal guidance means that there are a number of important issues, regarding the nature and content of the certification process, which have had to be decided and designed for the purpose of this pilot. Those decisions have been taken in consultation, discussion and debate with a range of key stakeholders. The TGCC project has held several workshops in Lusaka and Chipata, in September of 2014 and February of 2015. National policy-makers, representatives of NGOs, lawyers, economists, GIS specialists, gender experts, chiefs, indunas, fieldworkers and the intended beneficiaries of the certification process have all had a role in defining the process and the methodology contained in this manual.

The certification process builds on an earlier initiative, also carried out by the CDLA with TGCC support, to map the outer boundaries of the participating villages. This work also included identifying areas within the villages which provided access to resources to all village members, areas which were under dispute between villages and areas that are reserved as State land or protected forests.