Establishing land offices, design and installation of land information systems, provision of land certificates and legal changes takes time-often longer than the Compact period and depends on government processing and approval. Similar to other land projects, it took a significant amount of time in Benin to set up land offices, which led to delays in delivering certificates and insufficient time for training and other measures that would have mitigated the risk of unsustainable land information systems. Projects should be reasonably scoped to allow completion in time as well as institutional and financial feasibility assessments to support sustainability post compact. In Benin’s case 300 villages was overly ambitious and too large an effort to complete in a 5-year period. Even after the offices were established and capacity built to map and process land use rights, the government required field validation of private surveyor work leading to further delays. There should be an agreed upon streamlined process to recognize and formalize land rights during compact implementation, regardless if the project is trying to streamline these regulations and procedures as part of the Compact. Demand for formal land certification was present but exceeded the government’s ability to process the requests. The processing of a small number of certificates was largely done in the last year of the compact and then more slowly processed in the post compact period. Delays in certificate issuance prevented the evaluator from measuring those effects even though two follow-up data collection rounds were completed post compact. Similarly, the changes drafted for land legislation did not get passed until well after compact closure. Similar delays have occurred in other MCC compacts and a more realistic expectation of time to complete land activities and related benefit streams should be built into the timelines and related logic frameworks and cost benefit analysis. Streamlining of administrative and technical procedures should also be considered moving forward. These lessons from Benin and MCC’s other early land compacts have already been incorporated into scoping and institutional assessments completed in future MCC land projects.
Lesson Learned