The Land in Peace Project

After approval of the Kadaster proposal, a first necessary action was to establish a working relation with the Colombian government. This was accomplished through an agreement with the Agencia Nacional de Tierras ANT – it was convened to sign a MoU and to start field work in pilot areas of Colombia. The MoU was signed by the ANT director, the president of Kadaster in Apeldoorn and the Dutch Ambassador in Colombia. In later phases of the project, similar Memorandums of Understanding were signed with the cadastral authority of Colombia Instituto Colombiano Augustin Codazzi IGAC, the land Registry, the Superintendencia de Notariado y Registro SNR, Colombia´s national vocational training institute SENA (Servicio Nacional de Aprendizaje), and the Universidad Distrital of Colombia.

As part of the project, several pilots have been organized, applying the Fit for Purpose Land Administration methodology. Over the past decade, Fit-for-Purpose (FFP) land administration has emerged as a viable approach for providing large-scale formal land tenure security. The approach is endorsed by Kadaster - the Netherlands Cadastre, Registration and Mapping Agency - and suggests that FFP facilitates parcel data collection in an efficient way. FFP methodologies and tools contribute to formal tenure in a massive way: fostering participatory approaches, simplifying legal and institutional procedures, and making use of cutting-edge technologies. The benefits of the approach have been tested in several countries with different contexts and FFP, has among others been endorsed by the World Bank, the International Federation of Surveyors (FIG) and UN-Habitat, and is now also applied in the Colombian situation.

FFP Pilots in different parts of Colombia took place.

The first pilot took place in 2018 in Vistahermosa, Meta, where after establishing contact with the local Junta de Accion Comunal, five teams, (with professors and students of the Universidad Distrital of Bogota) accompanied by military anti-mine experts, started measuring up, quite successfully the vereda of Termales, a vereda consisting of 92 agricultural farms. These field works included the presence of ANT and SNR staff as well as Igac and DNP. Later in 2018 a pilot study was added to a neighbouring vereda, Costa Rica.

Two complete veredas were measured: Termales and Vista Hermosa.

Also during 2018 a pilot study was started in the north coast municipality of Apartadó, Antioquia, on request by the director of ANT. With help of the local ANT staff, contacts were made with the JAC of the vereda Los Mandarinos, where field work (plot measuring, interviewing and public inspections) took place.

In two other veredas in Apartadó field work was started during that year. In total Kadaster worked in Apartadó in six veredas. One vereda – La Linda – could only be reached by travelling on horseback. The fieldwork in La Linda was recorded by a well-known Dutch television crew, who made a 20 minute visual report of the work, shown on prime time on Dutch television in October 2018.

In total 4 veredas were measured: Los Mandarinos, La Linda, La Balsa and El Tigre.

In November of 2018 Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte, handed out the first property titles to 18 beneficiaries of Los Mandarinos, in a ceremony with the presence of Colombia´s Minister of Agriculture, the director of ANT and the mayor of Apartadó.

IGAC´s director invited Kadaster to accompany Igac´s work in updating the municipal cadastre of Cumaribo, in the eastern tropical plains. Cumaribo (6.5m hectares) houses 35 indigenous reserves and finds itself at the border of an always expanding agricultural frontier, where communal indigenous land rights clash with an emerging cattle ranchers class, surrounding and encroaching upon the lands of the original population (indigenous tribes of sikuani, piapoco, cuivas, saliva, among many others). The fit for purpose method was successfully applied in a commonly convened land measuring plan between the cattle grower colonos and indigenous habitants with clarifications of mutual land borders.

As a result of the fieldwork, the overlap in claimed area between the Indigenous Reserve Santa Teresita del Tuparro and the neighbouring parcels of the settler farmers was made visible.

By request of IGAC the FFP project was applied also to the urban housing plots of Cumaribo, where until present 250 land titles were handed out, the last ones in a virtual meeting between the mayor of Cumaribo, the Dutch Ambassador and the president of Kadaster in the Netherlands.

In late 2020 a mission was carried out to Barrancominas, in the southern region of Vichada and Guainía departments, to complement IGACs updating work in Cumaribo among the sylvatic Piapoco indigenous reserves.

Asked for by the Dutch Embassy who had made agreements on Dutch International Cooperation with the Magdalena and Huila departments, visits were made to Santa Marta and Huila, to explore possibilities for FFP applications in those regions. In Magdalena progress has been made together with ANT land administration work in the Mohana vereda in the municipality of Ciénaga. These contacts have been expanded later into a FFP training course for ANT officers.

A succesful pilot was carried out in the vereda la Mohana.

In coordination with the Cadastre of Bogota and the Habitat Secretary of Bogota´s City Board, a FFP project was prepared in the Sumapaz in rural Bogota. This project, carried out in the Vereda Tunal Alto (altitude 3300m), serves two purposes. One is to complement Bogota´s rural cadastre, being Sumapaz a heavily conflict and violence stricken area until the recent Peace Agreement of 2016. The second one was to start with training Sena´s land administration instructors and teachers, as to prepare a regular course in Sena´s nation-wide curricular programmes. In February 2022 a pilot FFP program was carried out in Tunal Alto, assisted by 20 Sena instructors

Together with the SENA instructors, several parcels were measured with the FFP methodology.

In October 2021 a New York Times newspaper article mentioned the Kadaster project in Colombia, giving a detailed description of the FFP methodology.

The Colombian presidency invited Kadaster to write a chapter on the FFP methodology in a book on Multipurpose Cadastre, together with the land administration programs of the Swiss government and Usaid. In December the Presidency´s book on Multipurpose Cadastre was launched.