Program areas at Cadasta Foundation
Partner development and support:the overall success of the Foundation's charitable and humanitarian purposes relies on engaging and involving over 100 motivated and trusted partner organizations (charitable, local and national civil society and rightsholder organizations) in order to bring about more efficient, transparent and equitable land governance and tenure security for land holders. The Foundation acts as a facilitator and network agent among stakeholders, enabling the collection of data across communities. Partners use the data to submit land tenure claims to governments and to enable improved access to services, land management, monitoring, livelihoods, and climate outcomes. The Foundation is a strong advocate for enabling partners to collect and share their land rights insights and learning through data portals, dashboards, and storymap tools. Cadasta tools enable partners and rightsholder organizations, such as indigenous alliances, communities and governments to customize data collection to the needs of a particular community or organization. The Cadasta platform securely stores land and resource rights data and allows partners to set privacy levels, consolidate their land tenure information, and to visualize and share data as needed in analyzing and addressing community needs.academic partners: Cadasta has a small network of academic partners to stimulate research, training, and technological advancement in areas such as property rights, and the effect of land tenure rights on poverty alleviation, tenure security, livelihoods, and climate impacts, among other outcomes of improved land tenure rights. Government partners: Cadasta works with over 25 government agencies across its projects. For example, government land officials receive training, support data collection, and issue land documents for projects designed to formalize rights. Cadasta has signed mous and collaborations with ministries of land and other relevant agencies at the district and local levels in uganda, ghana, malawi, liberia, nepal, and other countries. Local partners work with government bodies at all levels during the rights formalization process.
Platform and mobile apps for land tenure documentation, formalization and data management and storage:the Foundation's core activity to further its charitable purpose is the deployment of our esri-powered global platform and mobile data collection applications to partners. The Cadasta platform is adaptable, cost-effective, and efficient, allowing partners to collect, map, own and manage their own data related to land and resource rights and related information.this global platform enables recordation of rights, particularly for those left out of formal land systems. In addition, the platform has the ability to store significant quantities of data related to land, resources and project data based on our partner needs. The platform is secure, ensuring prevention of disclosure of confidential or personally identifiable information.the primary beneficiaries of this work are rightsholder communities with inadequate or lack of land tenure security and legal rights recognition. The Foundation makes the platform available to partners and users in such communities as part of a package that includes system access through log-ins and Cadasta training and services. The platform also serves as a repository of related resource data, such as satellite imagery, a living atlas, data layers, analysis and reporting tools, and other geospatial data, which has traditionally been difficult to access for non-state actors in the sector from a financial and technical capacity standpoint. One of the goals is to enable civil society and rightsholder organizations, communities, governments and individuals in lower resource contexts to interact with and contribute data through fit-for-purpose approaches to securing land and resource rights. Mobile and satellite technology play a central role in establishing fit-for-purpose tools and methodologies to improve land governance in often remote and under-resourced communities. Cadasta also supports data migration and integration for partners and governments to consolidate their data into Cadasta's high-quality platform with a broad set of functions and to visualize other relevant data sets in maps and other formats.where government capacity is lacking or where informal or customary land recordation systems are more prevalent, the Foundation's platform and data storage system can serve as the basis for alternative delivery models for land-related community services that reach the Foundation's constituencies made up of marginalized and under-represented groups in primarily developing countries. The Foundation works with international program partners that work in the area of land governance, protection of indigenous resource rights, conservation, climate, and upgrading of informal urban settlements, some of the partners are based in the united states, including habitat for humanity and landesa, while other ngos are based outside of united states, such as earthworm Foundation, cities alliance, international land coalition, tenure facility, and zoa, among others. Partner agencies are generally either section 501(c)(3) public charities, international charities, international aid agencies or private sector or government entities.cadasta also partners with local and national civil society groups, rightsholder groups, such as indigenous peoples, afrodescendant peoples, local community organizations and alliances, and government agencies working in rural, urban, and forest areas around the world, such as tata trusts, daemeter, Foundation for ecological security, pradan, colandef, earthworm Foundation, and many others.
Training and education program:the Foundation delivers training programs on land administration processes and the collection and management of land rights data to trainers and partners in the field to ensure that individual users and communities understand land rights information and to encourage responsible stewardship of the data. Trainees include those preparing to be trainers, project leads, platform users, government officials, and data collectors, with an emphasis on building local capacity. For example, Cadasta delivers government training to african land officials through an agreement with lantmateriet, the swedish land agency.the goal of the Foundation's training is to teach skills relating to the collection, documentation, visualization, and management of information related to property, land, and resource rights.cadasta's platform provides user guides and training materials through an online training and support portal for existing applications and field data collection methodologies. Cadasta also provides remote and onsite training, an online demo environment, and a global metrics dashboard that shares anonymized project and global project data. These tools and information are provided to support land data collecton and use of data to support advocacy and increased tenure security.cadasta engages in thought leadership by publishing articles and thought pieces on project successes, bottom-up land administraton approaches, and evidence of impact. Cadasta team members present as speakers in global professional, industry, and sectoral forums to promote its work and approaches to change practices in land administration in ways that empower communities and result in sustainable outcomes in agriculture, urban areas, forests, women's empowerment, and climate.