Renewed cooperation on land administration between the Netherlands and Colombia: Chair Executive Board of Kadaster visits the country.
From February 6th to 10th, Mr. Frank Tierolff, Chair Executive Board of the Netherlands Cadastre, Land Registry and Mapping Agency – Kadaster, visited Colombia to learn about and support the “Land in Peace” and “Land at Scale” projects that the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in the country initiated.
The visit began with a meeting with one of Kadaster’s formal counterparts, the Instituto Geográfico Agustín Codazzi – IGAC. Its Director General, the Dutch Ambassador and the Chairman of Kadaster signed a memorandum of understanding. This seeks to promote different bilateral cooperation initiatives oriented to the multipurpose cadastre policy, an important point of the peace agreement between FARC and the Colombian Government.
This collaboration aims to promote innovative, participatory and efficient methodologies that contribute to cadastral processes for land administration. It also encourages the participation of local actors such as young people, and ethnic and rural communities in the development of cadastral processes. Furthermore, it will implement joint research, development and innovation projects.
The Dutch delegation also visited the department of Huila, a large province in the south of Colombia. Here, they learned more about the developments of the most recent pilot of the Land in Peace project. In this, through the “Fit for Purpose” methodology Kadaster applies, young grassroots surveyors are trained, and properties are measured with the owners. Then, if there are disagreements on the land boundaries, these are settled during public inspections and analyses are carried out together with local institutions to provide peasants with land titles. These give them legal security of land tenure.
The representatives of the Dutch government could get a firsthand impression about the context of the Colombian countryside. They experienced the coffee production processes and the importance of land tenure for the peasants. The mission had meetings with the regional government to strengthen alliances and impacts of the project. They discussed information about the levels of informality in the region, the (legal) bottlenecks faced in certain departments, and the efforts of the regional government to formalize land tenure. The Governor of Huila expressed his appreciation for the collaboration with the Netherlands’ government on this topic, and proposed to scale up this work in other parts of the department. A follow-up meeting will take place with the idea to scale up the methodology Kadaster developed with Colombian partners, fit to the local context in the country.
If you want to know more about this project on land issues in Colombia, please contact us via: BOG-LNV@MINBUZA.NL