In Liberia, The Cloudburst Group has designed and is implementing a Difference-in-Difference impact evaluation of NAMATI’s Community Land Protection Program (CLPP). The project is helping communities protect land rights through legal empowerment, by-law development, governance strengthening, resource valuation, boundary mapping, and conflict resolution in Lofa, River Gee, and Maryland counties. The program’s goal is to proactively strengthen communities’ ability to protect, enforce, and defend their land rights. CLPP promotes an integrated community land protection model that supports communities to leverage community land documentation processes to create positive intra-community change leading to enhanced agricultural productivity, entrepreneurship, and employment.
Implemented on USAID’s behalf, the CLPP impact evaluation seeks to understand how training, mentoring and other support helps communities protect land claims and how documentation affects land tenure security and local governance structures across 46 treatment and 45 control communities or community clusters. Baseline data collection took place between January and April 2014. Post-baseline CLPP program evaluation activities were put on hold in July 2014 due to the Ebola outbreak, these activities will begin again in Spring 2015.
The Cloudburst Group developed the following instruments for data collection: a large-N household survey (~2,100) of community members, a survey of community leaders (160), key information interviews, and focus group discussions along with high frequency data on conflict and natural resource usage. We worked with a local data collection firm to train enumerators and qualitative researchers.
Our research partner in this Impact Evaluation is Alexandra Hartman, Yale University.