This is the first of two episodes on the issue of Housing, Land and Property (HLP) in a humanitarian context. The Episodes are co-hosted by: Alexandre Corriveau-Bourque, Co-Founder of Verent Solutions. and Trumanitarians usual host Lars Peter Nissen.

The guests in Part 1 are: Irantzu Serra Lasa, the Senior Director for Disaster Risk Reduction and Response from Habitat for Humanity International, Ibere Lopes the Housing land and Property Advisor for the Global Shelter Cluster and Shezane Kirubi, a Housing land and Property specialist with IOM Somalia.

For more information on the Conference Series on HLP in Crisis Contexts which is discussed in the episode see Outcomes from Inaugural Global Conference in 2023.  

The next conference will be the Dialogue on Community Land Trusts for Disaster Resilience and Humanitarian Responses - April 2-4 2024, in Puerto Rico. Second Global Conference on HLP in Crisis Contexts - May 15-17, 2024, in Washington DC. For information about any of these conferences contact Juli King – jking@interaction.org

To learn more about the work in Somalia see The Danwadaag Initiative.

Welcome to Trumanitarian. I'm your host last Peter Nissan, and with me in the studio today I have Alex. Hi, Alex, would you like to introduce yourself?

Hi, Lars Peter. My name is Alexandra Corriveau-Bourque and I'm one of the co-founders of Variant Solutions, which is a company that is trying to transform the way that humanitarians support refugees who live in rental housing. But more importantly for this conversation, I'm just a passionate nerd on the subject of housing, land and property.

Right. So housing, land and property, HLP, is going to be the theme of this double episode. It’s such a complex and rich theme that we actually had to chop all our interviews into two episodes. When you first came to me with this idea of doing an episode on HLP, I have to admit I wasn't too familiar with the topic and all the ins and outs. The way you explained it to me is that it's just like the Hitchhiker's Guide to the universe. It's an invisible problem because it's an SEP field: Someone Else's Problem. Just explain to me, why did you use that metaphor?

Well, for anybody who's a deep diver into the universe of Douglas Adams, the SEP field is essentially an invisibility cloak for the ship that they have, which convinces people's brains that they don't see it because it is somebody else's problem. And then unfortunately, that is ultimately what housing, land and property rights is. It's something that surrounds us everywhere. It is right in front of our eyes but organizations, governments and even people on a day-to-day basis often see it as somebody else's problem.

But unfortunately, displacement is fundamentally a housing-led and property problem. So it's everybody's problem. Everyone knows that people's survival depends on having access to safe, stable, and healthy places to live, clean water for domestic consumption and just a place to sort of establish yourselves and create a community, so everybody needs it, but no one looks at it directly. And it was very interesting, when I looked into the SEP field a bit, I googled around and I found out that it wasn't Douglas Adams who came up with it. It started in the mid-70s when there was a journal that published an article on low-income housing and bureaucratic inaction around that. So, actually, the SEP fields that we know and love from the Hitchhiker's Guide originated in thinking around low-income housing and why there are problems around that are not being tackled. I mean, that doesn't surprise me.

No, it's and I have to admit also that that I probably also was a bit fooled by the SEP field of HLP –terrible acronym– but I wasn't acutely aware of just how deeply this penetrates almost every aspect of what we do when we're dealing with people who have been displaced or have lost their home.

HLP issues at their core are messy and they're complex and I think that's why humanitarian agencies often treat it as someone else’s problem. They're already in messy, complicated situations. And they don't necessarily want to add an extra layer of complexity, especially one that's so deeply rooted in the conflict itself. They want to be able to just deliver the assistance. They want to build houses really quickly. And unfortunately, like almost any other protection issues, if humanitarians fail to pay attention to it, they can actually do serious harm to the communities that they're there to help.

But, of course, on this show, we just love– we thrive on– complexity and messiness. And so, let's dive into it. We have two episodes, and the way we've decided to structure this is we will begin with a global overview, speak with a couple of colleagues who are operating at the global level– the policy level– with this and then we will dive into three different contexts. I would like to ask you to introduce those three contexts and say why we chose to focus on those three.

Sure. So, our journey today or over the next two episodes will take us from Somalia to Puerto Rico to Ukraine. And the reason that we invited these speakers is that they're doing work, and they're imagining solutions that I find are truly inspiring. They're the people who looked straight into the SEP field and were able to see that HLP is their problem.

Great, but first, let's do the global level. We have two guests joining us in the studio for that: Please introduce them for us.

And the reason we invited the two of you is that Alex claims that you're both big HLP nerds, and so, you know, tell us why you’re such nerds.

That's a cool way to define it. In my case, I'm an architect and an urban planner and I came to work in humanitarianism with the idea that it was about building houses and getting people into shelter. And what I realized on the first mission that I went into, which was in Haiti, is that the housing was just at the very end of the whole process. There were so many issues that you had to understand before you were even able to build. And, in the situation in Haiti, for example, we need it to understand how people related to the land, the conflict that they have within the land, the fact that there were overlapping rights in the same lot and that organizations were not able to actually move forward without really having an understanding of those, and recovery was completely stopped. It was not about money. It was not about having bricks or having the materials. It was actually about understanding all of the land tenure situations and how you could bend the rules, to being able to build something that could stay with the people that were supposed to benefit from it. When I actually realized that it became something that I really wanted to understand better. I started following up, doing some courses outside of my job, and realizing that once you start putting that into the programming that you do, a lot of things start to make sense because you can have a lot of cascading effects that people actually get empowered to make investments that before they were kind of not really willing to because the land they were occupying could be taken away from them or they could be evicted.

And Ibere, what's your story? How come you're so passionate about this?

So we had this conference earlier this year. What were the main themes that you explored?

I think the conference had two main purposes. One was to connect land issues happening in the domestic US arena, which often gets very overlooked– It is assumed that developed countries do not have these issues– with the work that we are doing internationally, mostly in the humanitarian sector. And also to connect development practices with humanitarian practices. So while we were looking at HLP issues in crisis contexts, a lot of times HLP can be the trigger for actually having a crisis itself because they can generate conflict

So, for me, what was interesting was the fact that we were able to bring the US practitioners and international practitioners and really connect both pieces and realize that this this is an issue that goes beyond vulnerable countries where systems are not in place. It happens in every country: developing or not because land issues depend on history, and they have been changed over time and if you don't understand all of those changes, you risk actually doing harm while you are doing any type of programming because of a lack of understanding about what is beyond and all the tensions that you might be creating.

I had two goals with this conference. The first one was really to build that bridge between HLP in emergency response and in development and the reason for that is that the HLP or land tenure and property rights work in the development space has so much more expertise and develop a whole body of knowledge that we lack in the HP in emergency response and we need to drink from that that fountain. So, I think that's one of the things that we managed to achieve with the conference is to start this connection. Even within the donor community we had USAID talking to BHA on the issue and discussing how they could collaborate. So that was fantastic and the second objective that I had was to expose students and people beginning their professional lives to the HLP sector because I think that's one of the big bottlenecks for our sectors is the lack of people coming into the profession and seeing it as a potential professional pathway.

It's so interesting to hear the two of you describe this conference.

First, I hear you're talking about reaching across the famous Nexus and trying to really collaborate with other communities of practice. Also focus on high income countries and how HLP is a problem there and, very strategically, I also hear you talking about growing a new generation of professionals who are specialized in HLP. I think that's extremely smart.

So, I guess the million-dollar question is, if it is so important, why don't we have an HLP cluster? Why is it sort of tucked away in a corner of the protection cluster?

Look, I agree with you. I think that's it's a failure of the humanitarian architecture to not have an HLP cluster. The HLP of responsibility under the protection clusters to me sits awkwardly in there because, well, first of all, the main operational issues that come up on learning property come from the shelter class of shelter operations.

And then all the other most of the other clusters also deal with land issues. Protection has such a huge portfolio that HLP gets very little attention in there and also the fact that we don't have a cluster doesn't expose us to the rest of the humanitarian practitioners as a legitimate humanitarian area of practice as well.

The second part of your question on why is actually important and is not that there is an invisible thing until you start dealing with the issues, because it's intangible. It's about rights. And when you start talking about rights, it all becomes a bit convoluted. Humanitarian aid is a lot about getting things to people. And yes, the rights are kind of something that you need to keep in mind. But it's assumed that you're going to be looking into it, but unless you do it in a very intentional way, they are overlooked.

As you were talking, I was thinking: What does success really look? Maybe I'd like to ask you, if we gave you a magic wand, each of you, and you had one wish, and you could change humanitarian work in whatever way you wanted, what would that wish?

If I had a magic wand, HLP issues would be mapped so that people could qualify for aid regardless of their tenure status.

My wish is that all humanitarian actors would consider security of tenure as the cornerstone of self-reliance.

So Iru, Ibere, thank you so much for joining us and I look forward to seeing you at the future help in crisis conferences in the coming years.

We have our fingers crossed that your wishes come through. Thanks a lot.

Pleasure. Thank you.

Thanks to you for having us.

Now we go to Somalia, where we are speaking to Shezane Kirubi, a Housing, Land and Property specialist with IOM.

And Alex, you were the one who thought that Somalia would be a good case to look at. Why is that?

Somalia is, as most of your audience knows, one of these protracted conflicts that has waves and waves of displacement that has now captured our imagination for about 30 years.

And HLP is at the heart of a lot of these issues and for the first several decades, it was treated as somebody else's problem. But Shezane, the IOM and the coalition that she's working for have changed that story, and they've suddenly made it everybody's problem. So we're looking forward to learning more about how they've done that.

Fantastic. Shezane, welcome to Trumanitarian.

Great to be here.

Shezane, we've been kicking off these conversations with, why are you such an HLP nerd? So let's start there.

Ohh that's a difficult question. Maybe to start off, I'm Kenyan so I'm from Kenya and growing up as a Kenyan woman and seeing how housing insecurity is a daily reality for countless families, including women and children, I've seen the toil that it takes on lives from the uncertainty of not being able to call a place their home or their struggles over certain property rights, especially for women, who in most cases, particularly in Africa, face incredible amounts of discrimination. So, for me, housing, land and property embodies this vision or this mentality of empowerment and justice it signifies. For me, addressing housing, land and property challenges also signifies the pursuit of a society where, as an African woman, I can confidently be able to secure my housing and property rights, or where I can provide a safe and nurturing environment for my family. So, it's about giving me the tools to other women, the tools to break free from the cycles of poverty and vulnerability.

So for me, that's why it's really, really important and why I'm so interested in this topic.

So, land must be an incredibly complex issue to work with in a country like Somalia. What are some of the obstacles you face?

So, maybe just to give you a bit of background: Somalia has one of the highest displacement statistics globally. We're currently now at 3.8 million internally displaced people and what's interesting about Somalia is a lot of people are moving from rural areas into urban areas and this is because of assorted reasons. We are seeing, because of climate change in which Somalia is one of the most vulnerable countries to the effects of climate change, irreversible land degradation and high insecurity in areas of origin and displacement in Somalia is more of a protracted and permanent nature. And when people come into urban areas, they mainly settled on privately owned land, so a lot of the urban and displaced population in Somalia is housed on informal sets of which I guess are 85 to 90% of these settlements are on privately owned land without any legal guarantees, without any documentation or without any rights. Many instances in rare instances where these land tenure agreements exist, they often take a more informal or oral kind of nature. So they're gentlemen's agreements that can be easily violated or altered without any prior notice.

And can I ask Shezane, you mentioned several times, ‘we did this, we did that’: who are ‘we’ when you speak?

So I didn't introduce the program that I work for, but I work for the Danwadaag Durable Solutions consortium.

And the Danwadaag Durable Solutions Consortium is a combination of like-minded international and local organizations that are working together to provide long term stability and improved living conditions for displaced populations. So the consortium is led by the International Organization for Migration, IOM, and is implemented by international NGO's like the Norwegian Refugee Council and Concern Worldwide and other local organizations, so the unique setup of the consortium has enabled us to see insurmountable success of our project.

While the leadership of the UN agency has also enabled stronger partnerships with government stakeholders and access to donor funding and resources, we, as Danwadaag Durable Colutions consortium, we've adopted a multifaceted approach that involves working with a wide range of stakeholders and we've been working with governments, we've been working with private land holders and we've been working with communities mainly to establish more formal land tenure agreements. So, we've mainly been empowering local authorities to negotiate for this formal land tenure agreement. So one such example is if we have an investment that we want to put into a displacement site, we would usually leverage on this to be able to formalize this land tenure agreement because in exchange for these investments or these infrastructures that would ultimately increase the value of land. So we've seen cases where private land-owners would be willing to sign an agreement ranging between five to seven years and not evict these populations in exchange for these infrastructure investments at the end of the agreement.

In other cases, and this is one of our flagship projects, we've seen local authorities also allocate land. So, one such example is in Baidoa, and Baidoa is interesting because it's a town that has received huge influxes of displaced individuals. So a town that was originally meant to host 70,000 people now hosts almost 600,000 people.

So the Barwaaqo example is really a successful example of how we have been able to mitigate foster evictions because we were able to negotiate with government to allocate land and in exchange, we've been able to provide infrastructure access to basic services, but also for these families, they've been able to access land titles and so the project has been transformational for them because they were facing the highest risk of forced evictions and living in makeshift shelters in overcrowded, informal settlements. And now they are able to live their lives on their own plot of land with their own title deeds. So this example of course is not the the norm in Somalia. It's incredibly rare to have situations where government is able to allocate that land for relocation of displaced populations. So we're trying to see how we can look into other solutions like rental interventions or incremental housing solutions.

That sounds like an incredibly powerful combination of actors from the global level to the local level. Now, the main question that comes to my mind at this point is how do we scale these solutions that you've been working on to be able to support the number the millions of people in Somalia who actually do need this type of support?

But maybe just to mention here, that scale has been the issue, as you point out. And that's why we're trying to look at we are now adopting a new kind of innovative and testing approach. So with funding from USA, we're currently looking at how we can bridge the current knowledge gaps that we faced in phase one of our program and explore more bold and innovative ideas within phase two of our program. So we're taking on projects that other durable solution partners may hesitate or may be unable to take. So, as I said with the Barwaaqo example, because it's not scalable for the 3.8 estimated IDPs in Somalia, why don't we look at scaling rental interventions? So that's just one example of what we're doing.

Now Somalia is far from the only country in the world where we see a protracted crisis, with millions of people displaced for extended periods of time. How do you think it would be different if we in these crises, also introduced an approach with durable solutions similar to the one you're working on in Somalia?

Well, for me, what makes Danwadaag really interesting and just coming back to the focus on housing, land and property, is this initial emphasis on housing, land and property.

See, because as we know, as the actors in Somalia, finding a means to improve land tenure, security for IDP's is one of the most important steps to finding durable solutions, but also to address the negative repercussions of rapid urbanization.

So all our efforts have been geared towards helping displaced people and communities secure their rights to land, which is crucial to avoid forced evictions, but also to promote long term sustainability. The other thing that makes Danwadaag also quite interesting is the unique setup of the consortium. As I previously said, we are a combination of both local and international organizations and this has facilitated greater access and in working, like, in working in a country like Somalia which is quite dynamic and greater at adaptability. We've been able to adapt as issues emerge because in Somalia, a drought can start today, then a flood. You can have a flood two days later, so you need to develop that consistent modality or operators modi of adapting. And then also having local organizations at the forefront or having them as part of our consortium has also given us a wider contextual understanding of the issues and being able to even access communities to the extent that we've been able to access these communities to be able to understand them, but also to work alongside government has been really crucial to the success of Danwadaag. Then the last thing I would say is Danwadaag has also taken this bottom up approach. So whatever we do, we ensure that the communities that we serve are defining our priority areas. We will never go into an area without first understanding what the communities need, understanding their vulnerabilities and understanding their needs. So having this bottom up approach is something that is really crucial to implementing any project in Somalia, whether it's a housing, land and property project, or whether it's a durable solution project or a humanitarian project, you need to take that bottom-up approach at the very onset.

Shezane is a fascinating story you tell and I, and particularly like the way you describe building the coalition of actors working with a very contextually adapted approach, not the cookie cutter that we normally run around the world with. It's fantastic.

I guess my main concern or reservation or thing that puzzles me is it possible to scale this approach? Because the needs you are describing in Somalia are overwhelming when you look at the numbers.

And the way you work is fantastic, but I think very difficult to scale up. So, how do you do that? How do you scale?

Thank you so much Shezane, for joining us. This was a really exciting and fascinating conversation as always and as we look into the next episode, we'll be looking at how some of these solutions are scalable. And those models that are being applied in places like Puerto Rico and in Ukraine.

Thanks Alex.

What a story, Alex. That's such a powerful story Shezane is telling. What's on your mind?

I think for me, the donors and the organizations realized that it was less expensive in preventing these problems and then responding to them once they had actually taken place.

And that after maybe too long of treating it as somebody else's problem they all came together and decided to make it everybody's problem and they started to do something about it and I think that's really, really inspiring.

Yeah, it is such an inspiring success story I get. I guess the main thing on my mind as I asked is, is this scalable? Because what they do, there's no doubt that that it really works, but it's still.

At a fairly small scale, and we're talking about millions and millions of people, that's in no way an argument against it, but it would be good if we could find a way of really dealing with it at scale.

I one-hundred percent agree and I think that sets us up really well for our next episode where we're going to travel to Puerto Rico and to Ukraine, where there are people who are starting to imagine those scalable solutions.

Fantastic. So let's let's cut it here. Alex, thank you so much. It's great. It was a great conversation and to the listeners, don't give up. Don't leave us. There's another equally fantastic episode coming your way.