CREATE in Zimbabwe Summary Report

an NGO-centred model for supporting communities in the context of resettlement

CREATE (the Community Based Resettlement Approaches and Technology project), provides a practical framework for NGO support to poor rural communities. It was developed in the context of Zimbabwe under an initiative jointly supported since 1999 by IFAD (through a grant from its Norwegian Trust Fund) and the International Land Coalition .

CREATE defined an innovative institutional model for delivering technical assistance to households as part of so-called "community-based" resettlement and to have helped forge agreement among a wide array of stakeholders. At the same time, it shows the potential for this type of approach to make a far wider contribution to the development process. In particular, the CREATE experience describes an institutional model that can help channel support from a wide range of external stakeholders to poor rural communities through a NGO-driven institutional framework.

Experiences from Zimbabwe demonstrate that this approach can serve both short and long-term goals and can lead to a wide range of economic, technical, political and strategic benefits for beneficiaries and other stakeholders.

Working under the tremendous political and social constraints that surrounded the land issue in Zimbabwe between 1998 and 2001, it provided both a space and support for a wide range of stakeholders to come together in search of consensus-based approaches to the complex issues of land acquisition, beneficiary selection and resettlement.

Given the enormous difficulties facing Zimbabwe today, it is too early to assess whether CREATE will be able to contribute significantly to the process of land reform in Zimbabwe. Nevertheless, IFAD and the International Land Coalition feel strongly that the lessons of CREATE - in particular its broad definition of community, its processes for finding common ground among a range of actors and seeming adversaries, and its practical tools for implementing community-based land reform - should not be lost.

For IFAD and the International Land Coalition, the CREATE experience:

Provides the elements of a model for community-based approaches to land reform in Southern Africa and other regions of the world;

• Demonstrates how a NGO-driven institutional framework can advocate for equitable, community-based land reform and bring beneficiaries directly into the process of land reform and resettlement;
• Demonstrates that community-based land reform requires effective partnerships among a wide range of non-community actors, such as NGOs, local government, landowners, unions, financial institutions, etc.;
• Validates a broader role for civil society organisations (CSO) in community-based land reform - moving beyond their traditional role as "service providers"; and
• Helps define an institutional model that can help direct support from a wide range of external stakeholders to poor rural communities through a NGO-driven institutional framework.