The Chepkitale Indigenous People Development Project (CIPDP) was founded in 2000 and registered in 2003 with the main goal of supporting the community pursuing land rights for the Ogiek Community. CIPDP principally works in the Mount Elgon region traversing Bungoma and Trans-Nzoia counties where the Ogiek community members live. It has also established working relationships with hunter-gatherer communities with whom they work with on land and resource rights.

The programmes are centred around land rights of the community and include:

(i) Community capacity strengthening on all aspects of land rights
(ii) Policy engagements
(iii) Legal support
(iv) Community conservation
(v) Support for sustainable livelihoods

Design Phase (6 months)

The Wealth of Our Land is a collaboration between the Ogiek  CIPDP in Mt. Elgon, Digital Democracy and Forest Peoples Programme to enable the Ogiek to combine their immense knowledge and skills in managing their customary land with new community-based GIS technologies. This helps them to collect and leverage data describing land and resource use to defend and advance their land rights.

The project objectives are;
1. Strengthen the Ogiek’s capacity to map and monitor their ancestral lands, across all groups in the community, to create and sustain comprehensive knowledge mapping.
2. Reduce the Ogiek’s marginalisation through increasing their ability to advocate for themselves in local and national platforms with government and other officials.
3. Secure greater land tenure for the Ogiek through legal mechanisms to reduce conflict with neighbours and increase internal fluency on territory issues.

The design phase focuses on setting up a strong system for the Ogiek to gather and manage data on customary land use. It includes the customisation of new technology and comprehensive training to a team of Ogiek mappers within the CIPDP. The phase transitions into the implementation phase. Here, the mapping team continues to collect data however the focus shifts to using the data for internal decision making and external advocacy actions and ensuring long term sustainability. More training is provided to strengthen the Ogiek’s capacity to create products from the collected data, and creating map-based outputs.

Implementation Phase (18 months)

The project aims to promote just data-driven access to land and create more open participation and civic engagement on land issues.  The project will empower the Ogiek Community to self – advocate and inform data collection processes, technological platform, research products and policy recommendations generated by the project. The disaggregated data, contextualised technological platform, evidence based research and policy recommendations will be utilised to influence and catalyse access and just land use by Ogiek Community. The project will also promote the creation of more political spaces, processes and participation accessible by the aforementioned rights holders.  

Lessons learnt and innovations from the design phase have informed the development of the Implementation Phase of the project. This project will be implemented in Ogiek lands in the Mt Elgon region in Kenya.