The Land Rights Research & Resources Institute was founded in 1994 and registered as a non-governmental not-for profit company limited by guarantee under the Companies Ordinance, Chapter 212 of the laws of Tanzania.

The Institute was established out of the need to generate and sustain a public debate and participation, particularly where it matters in villages on issues of land tenure.

It is the institute’s belief that such debate will be better informed if. There is a recognition of indigenous systems of land tenure knowledge and experiences, a will and capacity to research into these and thus generate more systematic knowledge of the same; and an institutional arrangement independent of the state system to generalize local knowledge and experiences horizontally between and among village committees thereby producing a corpus of a truly national system of knowledge on land relations.