African Land Tenure : Where are we now?
Richard Baldwin et al.
The last decade has seen a massive change in the way that Land is perceived as a development issue in Africa, and it has moved to centre stage with Land Governance as the unifying theme and with various intervention paradigms such as Transparency, M4P (Markets for the Poor), Land for Investment, Fit for Purpose Land Administrationn adding to the more traditional Tenure Security, Food Security and Hidden Equity paradigms, and being taken up within major intergovernmental agreements While the conventional European land tenure model is constructed on individual property rights and absolute ownership, in Africa there is a much more holistic view, with individual rights coexisting alongside communal land rights; the challenge being how to recognise communal land rights within a formal system. In some countries, the law is clear and communal rights are recognised formally (for example Communal Land Reform Act, Namibia, Village Land Act, Tanzania) and here the land administration is effectively decentralised to the Traditional Authority or Village Council, The problem is how to carry out mass systematic registration of individual communal rights and maintain them in such a strongly decentralised structure with adequate resources and ensuring sound governance. There is also a transformation taking place in how these projects are conceived and implemented, with advances in technology (high resolution satellite imagery, low cost open source platforms, mobile phone / PDA GPS and location/banking services, pervasive networks) which dramatically reduce the intervention costs of large systematic programmes, where economies of scale, production processes and strict QA are allowing large areas to be subject to systematic registration relatively quickly at reduced cost.
Event: Annual World Bank Conference on Land and Poverty 2015
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