Scaling up Community Based Tools to Secure Land Rights; lessons from the Cocoa Belt in Ghana
Mark Kakraba-Ampeh, Eric Yeboah
The inability of conventional approaches to ensure security of land rights for all has resulted in the search of locally inspired alternatives to secure land rights. In the past three years, Land Resource Management Centre, together with its partners carried out an action research project in eleven communities where land is currently under intense pressures and tenure security is volatile. The project worked with communities and several stakeholders to develop tools to help secure land rights. These are i. Community Based Land Survey Tool (A participatory approach of mapping which incorporates high accuracy surveying technology to document land rights at a cost which is about 70 percent lower than the open market) ii. Flexible Templates to effectively document land rights and land transactions. iii. Spousal Transfer Template which seeks to secure land rights from a gendered perspective. These tools were developed in different communities on a pilot basis. Currently, they are being scaled up in some cocoa growing areas in the Western and Ashanti regions of Ghana where about 3,600 land owners and land users have registered to have their land rights and transactions documented using these tools. This paper seeks to document and share the various lessons learnt in order to influence future design and implementation of similar interventions.
Event: Annual World Bank Conference on Land and Poverty 2015
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