Securing Land Tenure and Easing Access to Land

This chapter examines the state of land tenure and administration in Africa, identifying systemic barriers to agricultural productivity and proposing reforms to secure land rights and improve land market efficiency.

• The African land sector faces nine primary challenges: only about 10 percent of land has legally recognized and documented ownership, scarcity of farmland for smallholders despite overall abundance, high ownership inequality and landlessness (particularly in former colonial settlements), limited access for women and youth, underutilization of state land, poor land sales and rental markets, frequent land disputes, high transaction costs, and risks associated with climate change.
• Securing land tenure requires different strategies based on land availability: land-abundant areas should prioritize the delimitation, demarcation, and registration of community land, while land-constrained, densely populated areas require community-based systematic land titling for individual rights. Both contexts require strengthened formal and informal dispute resolution institutions.
• Three key lessons for communal land registration are identified: demarcation is a time- and resource-intensive process of dispute resolution rather than just a technical exercise; registration is slow if community owners are not clearly defined (citing traditional authorities in Ghana and statutory ones in Tanzania, or the need for new entities in Mozambique); and registration must be followed by land-use planning and the delineation of common-property resources like grazing land.
• The ProSAVANA project in Mozambique is highlighted as an example that applies these lessons by organizing local communities into legal entities to register community land rights via community DUATs, registering an estimated 660,000 individual DUATs for smallholders, and institutionalizing district land use plans across 19 districts.
• To transform agriculture, three reform sets are proposed: increasing tenure security (noting that land certification in Ethiopia in 1998-99 and 2003-05 increased rental market activity), eliminating land market controls (noting that fewer restrictions in Uganda and Ethiopia increased rental activities and productivity), and integrating customary tenure into statutory law to allow formal transactions with non-community members, similar to the ejidos in Mexico.
• Land administration in Africa is highly inefficient compared to OECD countries, taking twice as long and costing twice as much to transfer land. Additionally, there is a severe shortage of professionals; Ghana, Kenya, and Uganda each have fewer than 10 land professional surveyors per 1 million people, compared to 197 in Malaysia and 150 in Sri Lanka.

APA

Webmaster (2016). Securing Land Tenure and Easing Access to Land. African Center for Economic Transformation. https://acetforafrica.org/research-and-analysis/reports-studies/reports/securing-land-tenure-and-easing-access-to-land/

Chicago

Webmaster. Securing Land Tenure and Easing Access to Land. African Center for Economic Transformation, 2016. https://acetforafrica.org/research-and-analysis/reports-studies/reports/securing-land-tenure-and-easing-access-to-land/.

Wikipedia

{{cite report |last1=Webmaster |title=Securing Land Tenure and Easing Access to Land |publisher=African Center for Economic Transformation |date=29 September 2016 |url=https://acetforafrica.org/research-and-analysis/reports-studies/reports/securing-land-tenure-and-easing-access-to-land/ |access-date=17 August 2026 |via=Climate Insights Directory}}

BibTeX

@techreport{webmaster2016securing, author = {Webmaster}, title = {{Securing Land Tenure and Easing Access to Land}}, institution = {African Center for Economic Transformation}, year = {2016}, month = sep, url = {https://acetforafrica.org/research-and-analysis/reports-studies/reports/securing-land-tenure-and-easing-access-to-land/}, urldate = {2026-08-17}, note = {Indexed by Climate Insights Directory} }