Indeed, despite a great many development organisations focusing on achieving better land tenure, progress has been negligible, with zero countries reporting any progress at all. Nonetheless, achieving greater rural land security in Africa will take enormous effort, because 86 per cent of all the continent’s rural land plots are still unregistered. The case for increasing land tenure security is even stronger for the almost half a billion people living in Sub-Saharan Africa’s urban areas. More than a third of all urban land parcels are unregistered, and it would cost a much smaller $5.2bn to survey and register this land, including the land in slums, along with setting up dispute resolution and running the system. Improving urban tenure security, which at low costs would make hundreds of millions of people better off, is one such investment.

Source: Punch April 24, 2023 14:18 UTC