Binding transferability restrictions, especially for bequest, are likely to reduce investment incentives even if tenure is secure (Deininger and Jin 2006) while sales limits will undermine emergence of credit markets. In light of Zambia’s history of requiring Presidential consent for any land transfer and a doctrine of land having no value that prevailed until recently (Adams 2003), understanding of the basis and nature of these restrictions will be essential to assess how these should feature in discussions of the new land policy.<sup>16</sup> A total of 31% of households report having access to some document, a level that is higher for urban (72%) as compared to rural areas (15%). Documents are most prevalent in Lusaka (67%) with shares between 11% in the East and 18% in the South. Yet, at about 11% overall (31% in Lusaka, 6% in the South and about 2% in the remainder of the provinces), less than half of these documents are full titles. While virtually all are in the name of household members, only 35% list a woman as a land owner. Incomplete titles, that have not been formalized by paying required fees and certificates by traditional authorities on customary land, each account for about half of these documents. Cross-checking these figures against administrative data (Kaunda 2017) suggests that they are plausible, though at the high end.<sup>17</sup> Substantively, high levels of informality may be due to three issues. Cost of service delivery may be elevated by outdated survey regulations requiring high precision sporadic surveys, institutional inefficiencies related to sporadic title issuance, and a rather dysfunctional IT system. A need to pay fees (of at least ZMK 4,000 per urban parcel, in most instances much higher) upfront rather than in installments may be unaffordable for credit constrained households, limiting transition to the formal regime and reducing pubic revenue (as property tax can be levied only on titled properties). Converting customary land into state land to allow document issuance may be resisted by local traditional authorities and give rise to informal substitutes issued by chiefs that can weaken transparency.

Questions on likelihood of land loss suggest high levels of perceived tenure insecurity: 43% of respondents perceive some risk of losing their land in the next 5 years.<sup>18</sup> Tenure insecurity is higher in rural than in urban areas (45% vs. 37%) and varies across regions with levels highest in the East where with 71%, insecurity is pervasive, followed by 43% in Lusaka and the North, and 21% and 11% in the West and South, respectively. Even if a more conservative measure of insecurity (“perceived land loss very likely”) is used, 26% of land owners are tenure insecure, a figure that is very high in global comparison. In Malawi, much lower levels of tenure insecurity had far-reaching effects on productivity and gender equality (Deininger _et al._ 2019).

> 16 This would include determining the range of people to which land can be transferred, the type of approvals needed to bequeath within the family and the risk of these not being granted, and women’s ability to make decisions on transferring land. Once such a regulatory assessment is completed, a suitable communications strategy could then be defined.

> 17 As per Kaunda (2017), Zambia’s integrated land information system (ZILMIS) includes some 600,000 documents of which at most 200,000250,000 are estimated to be complete titles. An average of 9.8% of respondents claiming to have title translates, at an average household size of 5.3 and with a national population of 15.6 million people, to 2.9 million households or 285,000 titles, suggesting that some informal documents or incomplete titles may have mistakenly been classified as complete titles.

> 18 Respondents to provide an answer on the likelihood of losing ownership or use rights to their land with a scale from 1 to 5, where 1 is not at all likely and 5 is extremely likely.

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