# **1. Introduction**

Public registries that allow unambiguous and comprehensive low cost identification of property ownership have long been considered a key part of countries’ infrastructure. To this end, considerable resources were spent in many developing countries to establish land administration systems, usually via adjudication and first-time registration of land. While studies show that establishing such systems can provide clear benefits, three developments have recently affected demand for land registration and the potential to respond to it, giving rise to what many consider a next generation of land registration initiatives that are more inclusive, less costly, and more participatory than the traditional type. New technology options in remote sensing, connectivity, and data processing drastically reduced the cost of acquiring and managing textual as well as spatial data. Economic growth and burgeoning land demand from sources including agricultural investors, urban expansion, and infrastructure increased the equity and investment benefits from secure property rights, including for women and communities who in traditional systems may have been disadvantaged. Finally, public goods such as planning and mobilization of own-source revenue depend on or can be more effectively performed if property rights are clearly defined.

Yet, like any piece of infrastructure, registries need to be maintained. A key difference to, say, roads, is that their sustainability depends not only on public investment but that private parties’ decisions on whether or not to formally register any transactions are a key factor. Perceived benefits from such registration (which depend on legal knowledge) as well as the money and time needed for it (which are affected by regulatory frameworks) are key determinants of such decisions. The outcome matters: as a key benefit of registries is their ability to provide authoritative information on all parcels of interest, even low levels of informality may undermine trust in the system and the value of what has been established at high cost. In fact, studies show that, as they failed to carefully identify private and social benefits arising from their operation, compare them to low-cost models of service provision, and on this basis develop appropriate modalities for funding, formalization programs—including ones that had positive overall impact—in Africa (Atwood 1990), East Asia (Maurer and Iyer 2008), and Latin America (Galiani 2011) were eventually unsustainable and failed to deliver on their potential.

To assess if ‘new generation’ land projects will need to pay greater attention to the extent of subsequent transactions being registered, this paper focuses on the experience of Rwanda. The fact that this is the only African country that completed nation-wide, participatory, low-cost way land regularization makes it of great interest to document achievements made possible through this effort as well as remaining challenges. Beyond focusing on an oft-neglected, we rely on administrative data that provide reliable information on key aspects including number (and amounts) of registered mortgages, transfers (and land prices in case of sales), land owners’ gender, and actual vs. potential tax receipts, at high levels of frequency and low cost.

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