willingness to pay from household surveys and exempting poor land owners would allow to eliminate informality without jeopardizing the registry’s ability to sustain itself from fee revenue (Ali _et al._ 2021).

These examples illustrate that fee reductions before launching titling initiatives are feasible and may be needed if overstaffing of land agencies or complex procedures make implementation of progressive laws unaffordable (Hunt 2004). However, a more frequent response was for donors to subsidize first registration, mostly in rural areas, a move justified with reference to the fixed cost of creating functioning registries. This approach faces two challenges: On the one hand, potential economic benefits from documenting land rights will be higher (due to higher land values) and cost of service delivery lower (due to parcel density) in urban than in rural areas. A focus on rural areas only thus requires an economic justification, especially as in many African settings, demand for documented land rights in urban areas is high: in Dar es Salaam, most slumdwellers paid into a savings scheme to finance title acquisition (Ali et al. 2016) with willingness to pay of US$200 for title instead of much cheaper substitutes of low quality (Manara 2022),<sup>5</sup> but supply constraints impeded an effective response (Manara & Regan 2021). Informal residents’ willingness to pay for title was also high in urban Democratic Republic of Congo (Balan et al. 2020). High demand for documented land rights is reported from Zambia (Ali et al. 2020a), Ghana (Ehwi et al. 2021), and Nigeria (Goodfellow & Owen 2020). In fact, efficient urban titling programs could be self-financing if, instead of charging high upfront fees that credit constrained households may be unable to afford, a small fraction of the associated increases in land values is captured _ex post_ via land taxes (Hawley _et al._ 2018).

A second challenge is that, even if a registry is successfully established, failure to reduce the cost of registering transactions will make subsequent registration unaffordable for most and may lead to a return to informality.<sup>6</sup> High registration cost undermined sustainability in the past (Atwood 1990; Pinckney & Kimuyu 1994) and continues to do so even for interventions with otherwise positive effects (Agyei-Holmes _et al._ 2020; Fabbri & Dari-Mattiacci 2021). In Peru, a well-functioning low-cost registry was closed down in response to pressure by local notaries, triggering a marked increase in the cost of service delivery and, as a result, informality (Gutierrez & Molina 2020), suggesting that low-cost land service delivery is feasible but may run counter to powerful political economy forces.

This points to complexity paper-based registration procedures and standards for surveying, planning, and valuation as key issues that may increase the cost of registering rights and the associated corruption risk. Addressing these through a regulatory framework and performance standards that are monitored can go a

> 5 While policy makers placed enormous hopes in non-transferable documents to improve credit access in rural (Stein _et al._ 2016) or urban areas (Kironde 2006), these were bound to be disappointed and there were several cases where banks that had lent against such licenses were unable to liquidate, partly due to poor quality and maintenance (Kusiluka & Chiwambo 2019).

> 6 Evidence of high fees leading to ‘deformalization’ comes from Jamaica (Barnes & Griffith-Charles 2007), the Philippines (Maurer & Iyer 2008), and-for agricultural land-Rwanda (Ali et al. 2021). In urban Argentina, Galiani and Schargrodsky (2016) report that registering an inter-family transaction cost 27% of property values or more than 7 times average household income while registering a within-family transfer such as an inheritance or divorce cost about 20% of property value and 5 times average monthly household income.

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