the information recorded in LAIS.<sup>15</sup> Beyond highlighting differences across regions and transaction types that a regular performance monitoring system based on administrative data could help tracked and narrow, two observations are particularly pertinent.

With 42% (50% and 27% for purchases and non-monetary transfers, respectively) of households who failed to register transferred land in their name having taken action even at village level,<sup>16</sup> and a high share quoting lack of information as one reason for not taking any action, awareness of the need to register transactions to make them legally valid remains an issue. The challenge of maintaining the high level of gender-equality achieved in the first-time allocation of land holders (table 3) implies that campaigns to inform households of the need to register may also need to emphasize gender aspects.

The official valuation for parcels registered post-LTR is, with close to US$700, well above the US$365 for non-registered ones or the US$290 for plots registered free of charge during LTR (table 7), in line with households’ subjective valuation (US$666 vs. US$447 for registered/unregistered ones).<sup>17</sup> This suggests that, beyond information, registration fees may be an issue. To explore if high fees, relative to property value, make rural registration unaffordable, we combine data on sales values of transferred parcels from our survey with LAIS data on the value of transferred parcels for Kigali to compute the fee to be paid as a share of property value (table 8). Even if the 10% of rural parcels with values below the registration fee so that registration would not make economic sense are excluded, mean (median) rural parcel prices are US$ 438 and US$ 185. Thus, for the median rural property, registering a transaction would require a monetary outlay equivalent to 22.6% of property value, compared to urban properties in Kigali where the registration fee is only 0.64% of median property value. While it is not the only factor, making fee structures less biased against rural areas could possibly go a long way towards ensuring sustainability of Rwanda’s land registry.

# **4.2 Willingness to pay for registration and its determinants**

To explore willingness to pay for registering subsequent rural transfers, the survey asked those who had acquired but not registered land, to state the amount they would be willing to pay for registration. While 20% were not willing to pay at all, the mean for those with positive amounts is RwF 4,500; about 20% of the official fee and the median is RwF 1,000, equivalent to the fee charged for first-time registration of rural parcels.<sup>18</sup> We explore determinants of households’ willingness to pay (WTP) by estimating a cross-section regression of the form:

> 15 Information had to be obtained from household surveys, as RNRA does not maintain records in ways that allows easy identification of parties to past transactions. While it is true that, contrary to a deeds system, registration of the current owner is sufficient to document ownership, having a historic record could still be very valuable help reach decisions in case of dispute and the current practice of discarding it may not be prudent. 16 The lower level of informality for inheritance is due to a higher share of such transfers having been registered during LTR. ** 17 Although responses to questions about reasons for non-registration may have to be taken with a grain of salt if households lack information, this is consistent with the fact that about 13% of those who have not yet registered their transactions cited high registration fees as a major reason. 18 The average cost per parcel during the systematic exercise amounted to less than USD 6 (RWF 4,620).

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