**8**

rights within customary practices themselves, and to provide relatively weaker, though more affordable, forms of formal recognition. The Rural Land Use Plans or PFRs ( _Plans Fonciers Ruraux_ ) in Benin, in operation since 1993, represent one such approach. The PFRs consist of documenting land claims by consensually mapping all agricultural uses within a village, surveying and demarcating the corresponding parcels, and issuing land use certificates to smallholders.

In recent years, several countries in Sub-Saharan Africa – including Benin, Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Ethiopia, Ghana, Madagascar, Rwanda, and Tanzania – have implemented some form of systematic land formalization program (see Byamugisha, 2013).<sup>10</sup> In rural areas, formalization policies typically take the form of freehold land titling or land certification. Both types of programs use topographical surveys to demarcate land and provide formal documentary evidence of the land rights recorded during the adjudication process. However, the rights provided under land titling and land certification programs may differ. In some contexts, land certificates – in contrast to freehold tenure – may only recognize use rights and entail restrictions on land transfer. In Benin, the certificate provides a right akin to ownership, and the law has provisions for its conversion into an ownership title. The main difference between the certificate and the title in Benin is the decentralized and participatory process (the PFR) through which the certificate is issued. The systematic and decentralized approach for certification through PFRs could thus result in a lower-cost policy option for developing countries.

# **2.2 Rural land registration in Benin**

Benin is one of the countries in West Africa where the design and implementation of policies to consolidate land rights is furthest advanced. The _Plan Foncier Rural_ (PFR), first tried in Côte d’Ivoire in 1989 and piloted in Benin since 1993, is a key policy experiment in this respect. The program is currently in the initial stages of a planned implementation scale-up in Benin. The objectives of the program are to improve tenure security and stimulate agricultural investment in rural areas through the registration of land rights.

The PFR was originally conceived to demarcate landholdings held by households in rural areas and to protect forests and natural resources from further encroachment by farmers. Its

> 10To our knowledge, there is, to date, no peer-reviewed counterfactual analysis on the effect of land formalization programs in Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Madagascar, or Tanzania. In Madagascar, Bellemare (2013) uses cross-sectional data and finds no evidence of an impact of land titles on agricultural productivity. Using a similar method, Fenske (2011) documents the relationship between land tenure and investment in six West African countries, including Benin, where he finds no difference in investment across owned and not-owned plots. However, he detects gender differences in investment patterns, with male labor being used more intensively on husbands’ plots, while wives’ instead use fertilizer and pesticide inputs more intensively.