of the land administration system to assess whether similar processes could be replicated elsewhere in Africa and use results to derive specific policy recommendations.

Doing so suggests that decentralized implementation through elected Land Use and Administration Committees (LACs) at village level allowed the program to make rapid progress without being biased against the poor; requirements in terms of procedures were adhered to reasonably well (though with variations across regions); and recipients appreciate certificates. While it would be useful to explore the scope to improve clarity of policy guidelines in a number of respects such as providing access to legal and policy information in written form, including coverage of common property resources (CPRs), ensuring better participation by women and, in some regions, their inclusion on certificates, the overall record of first-time registration is impressive. This is particularly notable given that the program has been implemented at a cost an order of magnitude below what is reported anywhere else in the literature.

The positive assessment of the program’s impact is supported by beneficiaries’ views and their willingness to pay. Econometric analysis suggests that certification has increased the probability of new investment and the time spent on such investment. At the same time, there is little doubt that ensuring sustainability of the program’s impact will require serious efforts on establishing processes to ensure that land records will be updated in a coherent and consistent fashion and that ways to improve their quality in response to existing demand are available. Comparison to China, where property rights reform followed a similar trajectory also points towards policy issues that will need to be addressed to further enhance the benefits from land certification. These include ensuring payment of fair compensation if land is taken; an increase in the scope for decentralized transfer of land to more productive users; and more strict circumscription of conditions for land redistribution to prevent abuse and reduce tenure insecurity. This scope for improvements notwithstanding, the massive scale and relative success of land certification in Ethiopia demonstrates that technical problems or lack of resources alone can not explain the failure by African countries to put the innovative aspects of recent reforms to their land legislations into practice.

The paper is structured as follows. Section two describes challenges for land policy and administration in Africa together with recent initiatives to reform legal frameworks and establish accessible institutions in response to these. Against this background, it describes key characteristics of Ethiopia’s land policy and its recent certification process. Section three uses village- and household-level data to describe the extent to which different stages of certification were implemented as planned and to explore the extent to which these varied along lines of gender or wealth. Section four provides evidence on impact as well as costs of first-time registration as carried out now and with a spatial reference added and discusses options to ensure that the information generated is kept up to date and can sustain itself based on user fees. Section five concludes by highlighting lessons for Ethiopia and other countries, and avenues for future research.

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