bias and reduce rather than increase tenure security. Titling costs of more than US$1,000 per title in rural Madagascar (Jacoby & Minten 2007) or Ghana (Agyei-Holmes et al. 2020) and close to US$500 in Benin (Mekking _et al._ 2021) or Zambia (Honig 2021) fall into this category. Often, large part of these costs can be attributed to the need for a detailed survey. Index maps that mark parcels’ location relative to others and are fully sufficient to provide the spatial reference needed to unambiguously describe a land parcel and have in fact been used for generations in the UK. Such maps can be generated at very low cost from satellite imagery. Beyond introducing wealth bias, emphasis on high-cost mapping may cause disputes and detract from the thorough investigation of rights that is needed to ensure trust in the registry (Arruñada 2018).

The case of Ethiopia where land-use certificates to more than 6 million households (18 million parcels) were issued quickly in 2003–05 at low cost (< $1 per parcel) via a decentralized process implemented by elected councils (Deininger _et al._ 2008) using a description of neighboring parcels only illustrates the scope for scaling up quickly in a decentralized manner that draws on elected local bodies. <mark>As digital tools were not yet available at the time, this effort established paper-based local registers, with significant impact.</mark> The program reduced conflict (Di Falco _et al._ 2020), strengthened women’s rights (Kumar & Quisumbing 2015) and bargaining power (Melesse _et al._ 2018) and spending on food and health care (Muchomba 2017). It <mark>increased tenure security and investment in land improvements (</mark> Holden _et al._ 2009), soil fertility (Melesse & Bulte 2015), and <mark>participation in informal rental markets (</mark> Holden _et al._ 2011) with <mark>benefits that exceeded cost (Deininger</mark> _<mark>et al.</mark>_ <mark>2011). As restrictions on land sales or rentals remained in place,</mark> certification only realized a faction of the potential productivity gains from full land market opening (Chen _et al._ 2022).

Rwanda is the only African country with a nation-wide fully digital registry and cadaster. It titled all the country’s 11.5 million parcels from 2011 to 2013 at a unit cost of less than US$6 (Nkurunziza 2015), building on a completely revised legal and regulatory framework (including strong rights for women), a carefully evaluated pilot, and the ability to pass implementing regulations to quickly respond to problems as they emerged. Beyond showing that obstacles to systematically registering land at scale in Africa are often more of a political than a technical nature, it also demonstrates the benefits from such action: 86% of land parcels were individually or jointly owned by a woman (Ali _et al._ 2017); soil conservation investment (Ali _et al._ 2014) and activity in land and mortgage markets increased (Ali _et al._ 2015). A radical reduction of registration fees (including transfer taxes) helped the country move from rank 137 in the ‘registering property’ part of the World Bank’s Doing Business ranking in 2005 to the top. The cost of the program could be recouped through incremental urban property tax revenues in less than a decade with current rates and in less than 3 years if rates were increased to 1% of property value. Fixed registration fees were very low as a share of property value in urban areas but rather high in rural ones, leading to relatively high levels of informality in the latter. Lowering fees for registering transactions in rural areas to be in line with stated 12