Panel B suggests that, irrespectively of whether they are formal or customary, trust in land institutions in Africa is low: Almost two-thirds (61%) of respondents in the Afrobarometer survey think that rich people will be able to fraudulently register land they do not own. Such opportunities are perceived to be strongly biased in favor of the wealthy. The same is true for formally documented ownership rights: out of 11 African countries for which survey data are available, only two provide documented land rights to more than 2% of their population and in most cases, these are biased in favor of affluent males. Limited trust in and performance of formal institutions contrasts with appreciation for traditional leaders.

If accompanied by proper regulation, digital technology, while not a magic solution,<sup>10</sup> offers opportunities to enhance the quality and interoperability of data managed by registries, reduce the cost of operating them, and enhance their potential contribution to improving land use to increase equity, transparency, accountability, and resilience. Three areas are particularly relevant: First, use of digital records and procedures can reduce cost of service delivery, increase transparency and accountability of institutions and security of rights. It does so by adopting fully digital workflows that rely on routine use of unique land parcel identifiers; authentication of right holders via digital IDs and electronic signatures, digital payments, and allow establishing audit trails. This can reduce the potential for fraud or record tampering omnipresent in paper-based systems if linked to a discontinuation of paper records and increased quality and usefulness of land records via digital interoperability and mandatory cross-checks (e.g., with court records or tax clearance certificates) before transactions are registered and automatic updating of related records (e.g., on building permits). Moreover, automatic reporting of assessed land values and registered land prices and associated data (e.g., transaction volumes) at granular level will reduce transaction cost in land markets and facilitate credit supply by providing an objective basis for valuing banks’ collateral in line with macro-prudential regulation standards, make acquiring land for large projects to improve mobility and resilience easier by providing an objective benchmark for land values. Linking property registries to registries of beneficial ownership also allows to address corruption, fraud, and money laundering through cross-border real estate investment (Alstadsæter _et al._ 2022).

Second, availability of digital imagery either from drones (Gevaert _et al._ 2020) or free satellite imagery and the capacity to easily process it (Gorelick _et al._ 2017) allows routine but granular analysis of land use at scale. This reduces the cost of documenting rights on index maps but also allows to link information on land use to information on rights, improving the scope for enforcement. Brazil’s DETER system that monitors deforestation daily based on free imagery and processing on the Google Earth Engine cloud computing platform to trigger enforcement or further scrutiny in cases of high risk (Doblas _et al._ 2022)

> 10 Examples of blockchain technology being used to entrench corrupt practices (Deininger _et al._ 2022) highlight that technology is not a magic solution but that the ability of achieving desired impacts is determined by the regulatory framework.

17