# **Rural land certification in Ethiopia: Process, initial impact, and implications for other African countries**

**Abstract:** Although many African countries have recently adopted highly innovative and pro-poor land laws, lack of implementation thwarts their potentially far-reaching impact on productivity, poverty reduction, and governance. We use a representative household survey from Ethiopia where, over a short period, certificates to more than 20 million plots were issued to decribe the certification process, explore its incidence and preliminary impact, and quantify the costs. While this provides many suggestions to ensure sustainability and enhance impact, Ethiopia’s highly cost-effective first-time registration process provides important lessons.

## **1. Introduction**

There is now a growing consensus that, even in rural African contexts where individual titling of land may not be desirable or feasible and use of land as a collateral for credit is at best a distant possibility, providing poor land owners or users, who are often female, with options to have their rights documented can yield significant benefits. These benefits, which come about largely due to the ability to draw upon formal mechanisms to enforce property rights, include incentives for land-related investment, enhanced gender equality and bargaining power by women, improved governance, reduced conflict potential, and lower transaction costs for productivity-enhancing land transfers through either rental or sale. A desire to reap these benefits provides the intellectual foundation for a recent wave of land law reforms that aims to give legal recognition to customary rights, strengthen women’s property rights, and establish processes for creation and maintenance of documentary evidence that are less demanding and costly than titles while at the same time offering transparent and non-discriminatory options for upgrading as need arises.

While such legal provisions are hugely attractive in theory, progress in implementing them has lagged behind expectations. In fact, hardly any of the countries that introduced legal reforms with much fanfare have succeeded in developing, let alone rolling out, a low-cost system for land administration at a scale that is sufficiently large to provide an option for the majority of the poor. This made it difficult for many of the expected benefits from such legislation to materialize, implying that the poor often continue to be excluded from formal systems and vulnerable to land loss. More generally, failure to implement land legislation has raised doubts regarding the technical, institutional, and political feasibility of such reform.

To assess whether such doubts are justified and whether a decentralized and less demanding model of property rights reform can have impact on the ground, we draw on the experience of Ethiopia which, over a period of 2-3 years, registered the majority of rural lands in a rapid process at rather low cost. A nationwide household survey is used to (i) assess whether the program met expectations regarding inclusiveness, fairness, and gender equity; (ii) obtain households’ subjective evaluation and willingness to pay for certificates; and (iii) provide an estimate of its sustainability and impact on investment. We cost different options for first-time registration -one of them being the program as implemented- as well as maintenance 1