Land titling programmes have been a fixture of African development policy for over three decades, backed consistently by the World Bank and bilateral donors on a simple, appealing logic: farmers holding customary or informal land rights cannot use that land as collateral for credit, cannot easily defend it against competing claims, and would invest more in improving it if they held a formal, transferable title. Convert customary tenure into registered individual title, the theory holds, and you unlock capital, security, and productivity simultaneously. I do not think the theory is wrong in the abstract. I think two decades of implementation across the continent have repeatedly shown that the paperwork this reform requires favours exactly the people least in need of the protection it promises, and that the people the reform was aimed at protecting are frequently the ones who end up dispossessed by it.
What Formalisation Actually Requires
Converting a customary claim into a registered title is not a neutral administrative act. It requires navigating a registry office, often located in a district capital far from the land itself, understanding documentation requirements that assume literacy and familiarity with bureaucratic processes, and, in many jurisdictions, paying registration fees that, while modest in absolute terms, represent a meaningful cost to a subsistence-farming household. Every one of those requirements is easier to meet for an urban-based elite, a local chief with existing political connections, or an investor with legal representation than for the smallholder the programme’s advocates most often cite as its intended beneficiary. Land titling programmes across Kenya, Rwanda, and Ghana, among the continent’s most cited implementation cases, have each documented patterns in which registration disproportionately consolidated title among better-resourced claimants while poorer or more marginal customary users, frequently including women whose land access under customary systems was recognised informally but not always registrable under formal rules written around individual, typically male, ownership, lost out.
Every requirement titling imposes is easier to meet for an urban elite or a well-connected chief than for the smallholder the programme claims to protect.
The Market Formalisation Actually Creates
Once land is titled, it becomes legally saleable in a way customary tenure, with its overlapping and negotiated claims, typically is not. That transferability is the entire economic point of the reform, and it is also the mechanism through which formalisation converts into dispossession. A titled smallholder facing a bad harvest, a medical emergency, or simple economic pressure now holds an asset a buyer, frequently better capitalised, sometimes a domestic investor, sometimes foreign agribusiness, can legally purchase outright, permanently, in a transaction customary tenure’s more flexible, negotiated, and communally accountable structures would have made considerably harder to conclude in one signature. Formalisation does not create the pressure that leads a struggling household to sell land it may need for the next generation’s survival. It removes the informal social and communal constraints that previously slowed, made harder, and made more reversible that sale.
The Honest Version of the Reform
None of this argues for abandoning land registration, which does provide genuine security against certain kinds of dispossession, particularly elite land grabs and government expropriations that leave customary claimants without paper title most vulnerable. The argument is that titling reforms marketed as a uniform good for smallholders need to be paired, deliberately and before rollout rather than as an afterthought, with protections against the specific new vulnerability formalisation creates: restrictions or waiting periods on distress sales, communal or family co-titling requirements that prevent a single household member from unilaterally selling collectively used land, and registration support specifically designed to reach the claimants least able to navigate a registry office on their own, rather than assuming the market will eventually correct for whoever gets left behind in the first registration wave. Kenya’s and Rwanda’s more recent programmes have begun incorporating some of these protections after earlier implementation rounds directly documented the dispossession pattern. That correction should have been the starting design, not a lesson learned at smallholders’ expense. Formalising who owns the land was never going to be enough. The reform needed, from the outset, to formalise who gets protected from losing it.
I keep returning to a simple test for any titling programme now proposed on the continent: does it name, in advance, the specific household most likely to be pressured into a distress sale within five years of receiving title, and does it build a protection for that household into the registration process itself, or only into the evaluation report written after the dispossession has already happened? Most programmes I have reviewed still fail that test. Donors and governments continue to measure success primarily by the number of titles issued. This metric rewards speed and coverage and says nothing about what happens to a title once its original holder faces the first real financial shock. Land titling can be the empowerment tool its advocates describe. It becomes that only when the reform is designed around the household under pressure, not the registry office counting completed files.
