Although increased global demand for land has led to renewed interest in African land tenure, few models to address these issues quickly and at the required scale have been identified or evaluated. The case of Rwanda's nation-wide and relatively low-cost land tenure regularization program is thus of great interest. This paper evaluates the short-term impact (some 2.5 years after completion) of the pilots undertaken to fine-tune the approach using a geographic discontinuity design with spatial fixed effects. Three key findings emerge from the analysis.

Rwanda's completion, in 2012/13, of a land tenure regularization program covering the entire country allows the use of administrative data to describe initial performance and combine the data with household surveys to quantify to what extent and why subsequent transfers remain informal, and how to address this. In 2014/15, annual volumes of registered sales ranged between 5.6 percent for residential land in Kigali and 0.1 percent for agricultural land in the rest of the country; and US$2.6 billion worth of mortgages were secured against land and property.

Rhe North-East Land Conference, organized by the Martin Luther Christian University (MLCU), Shillong, North-Eastern Region Community Resource Management Programme (NERCORMP), Shillong; North East Network (NEN), NRMC-Centre for Land Governance (NRMC-CLG); and Rongmei Naga Baptist Convention (RNBA), Manipur evident the significance tenure dynamics and development paradigms in North East Region deliberating on land, laws, locals and livelihoods on 30-31st January, 2020 at Shillong. 

The aim of this policy paper is to present successful approaches to secure land tenure rights in rural and urban areas. To support future programmatic decisions by the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), this paper focusses especially on impacts and good practices. It discusses examples from the German technical cooperation but also includes good practices and impacts achieved by other development partners.

This case study has been produced in response to a request to the Evidence on Demand Helpdesk. The objective of the request was to provide a detailed case study on the approach taken to land tenure reform by the DFID-funded Land Tenure Regularisation Programme (LTRSP) in Rwanda. The case study should provide the reader with an understanding of how land tenure reform can work under particular social, political and economic conditions, as well as the approach taken to ensure gender equality in land rights.

To provide for the temporary protection of certain rights to and interests in land which are not otherwise adequately protected by law; and to provide for matters connected therewith

SALGA supports the amendments on tenure grants although it proposed that the provision of bulk services for alternative land and the delivery of municipal services should also be included in the tenure grant. SALGA supports the amendments as it affects limitations on evictions and additional rights to occupiers. The amendments on the establishment of a land rights management board and land rights management committees are also supported by SALGA. The submission discussed the challenges of evictions and the impacts of this on municipalities in detail.

Effective recognition of customary land rights is still a challenge in Angola, as in many other African countries. Despite customary land rights of the traditional rural communities are expressly recognized in the 2004 National Land Law, very few communities in Angola have been able to register their land. In the Province of Bié, in Angola central highlands, only five customary collective land titles (called Dominio Util Consuetudinario) had been issued within the period 2004-2015.

Conventional notions of the ‘land parcel’ have been extended: previously unrecognized tenures including customary, nomadic, or communal interests are now incorporated into the concept. Technical tools including the Social Tenure Domain Model (STDM) enable these new understandings to be operationalized in land administration systems. The nomadic pastoralists of Kenya’s dry land regions illustrate where these new approaches can be applied.