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Showing posts with label title registration. Show all posts
Showing posts with label title registration. Show all posts
Thursday, November 12, 2009
Title Registration in Africa - a Bust?
Thursday, October 1, 2009
Development Terms of Reference
Excuse the rant, but I have a couple of points to make about TOR writing and expectations of donors, land reform in particular - one of my principal areas of expertise.
One. Land reform that aims to help the public in general and give the poor access to capital in particular, relies on only one key component. Secure tenure. All the rest is fluff.
Two. Secure tenure can be achieved within the confines of two key structures. The first is title registration (I exclude clearly successful deed recording as in South Africa or the United States) and second, effective enforcement mechanisms through the courts or other institutions.
Three. Title registration - the love of donors and particularly the World Bank - is not rocket science.
Four. Surveyors can be the enemy of rapid registration of title, especially in poorer countries where land is worth nothing but the surveyors insist on five to ten centimeter accuracy - in rural areas. Taste reality. People on the ground know where their boundary runs. Don't interfere. I have been in too many countries where no boundary disputes existed before the surveyors landed in their mother ship.
Five. Donors need fewer agricultural economists and surveyors driving secure tenure because the vast majority (except for a few, really, really smart practitioners) don't have the slightest regard of the foundations of the policy of secure land tenure. Valuable land is located in urban areas. That's why everyone is moving there and creating, as in Africa, slums at the rate of five percent a year. Give these people tenure first. The wilderness can come next.
Finally. Donors should not permit the release of a TOR that ignores the edges. In other words, don't target one area for reform without looking at the other sectors that directly or indirectly feed into that one area. That is not negligent. Or lazy.
It is stupid and a waste of money.
End of Rant. Thank you and my apologies to agricultural economists and arm-chair reformers.
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One. Land reform that aims to help the public in general and give the poor access to capital in particular, relies on only one key component. Secure tenure. All the rest is fluff.
Two. Secure tenure can be achieved within the confines of two key structures. The first is title registration (I exclude clearly successful deed recording as in South Africa or the United States) and second, effective enforcement mechanisms through the courts or other institutions.
Three. Title registration - the love of donors and particularly the World Bank - is not rocket science.
Four. Surveyors can be the enemy of rapid registration of title, especially in poorer countries where land is worth nothing but the surveyors insist on five to ten centimeter accuracy - in rural areas. Taste reality. People on the ground know where their boundary runs. Don't interfere. I have been in too many countries where no boundary disputes existed before the surveyors landed in their mother ship.
Five. Donors need fewer agricultural economists and surveyors driving secure tenure because the vast majority (except for a few, really, really smart practitioners) don't have the slightest regard of the foundations of the policy of secure land tenure. Valuable land is located in urban areas. That's why everyone is moving there and creating, as in Africa, slums at the rate of five percent a year. Give these people tenure first. The wilderness can come next.
Finally. Donors should not permit the release of a TOR that ignores the edges. In other words, don't target one area for reform without looking at the other sectors that directly or indirectly feed into that one area. That is not negligent. Or lazy.
It is stupid and a waste of money.
End of Rant. Thank you and my apologies to agricultural economists and arm-chair reformers.
Wednesday, April 1, 2009
Ghana's land reform struggle - losing the battle?
In 1997 I first came to Ghana on a short mission for the World Bank together with two experts in urban planning and title registration respectively, to try and find out where the land reform program had jumped the track. Ghana had been the shining star of West Africa for the Bank, but the failure to rapidly provide secure tenure to ordinary Ghanaians, and especially the poor, via a much vaunted new title registration system was disturbing, to say the least. There are few things more important to economic growth and reduction of poverty than land reform.
We interviewed all the usual suspects: government representatives, bank official (accesss to credit which land ownership provides), urban planners and lawyers. We wrote a report. Apparently, no one listened because when I arrived here at the end of January this year I was presented with virtually the exact set of problems we had identified more than a decade earlier. Incidentally, the land market reform program intitiated by the Bank was known as Urban I. Urban V - or VI (I need to check on this) is the latest iteration.
Ghana has received more than $750 million in aid from the Bank alone in the past 20 years. A significant portion of that was sunk into resolving land tenure issues. The poor have no cash. But they have assets. It's the frozen capital described by Hernando de Soto in "The Mystery of Capital". Give the poor tenure and unfreeze the capital so that the poor can escape the informal sector. That's the theory and I happen to agree. So what has gone wrong in the past twelve years that has in many ways witnessed rather large sums of money have rather minimal effect? Why are slums growing on average of 3.5% a year in Africa? This is an accelerating train wreck and the solutions will only be more painful as time passes without a better approach. To be continued...
We interviewed all the usual suspects: government representatives, bank official (accesss to credit which land ownership provides), urban planners and lawyers. We wrote a report. Apparently, no one listened because when I arrived here at the end of January this year I was presented with virtually the exact set of problems we had identified more than a decade earlier. Incidentally, the land market reform program intitiated by the Bank was known as Urban I. Urban V - or VI (I need to check on this) is the latest iteration.
Ghana has received more than $750 million in aid from the Bank alone in the past 20 years. A significant portion of that was sunk into resolving land tenure issues. The poor have no cash. But they have assets. It's the frozen capital described by Hernando de Soto in "The Mystery of Capital". Give the poor tenure and unfreeze the capital so that the poor can escape the informal sector. That's the theory and I happen to agree. So what has gone wrong in the past twelve years that has in many ways witnessed rather large sums of money have rather minimal effect? Why are slums growing on average of 3.5% a year in Africa? This is an accelerating train wreck and the solutions will only be more painful as time passes without a better approach. To be continued...
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