Research Paper |2017| Danielle Resnick, Austen Okumo
Over the last decade, land governance has become a major priority for the development community. A particular focus has been on sub-Saharan Africa due to the recognized paradox of high levels of land availability and low productivity in the region . While poor land governance systems have long been identified
as a key reason for this disjuncture, the relatively recent large-scale impetus to improve land governance emerged from the inclusion of land management in 2009 as one of the four pillars under the African Union’s Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Develop-ment Program (CAADP). Subsequently, in the wake of the G-8’s launch of the New Alliance for Food Security and Nutri-tion in 2012, many international initiatives have emerged to promote better land governance. These include the African Union’s Land Policy Initiative (AULPI) and the World Bank’s Land Governance Assessment Framework (LGAF). At the national level in Africa, land registration and land titling are the most common approaches to reform, with governments selecting among a broad spectrum of modalities to pilot. These include rural land use plans in some francophone countries (e.g., Benin, Burkina Faso, and Côte d’Ivoire), systematic land tenure regularization (Ethiopia, Madagascar, Rwanda), and communal land demarcation and registration (e.g., Ghana, Mozambique, Tanzania) .
Number 57 in the Food Security Policy Research Paper Series, this publication is part of the research output from the Feed the Future Nigeria Agricultural Policy Project, a joint effort between the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI)’s Nigeria Strategy Support Program (NSSP) and Michigan State University funded by USAID-Nigeria. This Food Security Policy Research Paper has also been published as IFPRI Nigeria Strategic Support Program Working Paper No. 38 in December 2016.
