Land is a vital productive asset, and access to it is an economic right. Yet governance across Africa remains weak, with many countries lacking clear rules that define ownership and tenure.
As a result, land disputes have fueled significant inequalities, particularly affecting women. Only a few countries, such as Rwanda, have made notable progress in securing women’s land rights.
The New Times Business Editor, Julius Bizimungu, spoke with Joan Cuka Kagwanja, Coordinator of the African Land Policy Center (ALPC) at the UN Economic Commission for Africa, about how the continent can strengthen land governance, secure land rights, and build the institutional and human capacity needed to implement effective land policies.
Here are excerpts:
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From your perspective, what does land governance really mean in the African context today beyond ownership and title deeds?
Land governance encompasses the whole spectrum of how we manage our land. It starts from the way we frame our constitution to the way that we develop our policy in terms of the methodology or the process that we use in policy formation and implementation.
For instance, is it inclusive? Is it not inclusive? Do we even have a clear vision for land governance in this country? That speaks to the vision side. It’s also about the laws and legislation we use to govern land.
Then there is the institutional side, how we administer land and how we deliver the land rights documented in our policies. What systems are we using to ensure this delivery? Land administration includes all these facets, whether valuation, legislation, or monitoring ourselves to ensure that our vision for land governance is actually upheld.
For example, we’ve seen that countries emerging from war often undergo a constitutional review and a land policy-making process. Because land is often at the center of conflict, these processes usually aim to include aspects that support healing within communities.
That’s why I say land governance encompasses so much; it goes beyond land itself and touches many other areas. At the African Policy Center, for instance, we describe land in terms of pillars: political, environmental, sociocultural, and economic.
How would you describe the current state of land governance across Africa, what progress have we made, and where are the biggest gaps?
Around 2007/2008, we began collecting evidence on land governance in Africa, first at the country level, then at the regional level as part of the AU process. What we noticed was that many African countries shared similar challenges.
One major issue was that although traditional systems of land governance exist across most regions, they were largely excluded from statutory systems. In many countries, the law barely recognised these systems, even though they were considered legitimate by local communities.
You can imagine the conflict this created.
For example, recognition of community land and collective land rights was often missing. Consider a pastoral community that moves during the dry season in search of pasture. Do they still own the land they left behind?
Sometimes, authorities would claim the land was “idle” or “free” and could be allocated. But once you understand how communities use land, you see that they do, in fact, own it, they’re simply allowing the pasture to regenerate.
When you examine African land governance, it’s clear that it’s not just about individual titles or individual ownership. Communities matter. Jurisdictions differ. And traditional land governance is highly heterogeneous – there are clans, families, and large communities that span borders drawn during colonial times. The complexity comes from the lack of recognition of these diverse systems.
During colonialism, statutory systems were imposed over existing traditional systems, creating what we now call legal pluralism. In some contexts, religious systems of land governance were also layered on top.
So, Africa’s land governance landscape involves multiple systems, traditional, statutory, and sometimes religious, each with its own legitimacy and each constantly evolving. Understanding this complexity is essential.
Among the key issues we identified, beyond the lack of recognition of traditional systems, was women’s land rights. Across the continent, women generally lacked equal access to land, which required reforms in laws and constitutions. While many traditional systems provided some access for women, they often excluded women from decision-making.
In other cases, women had access only to marginal land. Even in matrilineal systems, when land rights were formally documented, titles often went to men, sometimes an uncle, for instance.
In the end, women often lost out in both traditional and statutory systems. This made it crucial to include women’s land rights in the declaration for member states to commit to.
Poor land governance has often been linked to inequality, conflict, and low productivity. Can you illustrate the economic costs of weak land governance on African economies?
Let’s take the issue of equity in land governance, ensuring that men and women have equal access to land. One challenge tied to this is food security. In Africa, women produce the majority of our food. They make day-to-day decisions about the land used to feed the continent.
Yet they often lack secure land rights. If someone decides tomorrow, “you won’t grow groundnuts, this land will be for coffee,” women have little power to contest it.
This is fundamental to Africa’s food question. Those responsible for producing our food do not have control over the land or the decision-making power that comes with it, and that is dangerous.
We often talk about access to finance. While land is always used as collateral, it is synonymous with power. Many banks now design loans around land users. If I’m in dairy production, for example, I might get a loan aligned to my milk payments or coffee payments. The number of coffee trees I have can even be used as a form of collateral.
But then the question becomes: who is listed as the owner?
From an economist’s perspective, when you look at the production function, you can see that allowing more women secure access and control over land can shift that production function upward, boosting production and productivity.
When women have secure rights, they invest in the land. They will plant trees if they know their children will benefit from them. They will build bench terraces, even though they are expensive. They will invest in manure and biomass inputs, which also support climate resilience. Without security, they won’t make these long-term investments.
That’s just one example of how land rights affect outcomes. Then there’s the issue of conflict. Somalia, for instance, is one of the most naturally productive countries in Africa. Many people don’t realize this. It has rivers and water resources that Kenya lacks. It could be incredibly productive agriculturally.
But instability has disrupted farming systems through displacement and insecurity, making agriculture nearly impossible. Somalia is not producing what it could, which is a tragedy for Africa.
The Horn of Africa is one of our most productive regions, and the fact that Somalia cannot sustain its own economy, let alone contribute to the continent, is a major loss.
Conflict forces people to flee, and then no agricultural activity can continue, whether it involves crops, livestock, or anything else. Every land issue you touch leads to another challenge: lack of land-use planning, for example.
Some countries are fortunate to have mapped land rights and conducted land-use planning, so they know which land is used for what. But if you don’t know how your land is being used, or you lack laws governing the conversion of agricultural land to other uses like urbanization you end up with haphazard land use and significant losses.
What are some of the most promising policy or institutional reforms happening across Africa to make land governance more inclusive, transparent, and economically productive?
I think over the last 20 years, we’ve seen significant progress. I would start with how land policies are now being developed, they’re much more inclusive. We’ve seen multi-stakeholder platforms guiding land policy development.
Most recently, for example, in Guinea Conakry, they produced a draft policy last year. Even though the country is young in this process, the approach they used involved a multi-stakeholder platform and a committee leading the development, all under government leadership.
Government included these groups to ensure the consultations were truly inclusive. The result is a policy that reflects the country’s vision and represents the views of its people.
The DRC went through a similar process and developed its land policy framework in 2024.
Since we started in 2006, and even earlier when Rwanda reviewed its land policy, we’ve seen many countries adopt stronger, more inclusive approaches. This increases the likelihood that policies are evidence-based.
In the policies themselves, we’ve also seen greater recognition of the legitimacy of existing land governance systems, whether customary systems or other forms of land organization and tenure.
Communal land rights and customary acts are now included in the laws of many countries, Sierra Leone, Kenya, Malawi, and others, through acts that recognize community land or customary land rights.
In countries whose political systems already acknowledge traditional governance, this process is easier. But documenting these systems in policy and law is extremely important.
Where we are lagging a bit is in land administration. Not many countries have documented the majority of their land. And I’m referring to documentation in the form of certificates of occupation, certificates of ownership, or other recognized forms of tenure. The challenges often relate to institutional capacity, strengthening institutions, improving skills, and ensuring adequate budgets for the land sector.
We have been working with governments to address this. While recognition of the need to fund the land sector is growing, we also push to mainstream land issues into other sectors that already receive more funding, such as agriculture.
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You cannot invest effectively in agriculture, irrigation, or large infrastructure programmes without first documenting land rights. We’ve tried to ensure that this sequence, documenting land rights before major investments, is understood and integrated into planning.
Most of Africa’s land reforms have been financed by donor money, which is now winding up. What innovative mechanisms can be explored to sustainably fund land governance reforms?
I think it’s concerning because land governance is a continuous process. When a country emerges from conflict, the international community may step in with support, sometimes including resources for the land sector. Depending on your bilateral relations, you might receive significant assistance. But that support eventually ends, while land issues do not.
Even land documentation never truly ends. Land use changes, claims evolve, populations grow, so documentation must continue. The real question is: what is your long-term strategy for sustaining land administration?
Budget allocations to the land sector are a major problem. Yet the land sector contributes tremendously to government revenue, and it could contribute even more if fiscal policies addressed issues like land concentration and ensured land was not captured by a small elite.
There is real potential for the land sector to generate additional revenue, and it already does, but financing remains a challenge. If you don’t reduce and subsidize the cost of land documentation, it becomes prohibitively expensive.
So, we need to find ways, especially through technology, to make documentation faster and easier. The backlog of land disputes in courts is huge and costly. We need solutions, whether through technology, the establishment of land courts, or other mechanisms, to make the system more efficient.
The judiciary must play its role effectively, because improving efficiency will directly reduce the cost of delivering land rights.
We’ve seen real progress where land courts are functioning well. But financing remains a serious issue. That’s why we often convene dialogues between land ministries, central banks, and ministries of finance and planning, to raise awareness of how the land sector can either support or drain the economy. If it is under-resourced or its challenges go unaddressed, the entire economy feels the impact.
