Throughout rural Sub-Saharan Africa, the allocation and enforcement of land rights involve a diverse and complex set of customary arrangements made and upheld by local stakeholders such as village chiefs, councils of elders, and land chiefs. Customary land tenure systems often coexist with formal land administration systems, where proof of ownership or of use rights is documented with registered titles or deeds. Yet only a small proportion of the population holds formal land titles for the land they de facto own. This lack of formal land rights may lead to under-investment and sub-optimal yields. Codification of private property rights within an effective legal framework should in theory increase agricultural investment and productivity, and spur economic development. Hence, the policy response to undocumented property rights has often been the “formalization” of land tenure (i.e., the incorporation of “informal”, customary, undocumented tenure claims into the formal system of property rights), often through the provision of freehold titles.
While land titling programs have met with relative success in rural and urban settings, the evidence from Africa is less positive. This contrast is perhaps due to oversimplified interventions that neglect the complexity of customary land relations in rural areas, the limited capacity of central land administrations for the delivery of titles, or the difficulties in establishing decentralized institutions. The distributional impacts of land formalization programs are also ambiguous: Despite some claims of the possibly deleterious effects of individualizing land rights for women, there is scant rigorous evidence from impact evaluations to support or refute these claims.
Benin is one of the countries in West Africa where the design and implementation of policies to consolidate land rights is furthest advanced. The Plan Foncier Rural (PFR), first tried in Côte d'Ivoire in 1989 and piloted in Benin since 1993, is a key policy experiment in this respect. The program is currently in the initial stages of a planned implementation scale-up in Benin. The objectives of the program are to improve tenure security and stimulate agricultural investment in rural areas through the registration of land rights.
The Plan Fonciers Ruraux Impact Evaluation presents early evidence from the first large-scale randomized-controlled trial of a land formalization policy. The study was designed to address the following questions and issues:
- What is the effect of the PFR on perceived and de facto tenure security?
- What is the effect of the PFR on land market participation and land prices?
- What is the effect of the PFR on investment in land and agricultural production and yields?
- Additional issues: off-farm activities and gender differentiated impacts
The study examines the links between land demarcation and investment in rural Benin in light of a model of agricultural production under insecure tenure. The demarcation process involved communities in the mapping and attribution of land rights; cornerstones marked parcel boundaries and offered lasting landmarks. Consistent with the model, improved tenure security under demarcation induces a shift toward long-term investment on treated parcels. This investment does not yet coincide with gains in agricultural productivity. The analysis also identifies significant gender specific effects. Female-managed landholdings in treated villages are more likely to be left fallow—an important soil fertility investment. Women further respond to an exogenous tenure security change by moving production away from relatively secure, demarcated land and toward less secure land outside the village to guard those parcels.