Resource information
Following decades of social, political and economic insecurity marked by conflict, famine, regime change, and land redistribution, in the late 1990’s the Government of Ethiopia (GoE) embarked on an ambitious program to document and register lands held by rural households. This “first-level” land certification program was designed to increase tenure security and certify long-term use rights for rural households. The program has been widely viewed by donor institutions, development practitioners and scholars as one of the most successful low-cost land registration programs in Africa or anywhere else in the world. Despite the well-documented benefits, first-level certification was also perceived to have key limitations that rendered it unlikely to be a viable long-term solution for securing land rights for smallholders. In particular, the process did not map individual plots or provide a sufficient level of spatial detail around boundary documentation to allow for the development of cadastral maps for improved land use management and administration. Moreover, the lack of computerized land registries under first-level certification did not enable effective management and updating of registration records. With a view towards addressing these limitations, beginning in 2005, the USAID-supported Ethiopia Strengthening Land Tenure and Administration Program (ELTAP) worked with woreda-level (district) land administration agencies to pilot a second-level land certification process. ELTAP was implemented in Tigray, Amhara, Oromia and Southern Nations, Nationalities, and Peoples’ Region (SNNP) from 2005 to 2008. USAID support for second-level certification continued under the Ethiopia Land Administration Program (ELAP), which ran from August 2008 to February 2013. This report presents the results of an impact evaluation of the ELTAP/ELAP second-level certification work. The evaluation focuses on the impact of second-level certification relative to first-level certification impacts across a range of household-level outcomes. As such, the results provide insights on the role of land rights clarification and enhanced documentation in meeting broader development objectives. The study contributes original evidence on the role of land tenure strengthening in mitigating development challenges and helps build the knowledge base about the longer-term components of a functional land registration process.
