Africa: Title Deeds Not the Solution to Land Problems

In most of Africa, formal individual title deeds to land have failed to solve the problems of homelessness and insecurity of tenure among the rural and urban poor, or the mushrooming of slums in the cities. This was the gist of views aired during the recently concluded Expert Group Meeting on the new legal frameworks to land tenure, at Gigiri in Nairobi, where it was pointed out that in some African countries, less than one per cent of the land was titled. Participants from Africa, the US and Europe concluded that large-scale land titling is not a panacea to solving land tenure problems in the developing world.