During a three-year period, over 20 million plots in Ethiopia, covering the majority of rural lands, received land certificates. The benefits included an increase in bargaining power for women, stronger incentives for investment and more efficient transfer of land through decentralization of rental and sale transactions.
A new World Bank paper analyzes a nation-wide household survey which measures what individual titling of land can do for poverty reduction, even when funds are limited:
This scope for improvements notwithstanding, the massive scale and relative success of land certification in Ethiopia demonstrates that technical problems or lack of resources alone can not explain the failure by African countries to put the innovative aspects of recent reforms to their land legislations into practice.
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