Land in Africa: Market Asset, or Secure Livelihood?

Document begins: Land in Africa: Market Asset, or Secure Livelihood? Church House, Westminster, London November 8-9 2004 Formalising and Securing Land Rights in Africa Overview paper Prepared by Julian Quan, NRI & Camilla Toulmin, IIED for Session One: Formalising and Securing Land Rights: diverse approaches from Africa 1 1. Introduction The last time African land practitioners and policy makers came together in UK to discuss issues of land and tenure reform, at a workshop sponsored by DFID at Sunningdale in 1999, there was an emerging consensus amongst participants that secure land rights are of fundamental importance to Africa's rural poor. They also agreed that the conventional process of formal land titling was not generally the way to secure rights (risking in fact undermining security); consequently alternative and more decentralised approaches were needed which gave proper recognition to legitimate customary rights. The purpose of this paper is to provide a framework to revisit the arguments about how to provide land rights security in sub-Saharan Africa, to examine what has changed, and review new experience and evidence since we sought to summarise the "state of the art" of African land tenure in publishing the Sunningdale confe rence findings (Toulmin and Quan 2000). ...