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Securing Land Rights in Africa: Land Registration in Tigray, Northern Ethiopia assesses the strengths and weaknesses of a simple, inexpensive, village-based land registration system put in place between 1996 and 1998 in one of the poorest States, Tigray, of one of the world’s poorest countries, Ethiopia. The system worked well and fairly in large part due to those characteristics; but this success also depended on effective local governments which were able to prevent inequities from unforeseen shortcomings. At the same time, those same shortcomings are analysed and also serve as lessons: that the choice of a land description technology has consequences in use; that title is a legal conclusion that must be constantly updated to be reliable; that registering all the land of a household together under the name of the household head may lead to unnecessary recording problems and inequities when transactions, such as divorce, occur; and that intersections between registration systems (e.g., urban/rural, individual/community, small-holder/investor, cultivated/forested) may create problems.

This report forms part of a series of seven papers based on a research programme entitled “Securing Land Rights in Africa: Can land registration serve the poor?” led by IIED and funded by the Central Research Department of the UK’s Department for International Development.