Land

The World Bank is working to address land tenure insecurity through land administration and tenure security projects, analytical work, sharing good practices across countries and regions, and specialized technical assistance.

The World Bank supports government policies that recognize and record all forms of legitimate tenure: public and private, rural and urban, formal and customary, including those of pastoralists or others with weak rights, both collective and individual, whether they be smallholders, medium-, or large-scale producers.

Aligned with the World Bank Group Gender Strategy, the World Bank actively works with countries and partners worldwide to ensure women’s equal access and secure rights to land and property. The World Bank also supports the land rights of smallholders and Indigenous Peoples, displaced people and refugees.

The World Bank is increasingly working to make land and geospatial datasets available for use by the private sector, local government, civil society and others to accelerate growth, improve local revenue creation, location-based analysis and decision-making, urban management, climate change responses, and resilience.

The World Bank recognizes that national land administration systems and spatial data infrastructure are fundamental to disaster risk reduction and response – through the provision of a historical repository of pre-disaster land use and occupancy, as well as a unified geospatial platform for planning, monitoring, and implementing responses.

Achieving the SDG target of “all men and women having equal rights to ownership and control over land by 2030” will require a systematic effort to increase the poor households with secure property rights and an increase of investment by the global community.

Therefore, a substantial new investment program on improving security of tenure on a mass scale in developing countries is needed. To that end, the World Bank is engaging with partners in preparation of a “Land 2030 Global Initiative” to enhance the commitment of countries and mobilize resources to achieve ambitious targets of securing land and property rights by 2030.

World Bank Operations

The World Bank invests in security of tenure by assisting countries to recognize equitable land and property rights for all; improve policies and laws; title, survey, and register land; resolve land conflicts; and develop digital land administration services.

The World Bank’s focus is on employing land records and infrastructure for digital services that make transactions more transparent; promote growth; enhance planning and development; and improve equitable revenue collection, state and public asset management, and environmental protection.

The World Bank is working on land tenure as well as land and geospatial infrastructure and systems in dozens of countries across the world, with an investment of approximately $1.5 billion in commitments, impacting millions of land holders in Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe and Central Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East and North Africa. The countries and activities are manifold and include:

• Consolidating and strengthening land administration and management systems in Ghana and Uzbekistan;
• Developing a national Multipurpose Land Information System in Vietnam and Colombia;
• Improving Serbia’s and Moldova’s real property management systems;
• Improving regularization, titling, and registry services in Nicaragua and Mozambique; 
• Improving the State Property Management in Turkey and Kuwait.

Working on the frontier of technological advances, the World Bank is also investing in new geospatial technologies. 

• In Tanzania, Kosovo, and Indonesia the World Bank is piloting the use of new technologies, including drones, to map and register property rights.
• In Croatia, Vietnam, and Bosnia and Herzegovina and other countries, the World Bank is supporting the establishment of National Spatial Data Infrastructures to improve decision-making for investment and natural resource management.
• In Lebanon, Serbia, and Turkey, the World Bank supports the development of automated mass property valuation systems for more equitable and efficient property taxation, management of state assets, and transparent property markets.

Investing in secure tenure and land administration can generate revenue. In Uganda, one dollar invested in land administration generated three dollars in local revenue. In Eastern Europe and Central Asia, based on research of 13 land registration projects, the benefit to the economy of a single registration was over $16 in revenue.

In recently years, the World Bank has increasingly invested in securing land rights in countries affected by fragility, conflict, and violence (FCV).

International Engagements

The World Bank is working at the global and regional levels to support tenure rights, including:

• Contributing to the development and implementation of the UN Committee on World Food Security’s Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forests, or VGGT, which is the first international document on agreed principles for the governance of land tenure, and the Principles for Responsible Agricultural Investment (PRAI), which calls for investors in agriculture and food systems to respect tenure rights to land;
• Coordinates with all partners in supporting countries’ implementation of the VGGT through the Global Donor Working Group on Land;
• Supporting regional efforts, such as the implementation of the Framework and Guidelines on Land Policy in Africa, which serves as a basis for African governments’ commitment to land policy formulation and implementation; creation of the Latin America and Caribbean Network of Cadastres and Registries (in partnership with OAS and FAO); and the organization of the first Arab Land Conference in 2018;
• Conducting systematic and participatory assessments of land governance through the Land Governance Assessment Framework, or LGAF. World Bank has partnered with over 40 countries to use the LGAF as the basis for broad-based dialogue on issues of land governance;
• With UN-HABITAT, serving as the custodian of SDG land indicator 1.4.2 and supports others to monitor the SDG land indicator 5.a.1;
• Launching “Stand For Her Land,” an advocacy campaign that aims to close the gap between law and practice on women’s land rights, in collaboration with global and regional partners and local women and communities;
• Helping developing countries bridge the geospatial digital divide in collaboration with the United Nations Committee of Experts on Global Geospatial Information Management (UN-GGIM), including providing a roadmap on developing, managing, and using geospatial information under the Integrated Geospatial Information Framework;
• Organizing the Annual World Bank Conference on Land and Poverty, which presents the latest research and innovations in policies and good practice on land governance around the world. The theme of the 2019 conference is Catalyzing Innovation.

Last Updated: Apr 02, 2019

Some notable examples of completed World Bank-financed projects in support of land governance include:

• In Brazil, 55,000 poor rural families gained access to about 1.2 million hectares of land;
• In Bolivia, over 580,000 hectares of land were collectively titled as Original Communal Territories to Indigenous Peoples groups;
• In Bosnia and Herzegovina, property transaction time was reduced from several months to five days or less during the first land registration project;
• In Cote d’Ivoire, a $50 million project is helping the country build the capacity and institutions for implementing a national rural land tenure security program, directly addressing the inequitable land policies and practices that caused a prolonged period of armed conflict, institutional decline, and civil strife.
• In Indonesia, post-tsunami recovery efforts in Aceh included community mapping and issuing over 222,000 land title certificates, with 45% going to women as sole or joint owners;
• In Kosovo, the Real Estate Cadastre and Registration project has recorded land use or ownership rights for 182,000 people, and increased the coverage of land administration services to 77.4% of Kosovo’s population;
• In FYR Macedonia, more than 50% of land, or 1.37 million hectares, was recorded; and registration of transactions is now done 10 times faster than before the investment.
• In Malawi, 15,000 families were assisted in acquiring access to land;
• In Nicaragua, 1 million hectares of indigenous land were demarcated, titled, and registered, covering roughly 20% of the country’s territory;
• In Russia, in one year, the Cadastral Map eService received 15 million online visitors who averaged 29 minutes on the site and viewed 25 million pages; and
• In Vietnam, 5 million land use certificates have been issued under the First Vietnam Land Project, 60% of which were issued in the names of both, husband and wife.

Last Updated: Apr 02, 2019