Land

STRATEGY

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, collective and individual, whether they be smallholders, medium-, or large-scale producers.

The Bank pays particular attention to the land rights of smallholders, women, Indigenous Peoples, and their economic empowerment.  

The World Bank is working to address land tenure insecurity through land administration projects, analytical work, and technical assistance.

The World Bank is increasingly working to open land and geospatial datasets for acceleration of growth through businesses, and improving own source local revenue creation, location-based analysis and decision-making, urban management, climate change responses, and resilience.

The World Bank is preparing a Land 2030 Global Partnership 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 Bank invests in assisting countries to improve their systems to improve their systems to recognize equal land and property rights; improve policies and laws; title, survey, and register land; resolve land conflicts; reduce fragility; and develop digital land administration services. The Bank’s focus is on employing land records and infrastructure for digital services that create jobs; make transactions more transparent; promote growth; enhance planning and development; and improve equitable revenue collection, state and public asset management, and environmental protection.

The Bank is currently working in 48 countries, with a current investment of approximately $1 billion in commitments, impacting millions of land tenure holders in Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe and Central Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East and North Africa.

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

• In Albania and Kosovo, the Bank is piloting the use of new technologies, including drones, to map and register property rights. 
• In Croatia, Vietnam, and other countries, the 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 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.

Management and administration of land can generate revenue.  In Uganda, one dollar invested in land administration by the World Bank’s Competitiveness and Enterprise Development project generated three dollars in local revenue.  In Eastern Europe and Central Asia, based on research of thirteen land registration projects that have now closed, the benefit to the economy of a single registration was over 16 dollars in revenue.

International Engagement

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

• First, contributing to the development and implementation of the UN Committee for the World Food Security’s Voluntary Land Guidelines, or VGGT, and the Principles for Responsible Agricultural Investment;
• Second, supporting regional efforts, like the African Union’s Land Policy Initiative Framework and guidelines on land policy;
• Third, promoting detailed reviews on land governance, like the Land Governance Assessment Framework, or LGAF.  These studies have been completed in 35 (16 in Africa), and the Bank is in the process of completing an additional 12 more studies; and
• Fourth, as a founding member of the Global Donor Working Group on Land, the Bank is implementing the VGGT, and more recently helping to secure agreements among member states to include two land indicators in SDG 1 (Poverty) and 5 (Gender). 

The Bank is also engaged in high level land policy discussions in Africa, Eastern Europe and Central Asia, the Latin America and Caribbean, and the Middle East and North Africa regions.

Going Forward

Property rights are critical to addressing multiple SDGs.  The global community is focused largely on SDG 1 – to end poverty in all its forms everywhere – and 5 – to achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls.  But success also in other Goals will be contingent on resource rights providing incentives, securing shelter, and guaranteeing access to resources.

With the current levels of investment, the global community will not significantly increase the number of poor households with secure property rights, and will likely not achieve the SDG target of “all men and women having equal rights to ownership and control over land by 2030”. 

A substantial new investment program on improving security of tenure on a mass scale in developing countries is needed. Thus, the World Bank is preparing a Land 2030 Global Partnership to enhance the commitment of countries and mobilize resources to achieve ambitious targets of securing land and property rights by 2030.

RESULTS

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

• In Indonesia, post-tsunami recovery efforts in Aceh included community mapping and issuing over 222,000 land title certificates, about one-third going to women;
• In Vietnam, 5 million land use certificates have been issued under the Vietnam First Land Project, 60 percent of which were issued in the names both the husband and wife;
• In Nicaragua, 1 million hectares of indigenous land was demarcated, titled, and registered, covering roughly 20 percent of the country’s territory;
• In Bolivia, over 580,000 ha of land were collectively titled as Original Communal Territories to Indigenous Peoples groups.
• In Malawi, 15,000 families were assisted in acquiring access to land;
• In Bosnia and Herzegovina, property transaction time was reduced from several months to five days or less during the first land registration project;
• 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;
• In Brazil, 55,000 poor rural families gained access to about 1.2 million hectares of land; and
• In FYR Macedonia, more than 50 percent of land, or 1.37 million hectares, was recorded; and registration of transactions is now done 10 times faster than before the investment.