Rwanda’s completion, in 2012/13, of a land tenure regularization
program covering the entire country allows the
use of administrative data to describe initial performance
and combine the data with household surveys to quantify
to what extent and why subsequent transfers remain
informal, and how to address this. In 2014/15, annual
volumes of registered sales ranged between 5.6 percent for
residential land in Kigali and 0.1 percent for agricultural
land in the rest of the country; and US$2.6 billion worth
of mortgages were secured against land and property. Yet,
informality of transfers in rural areas remains high. Decentralized
service provision and information campaigns
help reduce but not eliminate the extent of informality.
A strategy to test the efficacy of different approaches
to ensure full registration, scale up promising ones, and
rigorously monitor the effect of doing so is described