Sustainability of the Rural Land Registration Information System: Implications for Credit and Investment in Sustainable Land Management in Ethiopia
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Date
2023-06
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Addis Ababa University
Abstract
Land is one of the fundamental natural capitals and means of livelihoods for most of Ethiopian population in the rural landscapes. However, centuries of dependencies and unsustainable exploitations of this critical natural capital for sustaining livelihoods led to severe environmental degradation and disruption of ecosystems functions. To avert this situation Ethiopia has been implementing different interventions since early 2000s in the land administration front including policy and legal reforms, institutional restructuring, business processes reengineering, mass systematic land registration, and digitizing of land registers. While the available literature shows that these interventions improve tenure security and land administration service delivery, little has researched on the sustainability of the digital land registers called the National Rural Land Administration Information System (NRLAIS) and its implications for credit and investment in sustainable land management (SLM). By exploring the driving factors of the acceptance and actual use of the system in delivering land administration services, the study explores whether the NRLAIS is sustainable and assesses its implications for credit and investment in an on-farm SLM. To help generate new insights and fill this evidence gap, primary and secondary data were collected using surveys (from smallholder households and woreda land experts), key informant interviews with regional and federal land administration officials as well as micro finance officers, focus group discussions with Kebele administration officials and land administration committee members, literature review and policy analysis. A probit regression and structural equation models used as well as descriptive and inferential statistics substantiated by qualitative explanations were employed to analyze the data collected. The results indicated that several factors influence the acceptance and actual use of NRLAIS among land experts as a good proxy predictor of its sustainability. These factors include system quality, information quality, service quality, perceived ease of use, and perceived usefulness of the system. Landholders‘ formalization of subsequent land rights transactions after first-time land registration also significantly influenced by attitude, subjective norms, and intentions with implication for the up-to-datedness of the information in the NRLAIS. The results also indicate that access to information from the NRLAIS increases the creditworthiness of small landholders and reduces transaction costs and risks. Policy and legislative reforms in collateralizing land use rights incentivizes financial institutions to develop and provide a new loan product tailored to smallholders using land certificates as collateral. These reforms represent unique opportunities and xiii allow smallholder households to access the capital required to move from subsistence farming to more productive, market-oriented, and sustainable land use management practices. This has multiple policy and practice implications including a) land administration reforms need long-term and programmatic approaches, particularly land-IT system adoption should be context specific and fit-for-purpose, follow incremental approach including business process reengineering and data quality enhancement, b) maintenance and timely updating of the information in the land registers is critical which should also be given due consideration supported by reforming secure transaction law and expanding digitalizing of the land registers, raising awareness of land rights holders on the need to formalizing subsequent land transactions, creating user‘s incentives such as making service centers closer to landholders, and valuing land resource for higher land rights tradability such as credit market, c) consideration of land tenure institutional factors along the categories of security of tenure and bundle of rights for possible tradeoffs and synergies in the context of effective SLM policy that help to incentivizes small landholders‘ on-farm SLM investment.
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Keywords
land administration, land registration, land information system, tenure security, credit, investment, sustainability, Ethiopia