The effect of Ethiopia's land certification program on rural and peri-urban farmers' land tenure security; evidence from Tigray

This paper examines the effect of Ethiopia's land certification program on the land tenure security of rural and peri-urban farming households in the Tigray region of Ethiopia. A low-cost land registration and certification program was introduced in 1998, primarily to provide land tenure security for farmers. We use logistic regression to analyze cross-sectional data collected from 500 respondents. The analysis shows that the effect of the land certification program is significantly influenced by the geographic location of farm households. The results show that the land certification program produced better results for rural farmers than for peri-urban farmers. Certified households in rural areas are less likely to experience a change in their land tenure (less secure land tenure) compared to certified farmers in peri-urban areas. Further research is needed to assess the extent to which the unregulated expansion of Ethiopian cities and towns affects the overall effectiveness of the land certification program and to identify other factors that might strengthen the program's effectiveness.