Interventions of Customary Land Secretariats in Ghana

Purpose: Since 2003, the Ministry of Lands and Natural Resources of Ghana has been assisting customary land authorities to establish customary land secretariats as a step towards improved customary land administration and management. The support for Customary Land Administration is to develop a more effective and accountable system of land administration at local level based on a collaborative approach, building on existing customary institutions, with the support of central government. The work seeks to provide an understanding of the customary land secretariat concept in Ghana. The work achieves this by observing several customary land secretariats and demonstrating the outcome of their implementation in Ghana over a decade from 2003 to 2020. The specific objectives are to assess the effectiveness of Customary Land Secretariats in terms of: 1) Maintaining reliable and up-to-date record of land transactions at the customary level, 2) Providing the expected linkage between landowners and prospective investors, and 3) Resolving land disputes through Alternative Dispute Resolution mechanisms. The work seeks to unveil the successes and failures of the customary land secretariats based on the above thematic areas.Methodology: The study employs a case study approach within a Quantitative and Qualitative data analysis paradigm. The research and its findings and conclusion hinges on robust empirical evidence with analysis of quantitative and qualitative data collated from 20 CLSs randomly selected across the country. Overall, 60 respondents were selected and interviewed using the purposive sampling technique. Some telephone and Email correspondence were used but to a limited extent. Visits were made to 18 of the CLSs to verify and confirm conflicting data collated from the different data sources.Findings: Results show a reduction in the number of ownership disputes in areas where CLSs have been established and that there is an increase in public education and sensitization of community people on land documentation and that there is an increase in the number persons registering lands including the proportion of women registering titles to their lands.Implications: In Ghana like many other African countries, land is central to livelihood for majority of the population which is largely agrarian subsistence farmers. An efficient land administration system at the local level has the potential to activate local economic development. Second, over 70% of lands in Ghana is customarily owned and held in trust by traditional leaders (i.e., family heads, clan heads, chiefs, and priests) for their subjects. The effectiveness of customary land secretariat implementation will greatly aid the fiduciary relation and promote accountability at the local level.