Urban Land Issues in Burkina Faso: A Matter of Political and Institutional Failure in Urban Policy?

This paper aims to review urbanization context in Burkina Faso and to analyse its implications in term of urban land management policy. Employing a qualitative methodology and conceptual lens of urban land development institutional aspect, this study benefited mainly form reviewing documents such as reports, scientific papers, plans, correspondences, as well as legislation and policies to analyse the land management context in urban areas in Burkina Faso through urban land supply process, urban land use patterns, use of land leverage tools and the political and institutional framework of urban policy.The results show that comparatively to other West African countries, Burkina Faso is the fastest urbanizing with average annual urban growth rate of roughly 5% for the period 1996-2016. In another hand, the country shows an increasing of its GDP per capita for the same period at a rate of 3.45 per year; making the country the third fast growing GDP per capita after Ghana and Nigeria where the growth was 4.45 and 4.65 percent per year respectively. The rapid urbanization in Burkina Faso is also characterized by the fast increase in urban households. Considering the period 1996-2014, while total households in the country increased by 53 percent, urban households increased by 142 percent. The main challenge of these increasing urban households is undoubtedly the provision of sufficient and convenient housing and employment.However and despite the political will, the successive governments fail to implement a coherent urban land management which has resulted as a surplus urban land supply especially for housing in the majority of towns/cities and which also lack of convenient infrastructures, with in addition almost half of the produced urban space remains unbuilt. The latter facts result as missing opportunity to use effectively land leverage tools like as land taxation, land value capture in a context where central and local governments suffer from deepened budget deficiency. In another hand, at the same time slums areas are still expanding with an increasing dwellers density. In order to improve urban land management recommendations in term of urban studies, urban governance, urban policy financing are provided at the end of the paper.