The acceptance of a continuum of land rights is an important step to improve the position of the poor and other vulnerable groups in relation to access to land and tenure security. To have full impact, however, this continuum has to be supplemented by a pro-poor land recordation system.

This paper supplies the first steps to come to the design of such a pro-poor land recordation system. It takes lessons from the history of developing land recordation systems in the Western world and their introduction to other territories. It identifies a number of elements that the design needs to meet, and comes with the first ideas for the design itself. An important one relates to the use of the community leadership to identify the parties, their position and status in the community, as well as the tenure arrangements and evidentiary rules in practice there. Instead of using paper trails and expert knowledge of professionals, the community and its leadership will provide these. To make sure that the system is not only affecting the local reality, it needs to have buy-in from the public sector actors as well. This is done via ‘co-management’, in which the public sector actors and the community share responsibilities for the recordation system. The linking-pins between the two are the (barefoot) land officer and the local record keeper. The paper does not detail the institutional and political economy side of the design, which will be the focus of proposed future work.

The proposed system is a trimmed down approach to land recordation, and has to be seen as the first step on a continuum of land recording. It allows people, especially the poor in customary areas and informal settlements, to set the first step on the property ladder, and should be flexible enough to allow for future improvements.

In many cities of developing countries, more than half of the urban population lives in slums and informal settlements, in sub-standard housing, without basic services and without the enjoyment of their human rights to land and adequate housing. Women headed households form a high proportion of the population in many of such settlements.

While lack of security of tenure affects millions of people across the world, women face added risks and deprivations: in Africa and South-Asia especially, women are systematically denied their human rights to access, own, control or inherit land and property.

The vast majority of women cannot afford to buy land, and usually can only access land and housing through male relatives, which makes their security of tenure dependent on good marital and family relations. At the same time, millions of women in Asia, Africa and Latin America depend critically on land for a livelihood.