Innovations in Financing Demand-Driven Property Registration

Approximately 1 billion people around the world have insecure rights to their land and homes, leaving them vulnerable to conflict, hunger, poverty and gender-based violence.

A major contributor to property insecurity is that an estimated 26 percent of the world’s population lacks legal property documents. This is because land registration is typically a labor-intensive process carried out by a small cohort of licensed professionals and slow-moving bureaucracies that are either unable or unwilling to provide efficient services.

Over the last decade, new non-governmental actors have emerged to alleviate this bottleneck and deliver land registration at scale, for a fee. But delivering these services is not easy or inexpensive.

Suyo, a social enterprise that provides tech-enabled land rights services to low-income households in Colombia, released a report in December 2021 titled Learning for systems change in property rights formalization. The report reflects on five years of Suyo’s experimentation with different approaches to financing and delivering fee-based property registration services to low income households in Colombia. It is the first report of its kind to evaluate metrics like Willingness to Pay and Capacity to Pay within the property formalization space, and to explore how to make this service more broadly accessible, including through partnerships with government and the private sector.

Building on this report, the Future of Land and Housing Program at New America, in collaboration with Suyo, wrote a series of briefs that address the following questions: how can organizations like Suyo remove barriers to scaling fee-based, demand-driven property registration? And how can they build innovative financing models that make this service accessible even for the poorest customers around the world?

• Brief #1 highlights long-standing problems with property registration service delivery globally, and explores end-to-end service and cost-recovery business models as innovative approaches for more sustainable and accessible registration efforts.
• Brief #2 focuses on financing models for property registration services within which customers contribute some portion of the cost. Through case studies of emerging models, it explores the level of subsidization necessary, and advances the ever-present question: “how can innovative land registration services finance this need at scale?”
• Brief #3 explores how social enterprises and non-profit organizations can create demand for paid property registration services. It looks at who is able to pay for these services, and who is willing to pay for these services, and provides lessons learned and recommendations for increasing consumer demand for property registration.

Insights to these questions can also be found in Suyo’s recent report, Learning for systems change in property rights formalization.

We appreciate the expertise and insights provided by Julie Abrams (Impact Investing Analytic), regarding property rights impact investing and financing, as well as feedback from Frank Pichel and Tony Piaskowy (Cadasta) and Thomas Vassen (Meridia). We would also like to thank Matt Alexander and Suyo for their invaluable collaboration as we built this briefer series.