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Since 2010, Lesotho has implemented legal and institutional changes to allow female land ownership, established a new land agency, reduced the cost of registering land, and carried out systematic urban land titling. Analysis using administrative data shows that these reforms triggered discontinuous and sustained changes in quality of service delivery, female land ownership, and registered land sales and mortgage volume. Land and credit market activation is, however, exclusively due to policy reforms. While (subsidized) systematic land registration allows women to access documented land rights, these effects may not be sustained without further regulatory change, highlighting the importance of reducing fees and streamlining processes to improve urban land and financial market functioning as a key precondition for Africa's expected wave of urbanization translating into productive cities and jobs.

Access To Finance --- Credit Market --- Finance and Financial Sector Development --- Gender --- Gender and Development --- Gender and Economics --- Housing Finance --- Land Market --- Land Reform --- Municipal Housing and Land --- Poverty --- Urban Development --- Urban Economic Development --- Urban Land Management --- Urban Land Policy --- Urban Poverty

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Compared with the vast literature on the investment and productivity effects of land rights formalization, little attention has been paid to the impact of variation in individuals' tenure security under customary tenure regimes. This is a serious gap not only because most of Africa's rural land is held under informal arrangements, but also because gradual erosion of long-term rights by women and migrants is often an indication of traditional systems coming under stress. Using a unique survey experiment in Malawi, the analysis shows that (i) having long-term land rights of bequest and sale has a significant impact on investment and cash crop adoption; (ii) women's land rights of bequest and sale, joint with local institutional arrangements, can amplify the magnitude of such effects; and (iii) the effects found here can be obscured by measurement error associated with traditional approaches to survey data collection on land ownership and rights.

Agricultural Investment --- Agricultural Sector Economics --- Agriculture --- Communities and Human Settlements --- Crop Adoption --- Crops and Crop Management Systems --- Gender --- Gender and Economics --- Gender and Rural Development --- Investment --- Land Rights --- Land Tenure --- Land Use and Policies --- Rural Land Policies for Poverty Reduction --- Tenure Security