In partnership with Oxfam, COLANDEF has been working with customary land actors in selected cocoa growing communities in Ghana to educate, strengthen institutional capacity for customary land governance and document customary land rights. 

Starting from 2022, traditional leaders, smallholder farmers, private sector actors, and state land agencies have been mobilised to review existing customary land practices, propose customised approaches to land governance, and built consensus on approaches for piloting land rights documentation for selected farmers. The preparation towards customary land rights documentation included training, awareness raising, institutional capacity strengthening, assessment of the typology of land rights and data collection on land rights for selected farmers. 

After a period of ground laying work, in January 2025, the third phase of the project commenced. Under this phase, we are mobilising cocoa farmers for their land rights documentation.  The initial phase of this land rights documentation will benefit over 150 cocoa farmers with about 37% representing women. This initiative would help the cocoa farmers formalise their land rights, have land tenure security, to reduce the risk of land disputes. 

To align the project with national policy,  stakeholders were trained on the provisions in the Land Act 2020 (Act 1036). The training highlighted the relevant Land Act provisions for enhancing tenure security for customary land rights holders. 

Following a successful pilot of this phase, the land rights documentation exercise will be scaled up and replicated in other traditional areas in the Ashanti region. We hope lessons from these pilot activities will provide the lessons for a nationwide adoption of customary land rights documentation model that allows all smallholder farmers, regardless of the crop they grow,  to benefit from land rights documentation in Ghana.

COLANDEF is committed to expanding awareness and ensuring that land rights documentation becomes an integral part of customary land governance to protect land rights of smallholder agricultural land users, contribute to improved tenure security, productivity and livelihood.

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Stay tuned for more updates on this impactful project.