The MCC-supported Land Title Facilitation Activity (LTF) in Ghana was designed to increase investment and productivity by strengthening property rights. In Ghana, LTF was a key element of the Agriculture Productivity and Value-Added Development Project “Agriculture Project.” With a focus on the Northern Zone, Afram Basin Zone, and Southern Zone . LTF strived to improve tenure security for existing land users and to facilitate access to land for commercial crops in the Agriculture Project Intervention Zones through systematic provision of titles.

In 2009, the World Bank began impact evaluation activities for the LTF in Ghana and in 2011 took over the impact evaluation of the rural land activities in Benin. The impact evaluation in Ghana focuses on the household- and plot-level effects of systematic land titling activities of the LTR, led by the Millennium Development Authority, in the Awutu-Effutu-Senya area (District 01) of Ghana. The evaluation methodology is a spatial regression discontinuity design. It focuses on title registration taking place in registration district 01 (Awutu-Effutu-Senya), and constructs treatment and comparison groups utilizing households along the border of the registration district. These borders were constructed for administrative reasons and do not follow any significant social, geographic, or administrative divisions. The Bank combines this physical discontinuity in the titled areas with a difference in difference approach. Spatial fixed effects control for unobserved local attributes.

Key research questions addressed by the evaluation, are as follows: • What is the effect of land title registration on perceived tenure security? • What is the effect of land registration on investments in land (e.g. agricultural improvements, building construction and tree planting)? • What is the effect of land title registration on access to credit?
• What is the effect of land title registration on crop choice (e.g. between cash and subsistence crops)? • What is the effect of land title registration on land markets (renting, sales and purchases)? *These will be differentiated across male and female owners of land and by the nature of the rights registered (customary freehold and short tenancies from chiefs).