Addressing land corruption in Africa: Recommendations based on the African Union's Land Governance Strategy

With a land area of 30.4 million square kilometres, Africa is the second largest continent on earth – large enough to accommodate the United States, India, Mexico, Japan and several European countries. 1 Comprised of 55 countries, the continent has a population of nearly 1.5 billion people, which is the fastest growing globally. By 2050, it is estimated that “one in four people on the planet will be African”. Africa boasts of “24 per cent of the world’s agricultural land, and 17 per cent of the arable” land, yet is, paradoxically, the hungriest continent in the world. It is also at the “forefront of the land grab crisis in the Global South” for agricultural purposes, as well as the new “green grabs” in which governments and big corporations are acquiring large tracts of land for “dubious tree planting, carbon sequestration, and biofuel and green hydrogen schemes”. These scenarios point to one major reality: the centrality of African land to the continent’s broader development agenda.

These processes are taking place in a context where the continent’s land governance is “increasingly seen as a major challenge”. The weakness of governance institutions, “further reinforced by high levels of corruption”, is at the core of land governance challenges in Africa, alongside land grabbing and a disregard for human rights, among other issues. This policy paper examines the land governance situation in Africa, with a focus on efforts by the African Union (AU) to address land corruption. The union is the principal intergovernmental body on the continent, through various regional initiatives, the latest being the AU’s 2023 Land Governance Strategy.