‘Valuation of Ghana’s Customary Lands in support of Land Management Activities’ Dr. Kwabena Obeng Asiama, Leibniz University of Hannover, Germany

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Abstract

The undertaking of several land management activities, such as land readjustment, land consolidation and …, is hampered and sometimes … due to the inadequate processes of assessing land and property value. This presentation looks at the development of a valuation process to support land consolidation on customary lands, which has largely been a failure.

There are two approaches to land valuation in land consolidation – the agronomic value, with its basis being the soil productivity and quality, and the market value. The market value has been touted as the better approach with studies pointing out the deficiencies in the agronomic value approach. However, the market value approach cannot be used in Sub-Saharan Africa’s customary lands due to the limited land market. Here, we develop a framework for an approach for assigning values to customary rural farmland parcels that reflects the local people’s view of land value. The results demonstrate that it is possible to place relative quid pro quo values on rural customary agricultural farmlands that have no land markets. We anticipate that the approach can be the starting point for more approaches to valuing rural customary lands for other specific purposes. A further verification is however needed in the study area to ascertain whether the results of the derived LVIs are representative of the local farmers’ view of their land values, and how the framework will fit into land consolidation practices.

Bio

Dr. Kwabena Obeng Asiama is currently a research scientist and lecturer at the Geodetic Institute (GIH) of the Leibniz University of Hannover, Germany. He received his PhD. (2019) and MSc. (2015) from the Faculty of Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation (ITC), University of Twente with a focus on Land Administration. He completed BSc. in Land Economy (2012) at KNUST, Kumasi, Ghana. In 2018, he received the FIG-Survey Review Prize at the XXVI FIG Congress. He was also named one of the 40 under 40 motivated and accomplished young surveying professionals by the xyHt magazine in 2020.

Kwabena’s research interests span real estate valuation (with a focus on 3D cadastres, large-scale land acquisitions, and areas without land markets and unregistered lands), land governance, as well as innovative approaches to land administration and land management activities on customary lands of the Global South.

Kwabena is currently Chair of the FIG Young Surveyors Network.