i Parkia biglobosa - School of Forest Resources & Environmental ...

Land Tenure
Land tenure is a complex and evolving issue today in Ghana and West Africa.
Land tenure can be defined as a bundle of rights associated with a parcel of land, held by
an individual or a group. A specific definition given by the United Nation’s Food and
Agricultural Organization (FAO 2001) for West Africa states, “land tenure refers to a
collection of rights, only some of which are held at any one time by a particular
individual or social unit”. These range from the state to individuals who may have
tenures derived secondarily from other individuals (such as a sharecropper who has his
tenure rights from someone who has leased the land from yet a third person). These
rights co-exist; frequently different individuals or groups hold different tenures to the
same piece of land but using it at different times or in different ways. For example, one
group may own rights to the harvest from the shea trees, another group may pasture their
animals, while yet another group will have gleaning rights to the wood fall from the same
piece of land (FAO 1995). In Ghana, the land tenure system is an overlap between
customary land tenure systems and government structures.
The administration and management of land in Ghana is mired under the
bureaucracy of several public institutions; Ghana’s Ministry of Land Commissions,
Metropolitan and District Assemblies, and the Office of the Administrator of Stool
Lands. These public institutions administer the land for infrastructure purposes such as
roads, schools, and clinics in collaboration with the customary land system administered
by the chief (Kasanga and Kotey 2001). An example of the overlap between customary
land tenure and government bureaucracy was a secondary project I undertook erecting a
three-classroom cement block building to the existing primary school. I had to acquire
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