Ghana’s ambitions for industrial development, infrastructure expansion and higher levels of foreign direct investment all depend, at some stage, on the same underlying asset: land. Yet for an investor evaluating a long-term commitment in Ghana, the first question is rarely who legally owns that land.
Ownership, in the great majority of cases, is already established under customary law and has been for generations. The more consequential question is whether the institutional system surrounding that ownership — documentation, dispute resolution, coordination between traditional and state authorities — produces enough certainty to support project financing, phased construction, and a multi-year capital commitment.
Many international observers still approach customary authority as a historical governance structure operating alongside Ghana’s modern economy rather than within it. The evidence from Ghana’s own recent institutional record suggests a different and more consequential question is now worth asking: can customary authority be transformed, through documentation, digitisation and closer coordination with state institutions, into part of a modern investment-enabling architecture, rather than a parallel system investors must navigate around?
Why land governance, not land law alone, decides outcomes
Under Article 267 of Ghana’s 1992 Constitution, stool lands vest in the relevant stool on behalf of its subjects, administered in trust rather than owned outright by the state.
Ghana’s Land Act, 2020 (Act 1036) consolidated decades of fragmented legislation and, for the first time, codified the country’s interests in land by name — allodial title, the highest customary interest; customary law freehold; common law freehold; the usufructuary interest; leasehold; and customary tenancy.
More significant for governance than for terminology, the Act placed chiefs, clan heads and family heads within a formal fiduciary framework, establishing institutional responsibility for transparency and impartiality in decisions affecting land held in trust, and required every stool, skin, clan or family to establish a Customary Land Secretariat to record and manage transactions.
This reframes the relationship between traditional authority and investment. A chief is not, under this framework, a private landowner whose decisions sit outside institutional oversight. A chief operates within a statutory fiduciary framework that attaches defined standards of conduct, a fixed constitutional revenue-sharing formula, and increasingly, documentation requirements that create a record external parties can eventually examine.
Traditional authority and modern land governance are not positioned as alternatives in Ghana’s legal architecture. Since 2020, they have been formally and deliberately connected.
The institutional architecture behind a land transaction
A single parcel of land in Ghana typically sits within an overlapping set of institutions, and how they interact matters more to an investor than any one of them examined in isolation.
The Office of the Administrator of Stool Lands (OASL), established under Act 481 of 1994 and grounded in Article 267, collects and disburses stool land revenue under a fixed constitutional formula: 10 percent to OASL for administration, and of the remainder, 25 percent to the stool, 20 percent to the traditional authority, and 55 percent to the District Assembly.
The Lands Commission handles registration, surveying and title documentation. The Land Use and Spatial Planning Authority (LUSPA), established under Act 925 of 2016, governs land use and development through a seventeen-member governing board on which the National House of Chiefs holds a seat alongside the National Development Planning Commission (NDPC) and Ghana’s professional surveying and planning institutes. LUSPA coordinates directly with the NDPC on integrating spatial and development planning.
At the local level, Customary Land Secretariats — a statutory requirement since 2020 — are meant to be the first point of record for any transaction, feeding data upward to both OASL and the Lands Commission twice yearly. Metropolitan, Municipal and District Assemblies (MMDAs) apply local planning and permitting authority on top of this structure.
The presence of the National House of Chiefs on LUSPA’s governing board, and OASL’s statutory obligation to work through traditional authorities rather than around them, reflects deliberate institutional design rather than oversight. Ghana’s land governance system has not attempted to displace customary authority with state administration. It has built a structure in which the two are formally connected — and the coordination quality of that connection, more than the existence of either institution alone, is what an investor is actually assessing when evaluating land tenure security.
An institutional transition already under way
The clearest evidence that this connection is deepening, rather than static, comes from developments already documented rather than proposed.
The Lands Commission has, through its Ghana Enterprise Land Information System (GELIS), extended digital search and registration services to a majority of Ghana’s regions, including Ashanti, with other regions still transitioning from paper-based processes, according to the Commission’s own account of its digitalisation programme and its online service portal. In August 2025, the Commission activated a Continuous Operating Reference System — a network of GPS stations delivering centimetre-level survey accuracy, aimed at reducing the boundary disputes that have historically driven land litigation.
Ghanaian property-sector reporting has also described a limited, localised pilot of blockchain-based title recording in Accra. No official Lands Commission timeline for a broader rollout has been published, and this is best read as an early-stage, emerging development rather than an operational system.
On the customary side, OASL announced in early 2026 that it would facilitate 300 new Customary Land Secretariats during the year, up from the 110 currently operating — an expansion projected to create more than 6,000 jobs in land administration, surveying, valuation and dispute resolution. The scale of that expansion is itself informative: more than four years after the 2020 Act made secretariats a legal requirement, institutional coverage remains incomplete relative to what the Act envisages, and is still actively developing.
Ghana’s own Lands Commission has underscored why this expansion matters. In public remarks hosted on the Commission’s official site, Ghana’s then Deputy Minister for Lands and Natural Resources described traditional authorities as custodians of approximately 80 percent of the country’s land, framing chiefs as the most consequential stakeholders for the Land Act’s effective implementation. The World Bank has cited a comparable estimate in its own land administration engagement in Ghana, which has, since at least 2018, included support for strengthening customary land administration and institutional capacity.
In September 2025, at a World Bank policy dialogue in Accra presenting its latest Ghana policy notes, the institution’s Division Director for Ghana identified land reform as one of a small number of priorities he described as “non-negotiable” for sustaining investment-relevant reform across political transitions, placing it explicitly alongside macro-fiscal stability and energy in the Bank’s own assessment of what shapes Ghana’s development trajectory.
Ashanti as a working example
The Ashanti Region offers the clearest existing case of what closer coordination between customary and state institutions can produce in practice, not as a hypothetical model but as an operating one.
The Manhyia Land Secretariat, under the Asantehene, Otumfuo Osei Tutu II, has been automated — a step Ghana’s Deputy Minister for Lands and Natural Resources publicly credited to the Asantehene’s own direction in mid-2025, recommending it as a model for replication in other customary areas and citing its contribution to comparatively low levels of land litigation across Ashanti and neighbouring parts of the Bono and Ahafo regions.
In July 2025, the Ashanti Regional Lands Commission was itself reconstituted, with its new leadership formally received by the Asantehene at Manhyia Palace — a board structure that includes both a state-appointed chairman and a representative of the Ashanti Regional House of Chiefs.
The Asantehene has himself been direct about the economic logic connecting land administration to investment. At a 2024 dialogue on land administration hosted at Manhyia, he observed that virtually every investment requires land, and that Asanteman’s system of clearly partitioned stool land custodianship has helped keep boundary disputes comparatively rare across the Ashanti Region and into neighbouring areas. In April 2026, addressing government and private-sector leaders at Manhyia, he returned to the theme from the investment side, arguing that durable economic development depends as much on stable, predictable institutional conditions as on state spending.
None of this suggests Ashanti’s system is without friction, or that it transfers intact to regions with different customary structures. It is, however, a documented and ongoing example of a traditional authority actively building the administrative infrastructure that determines whether a land transaction proceeds on a predictable timeline or becomes contested.
What this means for capital allocation decisions
Translated into the terms an investment committee uses, Ghana’s land governance system raises a specific, answerable set of questions rather than a single country-risk judgment.
Does the land in question fall within an area where Lands Commission digital services are already available, or one still operating on a paper basis? Does the relevant stool, skin, clan or family already operate a functioning Customary Land Secretariat, and does its record-keeping appear current? Is there a working relationship between that customary authority and the regional Lands Commission, of the kind now formalised in Ashanti? And where a dispute arises, is Alternative Dispute Resolution — which the 2020 Act directs secretariats to facilitate — actually functioning in that specific location, rather than merely provided for in statute?
These questions matter because the risk they describe is real and independently documented, not merely theoretical. The United States government’s 2025 Investment Climate Statement for Ghana cautions foreign investors directly that land records “can be incomplete or non-existent” and that clear title “may be impossible to establish” without thorough search — an independent, non-Ghanaian assessment that underscores why land documentation quality, rather than land law on paper, is the operative variable.
It is precisely this category of risk that instruments such as the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency’s political risk insurance, available to qualifying investors in Ghana, are designed to help manage at the transaction level, even as they do not substitute for the underlying documentation and coordination this article has described.
These variations do not have uniform answers across Ghana’s regions, and that variation, more than any single national reform, is the practical landscape an investor needs to map before treating land tenure as a settled input. A project timeline in a well-coordinated customary jurisdiction and the identical project in one with an inactive or under-resourced secretariat are not comparable risks, even though both formally fall under the same national legal framework.
Where this points
The evidence assembled here does not support a narrative in which modernization gradually supersedes traditional authority. It supports a narrower and more useful conclusion.
The Land Act’s fiduciary framework, OASL’s secretariat expansion, LUSPA’s inclusion of traditional authority on its governing board, and Ashanti’s own automated secretariat were built by giving customary institutions a more clearly defined, better-documented, more accountable role within a coordinated system — not by removing them from it.
The second-order consequence is the one that matters most for capital allocation. As documentation, digitisation and inter-institutional coordination continue to develop, the distinction between “customary” and “formal” land governance in Ghana becomes progressively less relevant to an investor’s due diligence than a different distinction: between jurisdictions where that coordination is already functioning and jurisdictions where it is not yet built.
The more relevant question for long-term capital allocation in Ghana is therefore not whether to work with traditional authority or around it. It is whether, in a given location, the connection between customary authority and the state’s land-administration infrastructure — digital records, regional coordination, functioning dispute resolution — has already been built, is actively being built, or has not yet started.
That distinction, more than any single national statistic, will determine whether a specific investment in Ghanaian land moves from agreement to implementation on a timeline capital can actually underwrite.
Author: Joe-William Ohene-Frimpong
Sources & References
Constitution of the Republic of Ghana, 1992 — Article 267. Establishes the vesting of stool lands in trust and the constitutional revenue-disbursement formula among OASL, traditional authorities and District Assemblies. lawsghana.com/constitution
Land Act, 2020 (Act 1036) — Parliament of Ghana, official repository. Primary legislative text. Codifies Ghana’s interests in land, establishes the fiduciary framework for customary authorities, and creates the statutory basis for Customary Land Secretariats. repository.parliament.gh · GhaLII official legislative database
Office of the Administrator of Stool Lands Act, 1994 (Act 481). Establishes OASL’s statutory mandate for stool land revenue collection and disbursement. ghanalegal.com
Office of the Administrator of Stool Lands — official communications (2026). Confirms the current number of operating Customary Land Secretariats (110) and the 2026 target of 300 additional secretariats. oasl.gov.gh
Lands Commission of Ghana — official statement on the Land Act and traditional authority. Primary Ghanaian government source for the estimate that traditional authorities are custodians of approximately 80 percent of the country’s land. lc.gov.gh
Lands Commission of Ghana — official online services portal and digitalisation programme documentation. Primary confirmation of the Commission’s GELIS digital services and its ongoing digitalisation programme. onlineservices.lc.gov.gh · lc.gov.gh — digitalisation of land administration
Land Use and Spatial Planning Authority — official site. Establishes LUSPA’s statutory mandate under Act 925 of 2016 and its governing board composition, including National House of Chiefs representation. luspa.gov.gh
National Development Planning Commission — LUSPA coordination announcement (March 2026). Confirms current institutional leadership and the formal coordination mechanism between LUSPA and the NDPC. ndpc.gov.gh
Manhyia Palace — official communications (2024). Source for the Asantehene’s own public remarks connecting customary land administration to investment and boundary certainty. manhyiapalace.org
World Bank — press release (November 2018), “Ghana to Scale Up Land Administration Services with World Bank Support.” Documents World Bank support for Ghana’s Land Administration Project and Customary Land Secretariats, corroborating the estimate that a large majority of Ghanaian landholders operate under customary law. worldbank.org
World Bank — “Transforming Ghana in a Generation” policy dialogue (September 2025), reported by IMANI Africa. Documents the World Bank’s identification of land reform as a priority within its current Ghana policy framework. imaniafrica.org
U.S. Department of State — 2025 Investment Climate Statement, Ghana. Independent assessment cautioning that Ghanaian land records can be incomplete and that establishing clear title requires thorough due diligence; notes the availability of MIGA political risk insurance for qualifying investors. state.gov
Ghanaian Chronicle — “Minister gives Otumfuo thumbs up for Manhyia Land Secretariat upgrade” (July 2025). Documents ministerial endorsement of the automated Manhyia Land Secretariat as a replicable model. thechronicle.com.gh
DailyGuide Network — “Otumfuo Welcomes New Lands Commission Leaders” (July 2025). Documents the reconstitution of the Ashanti Regional Lands Commission and its inclusion of traditional-authority representation. dailyguidenetwork.com
