Surveying & Built Environment Vol. 22 Issue 1 (December 2012)

egistry has an interest to ensure that
the value of the interest in land which is
to be registered is accurate, because its
fee schedule is dependent on the value
Surveying and Built Environment Vol 22, 37-60 Nov 2012 ISSN 1816-9554
Land Value (¢)* Registration Fees for first time applicants (¢)
40 million 222,000
Above 50 million 290,000
100 million 425,000
150 million 590,000
Above 150 million 622,000
200 million 755,333
250 million 922,000
300 million 1,089,000
400 million 1,422,000
500 million 1,756,000
600 million 2,089,000
700 million 2,422,000
Table 1: Land valued in the millions and corresponding registration fees, 2007
Source: Land Title Registry, Ghana, 2007, pp. 8-9
*Cedi (¢) is the national currency of Ghana in the ‘old’ denomination. The ‘new Ghana cedis’ is written
as GH¢. ‘Old’, as a descriptor, is used because the Bank of Ghana has recently redenominated the
currency. The relationship between the old and new denomination approximates ¢ 1,000,000 = GH¢100
= $ 0.7 (see Bawumiah, 2010, pp.150-160 for more detailed discussion about the redenomination of the
Ghanaian currency).
These sources of data notwithstanding,
information about land in Ghana is
sparse. One reason for this state of
affairs is that only few transactions
in land are registered. Even in Accra,
the capital city, between the 1981
and 2001, only 11,382 transactions
were registered (Abusah, 2004, p.44),
although there were over 55,000
land transactions around this time.
In 2008, Obeng-Dapaah (2008), a
of land. Table 1 gives a breakdown of
registration fees and corresponding land
values.
former Minster of Lands and Forestry,
announced that, in Ghana as a whole,
only 11,460 documents had been
registered since 2005 (Obeng-Dapaah,
2008). What about getting data from
other land sector agencies? Apart from
other long bureaucracy valuers would
have to go though to obtain information
from the land sector agencies 3 (LSAs)
in Ghana, Anim-Odame and his
colleagues (2009) reveal that the LSAs
3
In Ghana, these agencies are collectively called ‘New Lands Commission’, which excludes the Office of
the Administrator of Stool Lands (OASL).
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