Côte d’Ivoire has issued 68,000 land certificates, according to the tally presented on 5 October 2026 by Agriculture Minister Bruno Nabagné Koné. The level reported for 2017 was 4,000 certificates.
Three measures of work completed
The minister also announced 5,786 villages demarcated and boundary-marked and 86,447 agrarian contracts signed. These are cumulative totals presented at the Abidjan Land Days, rather than the number of files processed during October.
The scale of the remaining work is evident in the national needs cited: around 23 million hectares to secure, 9,000 localities to demarcate and 1.5 million certificates to issue. The certificate tally thus represents around 4.5% of this reference figure, according to our calculation. This ratio compares numbers of documents; it does not measure the share of area already secured.
An issue for agricultural investment decisions
The different counters are not interchangeable. The number of demarcated villages describes a territorial process. Those for certificates and contracts track other operations. Adding them into a single total would mask what each procedure contributes to land monitoring.
For a farmer or agricultural investor, having a clear land position helps clarify the rights and commitments surrounding a project. The long life of investments in a plantation or equipment makes this question especially concrete: spending is committed before all the expected returns have been received.
Economic monitoring of land security should therefore match the progress of procedures with the agricultural projects concerned, keeping each indicator’s unit and scope intact.
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