Lead image for Title north Kenya land to unlock growth .
Kenya's arid and semi-arid lands cover some 489,000 square kilometres - more than 80 percent of the country's landmass, and home to about 36 percent of its people. It is the largest asset the republic owns, and almost none of it has a price, because almost none of it has a title.
Every investment pitch for the north eventually meets that same wall. A developer wants a wind farm, a mineral processor a plant, a carbon project a 30-year lease, and each needs the one thing the north cannot readily supply: a landowner with a title deed to sign. Without a clear owner, there is no collateral, and without collateral no bankable project.
The Constitution recognises community land as one of Kenya's three forms of tenure, equal to public and private land, and the Community Land Act of 2016 gave it effect.
Communities would map their boundaries, elect management committees and receive collective title. Roughly two-thirds of Kenya's landmass is community land, home to some of its poorest citizens, and for the first time their claim to it would be as solid as a Nairobi title deed.
A decade later the promise is largely unkept. By most estimates only about 15 percent of community land has been registered.
The Ministry of Lands, which in 2019 set itself the goal of documenting all community land by the end of 2024, has quietly let the deadline slip. Progress is real but slow - 60 title deeds in Samburu East, half a million hectares still in process in Samburu North - drops against a drought.
The carbon market, potentially the north's most valuable new export, turns on exactly this question of who holds the land - and the danger is no longer hypothetical.
In January 2025 the Environment and Land Court shut down two of the Northern Rangelands Trust's conservancies in Isiolo, ruling in favour of 165 pastoralists that they had been established on unregistered community land without consent - a judgment that imperils the world's largest soil-carbon project.