Throughout Ghana and West Africa, you'll notice signs reading 'This land is not for sale.' Sometimes you'll buy land from one person, begin construction, then another person will come with the exact same paperwork claiming the same title to that land and everything grinds to a halt. — Carlo Matta at the MIT World Real Estate Forum | May 19, 2016

Speaking on a panel called "Growth Markets, Development Opportunities: Africa & the Middle East" this evening at the MIT World Real Estate Forum at the MIT Media Lab, Accra-based real estate Carlo Matta of Laurus Development Partners explained the pervasive challenge of land title ambiguity dampening economic activity in countries like Ghana. "That's why we don't invest in West Africa," responded Bronwyn Corbett of South Africa, who leads the Delta Property Fund as its COO / CIO.

Property rights are among the institutions of justice we highlight in Poverty, Inc. as a socioeconomic bedrock for human flourishing. "You can't start an economy if ownership is in question," says Ghanaian software entrepreneur Herman Chinery-Hesse in the Poverty, Inc. chapter, "Excluded," also featuring Muhammad Yunus and Hernando De Soto.

NARRATOR One of the key factors that creates inclusion and fairness for the poor is justice in the courts, or what is often referred to by development economists as the rule of law. MUHAMMAD YUNUS Rule of law is that I know what I am, what is the rights and responsibilities around me, and it’s protected. That’s the rule of law; otherwise, it’s a jungle. The most powerful one will take everything. And that’s not a good idea for human society. HERNANDO DE SOTO Try and imagine a football match without rules. You don’t get a game going. The rules are crucial to get that game going. But everybody knows how to drive a ball; everybody knows how to buy and sell, so there is plenty of entrepreneurship ability in the world. The problems are the rules. In two-thirds of the world there isn’t yet the rule of law. What makes people interested in the rule of law, the first thing that they understand is that everybody on this earth lives on a plot of land, and so if you come around and say, “Look, we have found rules that determine how far you can go and how far somebody else can go,” are you going to share or not share water? Are you going to have passing rights or not passing rights? People start understanding the value of standard rules. HERMAN CHINERY-HESSE Property rights are a terrible problem. Terrible, terrible problem. Sixty or seventy percent of our people are farmers, and just imagine if you have 10 million farmers who have no title to the land they are farming on. We haven’t got clean title in Ghana. It’s very, very difficult. You buy land; you have to buy it four or five times. If you’re looking for farm land as a small peasant farmer, looking for five acres to buy, you can get five acres from the chief by giving him a drink, but you don’t own the five acres, so you can’t go to the bank with the five acres as your collateral to then borrow money to buy a tractor. Last time I had a meeting at The World Bank, I asked The World Bank officials, “Hey, you’ve been working with our government all these years. You know this is at the bottom of our problems. What are you doing about it? Are you saying for twenty years you just forgot?” We have a situation where anybody’s business, anybody’s house can suddenly come into question, and they might just lose their investment and it wouldn’t encourage people to invest. I don’t see that a lot of work has been done there, or a lot of progress has been made by them. You can’t start an economy without ownership not being in question. This is my fundamental.

How can this problem of clean title be solved?

One of the more promising prospects for innovation involves a still nascent technology known as blockchain, a data structure for digital ledgers first pioneered by Bitcoin.

Here's an interesting property rights use-case published by Factom, an Austin-based blockchain company.

Factom allows developing nations to create title records and unlocks $9 trillion in value for the poorest people.

Factom has announced land registry partnerships with the governments of Honduras and China. Another company Bitfury is working with the Republic of Georgia. So if you're interested in property rights, be sure to keep an eye on blockchain.

Circling back to the panel at the MIT World Real Estate Forum, one more thing is worth noting: there is certainly an increasing optimism regarding the investment prospects of the once "hopeless continent" (according to the Economist). Africa is rising.