Land tenure security

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Whether a household's claim to the ground it occupies is recorded, recognised and defensible. SDG indicator 1.4.2 measures it two ways, and the gap between them is the interesting part: on data from 85 countries, about 66 per cent of adults reported perceiving their land rights as secure, while only about 43 per cent held legally recognised documentation — and in sub-Saharan Africa the documented share falls to roughly 15 per cent. Tenure is the hinge between the informal city and every other system in this Journey. A utility will not usually lay a service main into land it cannot bill or is not permitted to enter. A household will not build a concrete second storey on ground it may lose. A municipality cannot levy a property tax on parcels it has not registered, which starves the very budget that would extend the network. And the state retains, in practice, the power to clear what it has never recorded — which is why demolition remains a live instrument in cities where tenure was never formalised.