$9 Trillion In Unregistered Land

The second annual Clinton Global Initiative held in NYC last week saw heads of state, celebrities and the super-rich, gathering to raise funds to help solve the world’s problems.

The buzz at this year’s meeting centered on a topic heretofore all but ignored...registering poor people’s property so they could borrow against it to build businesses, etc. Many citizens of developing countries (estimated to be 85%) don’t formally have title to their land, which is a key source of urban poverty.

Unregistered land in developing countries has an estimated total of over $9 trillion. It’s wealth locked-up, which keeps people in poverty instead of being an asset that can lift them up.

Saying that “land ownership is the cornerstone of economic stability in any region,” Craig DeRoy, the president of First American Corp., a seller of title-insurance and credit information, committed $1 million in cash and in-kind services to develop a “template” to give the poor in developing countries a way to establish land titles.