Stage 2 · Build a credible file · Lesson 1 of 4
Land in Madagascar: title, certificate, lease
Land only works as security if its documents agree with the register and with what is on the ground. You will read a land status certificate, then take your own plot through the questions an analyst asks.
What a status certificate says
The first document an analyst asks for about land
This is a land status certificate, issued for a plot on the east coast meant for a hotel project. It looks ordinary. Open the lines one by one.
Click a line to open it.
Land title no. 4182-TMCommune of Ambila · 3 ha 12 a 40 ca
The registration number in the land register and the recorded area. It identifies the plot. It does not yet prove your rights over it.
Registered owner: R. H., private individualtransfer transcribed 18 June 2021
Who is on the register today, and since when. A sale made after yours shows up here, and nowhere else.
Mortgage registration no. 1142taken 9 April 2019 in favour of a bank · not released
A mortgage registered two years before the sale, and still in force. It stays with the land, whoever owns it.
This land secures somebody else’s debt. Until the registration is released (struck off the register), no lender will agree to rank behind it.
Objections and seizures: none
Nothing blocks a sale of the property today. A seizure by one of the seller’s creditors would appear on this line.
Boundary survey: minutes of 14 June 2024sworn surveyor · dimensioned plan attached
The most recent marking-out on the ground. Two years is recent. Ten years in a neighbourhood that has changed, much less so.
Made-up example for the exercise, modelled on a real certificate. The mortgage dates from 2019, the sale from 2021: nobody asked for a certificate on the day of the sale.
The title is genuine, so is the notarial deed, and the registered person really is the owner. Yet this land cannot serve as security, because of a 2019 line that was never released. The title says who owns the land. The land status certificate (CSJ) says what weighs on it at a given date.
It is asked for at two moments, with two different requirements, and both are right. For a funding file, funders want a CSJ less than three months old. For a purchase, prudence calls for a CSJ dated the day of signing, or the day before, because that is the day you pay.
Title, land certificate or nothing
Eight plots in ten have no legal document
That is the World Bank’s estimate, carried in the US State Department’s 2025 investment climate report. Of more than ten million plots, about 80% are occupied with no legal document. Your land falls under one of three regimes, and an investor wants to know which before anything else.
Sources: World Bank, cited in the 2025 State Department report; Observatoire du foncier, Programme national foncier II; law 2006-031 on untitled private property.
Many founders do not know this: a land certificate is not a second-class title. Article 12 of law 2006-031 gives it the same force. The difference lies in how solid the enquiry behind it is, and in whether you can get one at all. Only 594 communes, about 37% of the country, ever opened a land desk. By 2019 a third of those desks had stopped working for lack of funds.
- Under foreign control: the lease
- The traps, one question at a time
- Genuine documents, a false sale
- The boundary survey
- In your file
- Three questions
- Before you submit the file
The rest of the lesson
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7 more parts, with the calculations on your own numbers and what to write in your file. The account is free, no commitment.
The words of this lesson
Each word links to its full definition in the glossary.
- Land title
- The document attesting a right of ownership over land. In Madagascar it is a starting point, not a proof.
- Land certificate
- In Madagascar, the paper issued by the local council recognising your rights over untitled land; weaker than a title.
- Land status certificate
- The up-to-date position of a plot at the land office: who owns it, and what encumbers it.
- Long lease
- A very long lease, up to 99 years, giving rights close to ownership.
- Boundary survey
- The physical delimitation of the plot by a surveyor, with markers and a plan.
- Acquisitive prescription
- Becoming the owner of land by occupying it openly and continuously for a long time, under conditions set by law.
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