2025 Reform: Why Village Attestation Is No Longer Sufficient to Obtain an ACD
Why is the village attestation living its final days in Ivory Coast? Decoding the 2025 government reform and a practical guide for the diaspora to prevent your land investment from being blocked or cancelled.
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The 2025 land reform and the end of a tolerance
For years, the Ivorian property market ran on a tolerance: raw land was bought and resold on the strength of a village attestation alone. That document, issued by the local chieftaincy, served as the starting point for assembling a technical file.
Mounting disputes, double sales, and clogged courts eventually changed the calculation. The Ministry of Construction, Housing and Urban Development (MCLU) announced a directive meant to clean up the sector.
What changes concretely at MCLU counters
Land registration rules are tightening on three points.
- The Ministry's decentralized services will no longer accept village attestations as the cornerstone document for opening a request for a Definitive Concession Decree (ACD) on new subdivisions.
- The State wants to compel developers and landowners to settle customary rights and obtain a global title before marketing individual lots.
- Traceability of each parcel in the Integrated Urban Land Management System (SIGFU) becomes the rule at the counters.
Direct impact for diaspora buyers
If you live abroad and recently acquired land whose only supporting document is a village attestation, or an unregularized allocation letter, your file is fragile.
Three risks stack up. The first is administrative: you can no longer file the technical dossier needed to obtain your ACD. The second concerns the liquidity of your asset, since land that cannot be regularized finds no buyer on the formal market, and the money you committed stays locked in it. The third is judicial: if a conflict arises with the customary family that sold you the parcel, you hold no institutional title to set against them to prove your right.
How to secure land already purchased under attestation?
If you already hold a village attestation, three steps should be launched without waiting, while old approved subdivisions remain treatable.
- Check that your land sits inside a subdivision approved by ministerial decree. Without that approval, no registration procedure is possible.
- Have your technical file prepared, topographic surveys and boundary demarcation report included, by a surveyor-expert registered with the Ordre des Géomètres-Experts de Côte d'Ivoire (OGECI).
- File your ACD request to assert your acquired rights before the new circulars apply everywhere across the territory.
What to remember
Dropping the village attestation as an entry document professionalizes a market that badly needed it, and it leaves buyers little time to react. Buying an untitled parcel today without legal support means accepting a risk you cannot measure. At Capital Foncier, we open a file only on parcels whose documentary chain has been verified and whose registration procedure is already under way. To follow each step of that process, read our definitive guide to Village Attestation to Land Title.
Official sources:
- servicepublic.gouv.ci: ACD (100,000 FCFA per individual lot), CMPF (15,000 FCFA), state of domain (5,000 FCFA), land status (3,000 FCFA)
- construction.gouv.ci: MCLU, Guichet Unique du Foncier et de l'Habitat (GUFH), tel. 27 20 21 74 78, subdivision database since 1960
- idufci.construction.gouv.ci: IDUFCI (Identifiant Unique du Foncier de Côte d'Ivoire), SIGFU (Decree No. 2019-221)
- dgi.gouv.ci: Land Registry, IPF (Impôt sur le Patrimoine Foncier)
- Ordinance No. 2013-481: urban land domain
- afor.ci: Rural Land Agency, certification, contracting
- Law No. 98-750 (PDF): rural land domain
- PRESFOR: 3,353 villages, 16 regions, certification covered by the programme
- Decree No. 2019-263: delimitation of village territories
- Decree No. 2019-266: inquiry commissioners, CVGFR (Comités Villageois de Gestion Foncière Rurale)
?Frequently asked questions
My village attestation dates from 2015, is it affected by these restrictions?+
The directive targets new subdivisions first, to stop informal transactions. Acquired rights on old approved subdivisions remain treatable, but the counters are increasingly demanding on the traceability of those older attestations. Launch your ACD procedure without waiting: a file left aside ends up running into documentary requirements it no longer meets.
A developer is offering me land with a village attestation, promising to handle the ACD later. What should I do?+
Walk away, or demand solid contractual commitments before a notary. Plenty of informal brokers use that argument to offload land sitting in unapproved or disputed areas. If the developer undertakes to deliver the ACD, the final payment must be conditional on the document actually being issued by the Ministry, with the funds held in a notarized escrow account until then.
What is the secure alternative to village attestation today?+
The soundest route in legal terms is to acquire land that already holds an ACD or a Land Title, then have the transfer of ownership drawn up as a Certificate of Land Property Mutation (CMPF) by a notary. If you are buying upstream (pre-financing), the operation has to run under the strict control of an expert firm that checks the legal viability of the project.
Official timeline: under Ivorian administration texts, 180 calendar days at the MCLU for an ACD on an approved subdivision (BÂTIR N°004, 2022), excluding tax processing. In practice, the total time experienced is often longer, for reasons that cannot always be explained. Note that the Land Title (TF) is created by the Land Property Registry during the ACD procedure (official step 3), not after. The ACD published in the Land Register is the Land Title published.
