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There is a particular kind of poverty that does not look like poverty at all. It looks like a house. A concrete structure with a zinc roof, built by hand over a decade, sitting on land the family has occupied for three generations, farmed, buried relatives on, and would defend as fiercely as anyone defends anything they own. By every lived measure, it is owned. By the measure that matters to a bank, a court, or an investor, it may not exist. No title. No registered boundary. No instrument a lender can rely on if the borrower defaults. The asset is real. The capital is not. This is the gap Jamaica has spent a decade fixing at the fiscal level and has barely begun to fix at the property level, and it is arguably the larger of the two problems.

The numbers are not marginal. Jamaica has roughly 900,000 to 970,000 parcels of land on the government’s valuation roll, and by the government’s own account, somewhere between 55 and 60 per cent carry a formal, registered title. That leaves several hundred thousand parcels, representing an enormous stock of real estate value, sitting outside the legal system that would let it function as capital.

The minister responsible for land titling has said publicly that resolving this could take up to twenty years even with full public cooperation. The Prime Minister has drawn the comparison explicitly: countries where land ownership meaningfully drives economic growth have titled between 90 and 100 per cent of their land. Jamaica sits at roughly 60. That twenty-to forty-point gap is not a statistic. It is a specific, measurable quantity of national wealth that cannot currently be borrowed against, insured properly, subdivided cleanly, or passed to the next generation without dispute.

The economist Hernando de Soto built an entire body of work around exactly this phenomenon, and it is worth being precise about what he actually argued, because the popular version of his thesis is often flattened into something less interesting than the original. De Soto’s claim was not that poor countries lack assets. His fieldwork across Latin America, Asia, and Africa found the opposite: that the poor in developing economies typically hold enormous sums in real estate and business assets, often exceeding the total value of foreign direct investment and development aid combined. His claim was that this wealth is held in what he called extralegal form, outside a unified, publicly verifiable system of property rights, which means it cannot be converted into the fungible, transferable, collateralizable instrument that a modern economy calls capital.

A title is not a formality layered on top of ownership. It is the mechanism that translates a physical asset into an economic one, the way a bond translates a stream of payments into a tradeable instrument. Without it, the asset is frozen. De Soto called this dead capital, and the term is doing real analytical work, not just rhetorical work. Capital, in his framing, is representational. It is the paper, or now the registry entry, that stands in for the asset and can be pledged, subdivided, and moved through a financial system in ways the physical asset itself cannot be.

Jamaica’s untitled land is dead capital in precisely this sense. A family sitting on an acre of unregistered land in St. Mary or Clarendon may have an asset worth several million Jamaican dollars, and yet be unable to walk into a commercial bank and borrow against it, because the bank has no reliable instrument to secure its interest. That family’s access to capital for a small business, a home improvement, a child’s education, is constrained not by the absence of wealth but by the absence of a legal technology to represent that wealth. This is the precise mechanism by which land titling becomes a growth policy rather than a bureaucratic housekeeping exercise. It does not create wealth. It unlocks wealth that already exists by giving it a form the financial system can process.

It would be intellectually lazy, however, to present titling as a costless, uncomplicated good, and a serious column owes the argument its strongest counter case. De Soto’s thesis has been contested, most notably by scholars who argue that formalisation programmes in practice have sometimes dispossessed the poor rather than empowered them. The mechanism is straightforward. Once informal land becomes a titled, marketable asset, it also becomes a taxable, seizable, and purchasable one. Households under financial pressure who might never have sold an informally held plot, because there was no clean way to sell it and no market pricing it, can find themselves selling a newly titled one to a buyer with more capital and more patience, often at a price that undervalues what the land will be worth once the whole neighbourhood is regularised.

There is also a real administrative cost to titling that falls disproportionately on people with the least capacity to bear delay, survey costs, legal fees, disputed boundaries between neighbours who never needed a fence line to matter before, and estates where a title cannot be issued until every heir across three generations and two continents has been located and has signed. Jamaica’s own systematic registration programme has tried to address the cost problem directly, with government advancing survey and legal fees and recovering them through a caveat on the eventual title rather than requiring payment up front. That is a sound design choice, and it is worth noting precisely because it shows the government has already absorbed part of this critique into the programme’s structure.

The global record bears this out with unusual precision, and it points in two directions at once. Peru is the case de Soto himself built his reputation on. In the 1990s the government established COFOPRI, a single formalisation authority created specifically to pull title granting, cadastral mapping, and registry functions out of separate, competing departments and consolidate them into one low-cost, fast-moving process. The programme titled more than a million urban properties within a few years and became the template other governments across Latin America, Africa, and Asia tried to copy.

But the part of the Peru story that matters most for Jamaica is what happened after the titles were issued. Subsequent research, including work by the economists Erica Field and Maximo Torero, found that the credit boom de Soto predicted- poor households using their new titles to unlock formal bank loans- did not materialise anywhere near the scale envisioned. Banks in Peru continued to demand additional collateral beyond the title itself, or simply priced newly titled, thinly documented land as high risk regardless of its legal status. The title changed the legal category of the asset. It did not, by itself, change a lender’s willingness to underwrite it. That is close to a controlled experiment confirming exactly the gap this column is describing.

Thailand tells the other half of the story. A land titling programme run there in the 1980s, studied extensively by the World Bank economist Gershon Feder and others, was paired deliberately with reforms to the valuation and registration infrastructure that rural banks relied on, and the research associated with that programme found real, measurable effects on financial development and access to formal credit, not just legal recognition of ownership. The difference between the Peruvian credit shortfall and the Thai credit expansion was not the quality of the titles. Both countries issued legitimate, legally sound titles at scale. The difference was whether a financial system had been built, deliberately and in parallel, to actually receive those titles as usable security. Jamaica should read Peru as the risk of doing this reform half finished, and Thailand as the evidence for what closes the gap.

The stronger version of the argument, then, is not that titling is an unambiguous good to be pursued at any pace, but that Jamaica’s current pace, measured in decades against a stock of unresolved parcels that runs into the hundreds of thousands, is itself the more urgent problem to solve, and that the solution requires more than survey capacity. This is where the finance side of the conversation, the part I know best, actually enters. A title, on its own, is a necessary but not sufficient condition for capital formation. A title becomes usable capital only when there is a financial system standing ready to accept it as security on terms an ordinary household can actually use.

Jamaica’s commercial banks remain conservative, collateral-focused lenders, and a freshly issued title on a modest rural or peri-urban property does not automatically translate into a mortgage a working family can afford, particularly where the land’s appraised value is uncertain because it has never traded in a formal market before. The missing piece is not only the National Land Agency’s registration throughput. It is a parallel financial infrastructure, a standardized approach to valuing newly titled land, a secondary market or guarantee mechanism that gives lenders confidence to extend credit against first generation titles, and possibly a dedicated facility, structured with a development finance institution like the DBJ taking a first loss position, specifically built to underwrite the earliest cohort of newly titled smallholder land, where the credit history is thinnest and the appraisal risk highest.

Put the two halves together and the reform looks different than the government’s own framing suggests. The National Land Agency’s registration programme is the supply side of this problem. It produces titles. But a title sitting in a drawer is only marginally better than no title at all if no lender will accept it, and the demand side, the financial architecture that actually converts a certificate of title into a loan, a business investment, or an inherited asset a family can divide without conflict, has received almost none of the same policy attention. Twenty years is a long time to wait for the supply side alone to close a gap this large. It would be a genuine missed opportunity if, a decade from now, Jamaica had meaningfully closed its titling gap and discovered that the newly titled land still could not function as capital, because nobody built the lending infrastructure to receive it.

Two concrete moves would bring this over the line, and neither requires waiting twenty years. The first is institutional, borrowed directly from the Peruvian model at the point where Peru actually got it right. Jamaica’s land functions remain split across separate bodies: the National Land Agency, the Titles Office, and survey and valuation functions, each with its own queue, its own fee schedule, and its own points of failure.

COFOPRI’s actual innovation was not the titling target. It was consolidating title granting, cadastral survey, and registration into a single fast-track authority with one process and one file per property, which is what allowed Peru to move at the pace it did in its first years, before the credit side of the story stalled. Jamaica’s Land Administration Capacity Enhancement Project is a step in that direction. It should be pushed further, toward a single statutory authority with the power and the budget to move a parcel from unregistered to titled in months rather than years, with the systematic registration model’s fee deferral structure kept intact as the mechanism that makes participation viable for households with no cash to spend upfront.

The second move is financial, and it is the piece Peru never built and Thailand did. A newly titled parcel in a rural or peri-urban parish is, from a commercial bank’s underwriting desk, an unknown quantity: no sale history, no comparable transactions, no track record of the borrower servicing secured debt. No bank will price that fairly at scale on its own, which is exactly why Peru’s titling wave produced legal owners but not, in the main, bank borrowers.

The fix is a dedicated first loss facility, housed at the DBJ or structured as a joint facility with commercial banks and international development finance partners, purpose built to absorb the early stage default risk on loans secured against first generation titles, paired with a standardized valuation methodology the NLA and participating lenders agree to use so that a fresh title in St. Mary is priced on a consistent, defensible basis rather than left to each bank’s individual discretion. Put the fast track titling authority and the first loss lending facility in place together, on a published timeline, and Jamaica converts a twenty-year bureaucratic project into a financeable, investable national programme, one that private capital, including the diaspora capital already looking for credible domestic vehicles, could co-fund rather than wait on.

This is, in the end, the same argument that runs beneath most of what is wrong with Caribbean capital formation, told from a different angle than usual. The region is not short of underlying wealth. It is short of the instruments and institutions that convert wealth into capital that can move, compound, and be borrowed against. Fiscal discipline was the hard, decade-long project of the last generation. Building the legal and financial plumbing that turns land, and the family wealth locked inside it, into something a bank will lend against may be the equally hard, equally decade-long project of this one. It will not make headlines the way a budget surplus does. It is, nonetheless, sitting under several hundred thousand parcels of land, waiting.

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Ambraee Houslin is a private equity strategist with a strong background in economics and statistics. He has extensive experience in investment banking, corporate finance, and investment research across Jamaica and the Caribbean region. His core expertise includes mergers and acquisitions, capital structuring, and executing complex transactions that drive growth and value creation. Ambraee has led and supported deals spanning strategic acquisitions, private credit facilities, and post-transaction integration strategies for high-impact sectors.