Honorable Ali D. Kaba was appointed by His Excellency President Joseph Nyuma Boakai, Sr., in 2024 as Acting Commissioner for Land Policy and Planning at the Liberia Land Authority (LLA), pending confirmation by the Liberian Senate.

He is a Balzan Fellow at the Australian National University and a Ph.D. candidate in Development Studies at American University’s School of International Service. He holds an M.A. in International Development from the University of Denver’s Josef Korbel School of International Studies and a B.A. in Sociology from Jacksonville University. He is also a proud graduate of the College of West Africa in Monrovia.

With more than fifteen years of experience across Africa, Hon. Kaba has worked in land governance, post-conflict development, natural resource management, policy formulation, and civil society advocacy. His contributions include national land policy reforms, community land documentation initiatives, and international research on land tenure, climate governance, and inclusive development.

He has served as an Adjunct Professor at American University’s School of International Service and previously worked as Senior Researcher at the Sustainable Development Institute, where he helped design Liberia’s first civil society land governance program and led initiatives on community land rights, natural resource governance, and policy reform. He also served as West Africa Specialist for Collective Tenure Registration, helping develop land documentation systems in Jigawa and Kaduna States, Nigeria.

Hon. Kaba has consulted with a wide range of national and international institutions, including the World Bank, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the Rights and Resources Institute (RRI), the University of Michigan, Tetra Tech, NAMATI, OXFAM, the Ministry of Finance and Development Planning, and the Governance Commission. He has also been affiliated with the Comparative Post-Conflict Recovery Project (CPRP) at Emory University. He has authored and co-authored several policy and academic papers and contributed to Liberia’s National Vision 2030. His research and professional work focus on legal pluralism, with particular attention to how youth and women secure land, livelihoods, and economic opportunity within an evolving rural governance landscape.