Conference Agenda

The dearth of land information on customary lands limits the development and application of land consolidation. This paper presents and discusses the results of an experiment carried out to test the potential of participatory land administration applied on customary lands in support of land consolidation. The concept of Participatory Land Administration (PLA) which is developed in the context of the evolution of crowdsourced, volunteered, and participatory approaches provides new insights into neogeography and neocadastre, and fit-for-purpose and pro-poor land administration. The area of the experiment is in Northern Ghana where the local farming community was engaged to develop a process. The study involved collecting land information relating to farms over a two-week period, using a mobile app and an orthophoto, based on PLA. The results show that PLA can potentially support land consolidation, but further investigation is needed on how it can be integrated into the formal land registration system.

Urbanization has been a global phenomenon and has significantly contributed to economic development. However, the rapid rate of urbanization is increasing the social, economic and environmental load of cities. As such, urban development is the current global priority but the biggest challenge is how to ensure that these urban areas develop in a sustainable manner. Ensuring sustainable urban development requires appropriate land information if relevant and good decisions are to be made by public authorities, private sector or community organizations. The paper highlights the changes in procedures, responsibilities and computing environment with a focus on achieving good land governance and efficient land services. The experiences in Kenya and Zambia provide key lessons for consideration in future projects for replication and scaling up and potentially, will inform other similar initiatives in other countries.

Mozambique has adopted the road of systematic land cadastre, which is the goal of Terra Segura Programme, to cover some 4 thousand communities and 5 million rural parcels, out of an total estimated universe of circa 12 million parcels and plots.

The initial exercises to attend this massive registration, utilized traditional methods of land tenure regularization, which resulted in being either too expensive or time-consuming initiatives, with serious problems of data quality.

New approaches were designed and tested to create an effective sustainable cadastre.

To that effect, a scaling of previous tests was designed to be implemented in a cluster of 8 communities in on province with at least 5 thousand households.

The end goal of this scaling up exercise was to learn and disseminate lessons in local capacity development, land registration based on community-based crowdsourcing, and improve the methodology and tools.

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