The decentralized approach on land registration is regarded as the key to Ethiopia’s successful swift and cost-effective land registration. Ethiopia’s success seems to be a rare case though:
“In fact, hardly any of the [sub-Saharan] countries that introduced legal reforms with much fanfare have succeeded in developing, let alone rolling out, a low-cost system for land administration at a scale that is sufficiently large to provide an option for the majority of the poor. This made it difficult for many of the expected benefits from such legislation to materialize, implying that the poor often continue to be excluded from formal systems and vulnerable to land loss. More generally, failure to implement land legislation has raised doubts regarding the technical, institutional, and political feasibility of such reforms.” (Deininger, Ali, Holden, & Zevenbergen, 2008)
In my previous post I mentioned the Land use and Administration Committees (LACs). The LACs are playing a major role in the registration process, so I’ll explain a bit more about that.
Generally, the land registration tasks are performed by a LAC. The major benefits of land registration by a LAC (Deininger, Ali, Holden, & Zevenbergen, 2008, Crewett, Bogale, & Korf, 2008, Adenew & Abdi, 2005):
- LACs are able to solve most conflicts in the field. The plots are registered in a public process with neighbors present in the field.
- High accessibility: people living in rural areas have easy access to the locally based committee.
- Transparency and accountibility within the decision making processes are increased because of the high accessibility and because the people concerned are directly involved in the field.
- Representation: the LAC members are elected by popular vote
- Paying additional attention to women rights and related land rights issues, policy states that every LAC should include at least one female member.
- Different languages are spoken in Ethiopia. However, there is no language barrier in the decision making process, because the committee exists of locally elected members.
- Besides no language barrier, the members also respect local culture and traditions.
- All this leads to high efficiency. The committees are able to quickly respond to local urgent land issues.
- This efficiency leads to cost-effectivity.
The LACs are supervised on kebele or woreda level, depending on the institutional structure present in the Regional State. Except for some ICT pilots, all records are kept on paper on kebele or woreda level. Land certificates based on these records are also issued by government officials at kebele or woreda level.
Based on the nine benefits mentioned above, and the fact that this decentralized approach is the key to Ethiopia’s succes on land registration, I conclude that if an ICT system would be developed, it should support this decentralized approach.
[...] land registration are made on this level, which happens to be the key to succes, as I mentioned in my previous post. Link SummaryWikipedia: Regions of Ethiopiahttp://upload.wikimed…a_regions_english.pngWikipedia: [...]