Land Digitization in Kenya
The republic of Kenya is establishing a digital national land information management system (NLIMS) known as Ardhisasa to improve the effectiveness of the country’s land administration system. So far, progress has been plodding because the overarching objective of ensuring land information accuracy comes at the expense of speed. This article outlines Kenya’s cadastre and non-spatial data digitization and conversion processes in the context of land administration.
Before establishing colonial rule in Kenya, communities administered their land using communal rules and practices, such as Kikuyu’s Githaka landholding system (Okoth-Ogendo, 1991, p.63). Between 1895 and 1963, the British introduced a new land administration system in which the established land law infrastructure mediated the relationship between communities and their land parcels. At the core of this is the documentation of land rights holders and the establishment of a public authority to administer the established land rights and their respective holders. Among other things, the post-colonial impacts of this new regime of possession include inconsistent land records, absentee landlordism, entrenched land corruption and historical land injustice claims.
Historical land injustice claims are among the issues being addressed by the National Land Commission (NLC), which was one of the post-2010 constitutional land reform measures. The other key post-2010 legal reforms included the introduction of new land laws, namely the Land Act of 2012, the Land Registration of 2012 and the Community Land Act of 2016. These laws and their supporting mechanisms are primarily aimed at streamlining land administration, with the overall goal of improving the delivery of land administration services and the efficiency of the land market. One way this is being done is by introducing electronic land transactions premised on institutional and legal reforms.
A history of modernization attempts
The manual land administration system has long been identified as a possible cause of many protracted land administration problems (RoK, 2021). As a result, dating back to 2004, several initiatives have been attempted, such as the ‘Project for Improving Land Administration in Kenya’ (PILAK), which had modernization of the land administration system as one of its objectives (RoK, 2021). However, the lack of sustainability plans and the entrenched importance of land to Kenya’s society, economy and culture means that the different initiatives did not bear the anticipated fruits. The post-2010 land law reform theory of change was that establishing a new apolitical institution, the NLC, would reduce public land corruption. In this vein, the mandate to set up the National Land Information Management System (NLIMS) was placed under the NLC. However, in 2016, the mandate was transferred back to the ministry in charge of land administration following the passage of the land law amendment. The reforms also restructured devolved land governance by removing county land management boards (CLMBs). Following these reforms, the ministry embarked on developing NLIMS, today referred to as ‘Ardhisasa’, and establishing the required policy, legal and institutional framework.
Ardhisasa was developed to reduce the backlog in land transaction processing by fast-tracking land property searches, registration, valuation and title issuance, culminating in accelerated investment and development of land as capital. In the longer term, this should resolve the land administration and management challenges of manual, paper-based transactions, introduce a more efficient and integrated land management system, and provide a tool to counter fraud and corruption within the land sector (Fenna & Gateri, 2024).
Ardhisasa: slow but sure development
There are two schools of thought regarding the implementation of Ardhisasa. One is incremental implementation, which holds that the implementation should be broken down into constituent land administration processes and then implemented with a clear roadmap, timeline and milestones. The other school of thought is the implementation of the entire system. The ministry opted for the latter, perhaps because of the failure of the previous incremental approach. Ardhisasa’s holistic establishment and development involved both administrative and technical actions. Among other objectives, administrative actions included forming a taskforce to establish the status of electronic land transactions, making the necessary arrangements for ICT improvements, investments at key installations such as land registries, and capacity-building efforts. Related to this and key to the functioning of Ardhisasa are the technical activities that started with the mundane activities involved in converting land records from paper to digital. In the land registries where preparatory activities such as file sorting and categorization were conducted, the registries were closed briefly, during which land transactions were impossible.
Digitization of documents and maps
One of the first digitization tasks is the preparation and digitization of different landholding documents. This involves identifying, cataloguing and sorting relevant land parcel files within the land registries. The verification and validation of the sorted files follow this. After verification, each document within the files is barcoded, digitally captured and uploaded to the electronic document management system (EDMS). The digitized files are returned to the file storage room (Datta & Muthama, 2024). The digitization workflow involves different land ministries and temporary staff who play different roles. This process is slow and tedious because each land parcel file comprises the land transaction history of the corresponding land parcel, including all land transaction-related documentation. Thus, the number of files could be extremely large.
Source: GIM International
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