Digitise land records to eliminate challenges – IMANI

The founder IMANI Africa, Franklin Cudjoe, has stressed the need for the Ghana to digitise all land records to eliminate challenges affecting land registration system in the country.

“Lands hold the value for building any country’s worth” for which reason Ghana needed a system that could properly identify land records to aid commerce, he said.

He was speaking at a forum in Accra on Wednesday to address the challenges confronting land registration in the country, stressing that digitisation could be achieved by fast-moving the documentation of land owners in a well-organised but less costly manner.

The forum was to see to the initiation of several reforms in the registration and ownership of lands and ensure a better record keeping system for land registration.

While noting that the registration of lands should not be expensive, Mr Cudjoe said that the registration of lands should not make the country lose its ability to be an attractive place to do business.

He, therefore, called on the Government to assist the Lands Commission with the necessary resources and also implored private organisations to take interest in the matter and help see to its efficiency and effectiveness.
Speaking on the need for the maps of the country to be updated after several decades, he revealed that the policy think-tank, IMANI would embark on a project where every land owner would post his or her land, the person he or she was in conflict with, and the court and judge addressing the case.

On his part, the Internal Consultant for IMANI, Dennis Asare said that Ghana’s land market faced lack of clear land ownership, delay in title registration and lacked institutional cohesion.

Mr Asare said that property registrations were also confronted with lack of information, decentralisation of land sector agencies and the lack of enforcement of court rulings.

However, he mentioned that the decentralisation of land administration according to the decentralisation framework would ensure that the menace was eradicated.

Furthermore, Mr Asare pointed out that the digitisation of property registration as championed by many could be enforced by adopting a people-centred approach, breaking new grounds and rectifying existing records.

Meanwhile, the Lands Commission has stated that the Commission had plans to undertake measures to ensure the effectiveness and efficiency of land administration in the country.

The Head of Special Projects for the Commission, Dr Benjamin Quaye stressed that the Commission had plans of mapping up the entire country as the country had seen no mapping since 1974 and introduce online systems for easy access by people.

Dr Quaye added that there would also be the introduction of the Ghana Land Parcel Administration (GLPM) number to serve as the digital link between the plan and the land on ground to enhance the accuracy of lands.