Kenya Launches Digital Land Management and Administration System
By Ogova Ondego
Published April 28, 2021
Kenya has launched its much touted National Land Information Management System (NLIMS).
Known as Ardhisasa, the first phase of NLIMS, a one-stop digital shop for land transactions, has gone live with the manual Nairobi Land Registry closed to pave way for the migration to the digital platform.
President Uhuru Kenyatta presided over the unveiling of the digital land information management system at the National Geospatial Data Centre in Ruaraka, Nairobi, on April 27, 2021.
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President Kenyatta said the digital platform will protect Kenyans ‘from exploitation by cartels, middlemen and fraudsters’.
“The full roll-out of the programme will facilitate the resolution of historical land disputes and guarantee the security and sanctity of your land title deed, true to the clarion Shamba Lako, Hati Safi,” Kenyatta said.
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“Nairobi County has two registries: Nairobi and Central. Central will go live in May this year after the conversion process which will culminate in everything going online,” Farida Karoney, the Minister for Lands and Physical Planning, says. “To undertake conversion, the old system has been shut down.”
However, the Minister who is at the forefront of land reforms in the country, says “There are aspects that require alignment with the law to facilitate digital transactions. These include sectional properties – or apartments – and other sectional units that are in the process of being brought under the Sectional Properties Act, signed into law in 2020.”
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She says the Government is rolling out land digitalisation in phases, with another 20 of the 47 regional administrative units, known as Counties, set to be brought on board by the end of 2021.
Karoney says the land titles conversion process, that should have been completed in 2017, had been held back by Parliament’s delay in approving regulations to bring the Land Registration Act of 2012.
Upon Parliament approving the regulations in 2017, Karoney says the Ministry of Lands and Physical Planning that she heads started ‘developing the Nairobi cadastre in 2018 to allow for a seamless transition to the new legal regime. We have digitised all our cadastral maps and our survey databases are tamper-proof’.
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Karoney says the Ministry she heads is doing everything possible ‘to ensure accountability and enhance public confidence in the exercise’.
“Digitalisation, our priority project, is anchored on legal reforms,” she says. “We proposed amendments to business laws under what is now cited as the Business Laws (Amendment) Act, 2020 to introduce electronic land transactions and allow for re-engineering of business processes. These reforms are in tandem with Article 60 of the Constitution that provides for sustainable land use and management.”
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Saying that “Attempts to digitalise the land transactions have been made by successive regimes since 1999”, Karoney says her Ministry has drawn “critical lessons from the false starts and developed a project plan” anchored on four pillars–to move the process forward.
It was while developing detailed land records, known as cadastres, for Nairobi capital area, Karoney says, that the ministry saw the need ‘to migrate to the new registration regime’.
