Mission

The SOLA projectwill be piloted in three FAO member countries: Ghana, Nepal and Samoa. Fully functional IT- solutions for selected modules of the SOLA software will be customised to meet local cadastre and registration laws and practices before pilot implementations of SOLA in those countries. In addition local software developers will be recruited and trained so that they can undertake the required customisation of SOLA, support the pilot implementations and maintain the software. These local software development teams are expected to become key members of the  SOLA user and developer community.

Samoa

Although over 80% of land in Samoa is held in customary ownership and is outside of the title registration system, the transactions affecting the remaining 20% (freehold and government) of the land are sufficient to warrant two separate computerised systems dealing with title registration and the associated cadastral mapping. The Samoan society is also vigorously discussing how to balance protecting Samoan way of life with using customary tenure to provide more economic benefits. The existing computerised systems are based on commercial software and are dependent on overseas software support.

SOLA intends to provide an opportunity to move to more sustainable computerised systems, that integrate the title registration and cadastral mapping functions and to assist Samoa to build up software support skills within Samoa.

Nepal

In Nepal, land registration and cadastral services are provided to citizens through over 75 district offices. The recent political instability has heightened the need for land reform and improved land administration services. Although computerised systems have been developed, these are based on proprietary software and the district offices of both the Department of Land Reform and Management and the Department of Survey operate primarily on paper based systems. The physical condition of these paper based records is deteriorating and the condition of the offices in many of these districts is very primitive. Power and communication links with the district offices are very tentative.

SOLA intends to provide an opportunity to move to a more integrated operation of the land related departments operating at the district level, and for the new open source system to be easier to operate, to provide support for a more comprehensive range of district office functions, to safeguard the archives of land related records from further deterioration and to run on a hardware platform that provides a continuous service regardless of interruptions in mains power.

Ghana

80 percent of land in Ghana is held in customary ownership and title registration has been introduced in Greater Accra and parts of Kumasi region. The remaining 8 regions have a deeds registration system. There are computerised systems based on proprietary software and located in the headquarters and Greater Accra offices of the land sector agencies. However, many of these systems are stand-alone systems operating on very old hardware and networking is limited to building based local area networks.

Over the last five years, the Land Administration Project has supported the development of stage 1 of the Ghana Land Information System (LIS). The Ghana LIS is designed to support the business processes of the newly established Land Commission which brought together land sector agencies within a single organisation. The Land Administration Project also made a start on creating a digital archive of registration records.