President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo Tuesday asked stakeholders in the land sector to speed-up the process to fully digitalize the workings of the Lands Commission to optimize the impact of land to the socio-economic development of Ghana.
He noted that land was pivotal to national development, and to optimize its (land) contribution to the socio-economic development of the country, technology must be leveraged in land administration.
The President who made the call when he opened the maiden four-day National Land Conference 2022 in Accra, said it was unacceptable for Ghana to operate in a manual environment in land administration when the much-needed strides in development could only be driven by technology.
“In this age of technology, it is unacceptable that we are still operating in a largely manual environment. We cannot deliver efficient land administration if documents on land must be processed manually.
“We must therefore expedite action on the digitalization process and ensure that the Commission goes fully digital,” he said.
The Ministry of Lands and Natural Resources is organizing the conference in collaboration with the Lands Commission, the Department of Land Economy of the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, and Colandef, a civil society organization focused on Land and Property Rights.
The conference seeks to provide a multi-stakeholder platform for policy dialogue on land issues and challenges, adopt innovative approaches and enabling technologies to improve land governance and administration and make recommendations to the government.
It also aims to increase public awareness and potential benefits of the Land Act, 2020 (Act 1036) and the Land Use and Spatial Planning Act, 2016 (Act 925). It is on the theme “Leveraging National land Policy, Legislation, and Institutional Capacity Towards Sustainable Socio-Economic Development.”
Underscoring the importance of an effective and efficient Land Sector to Ghana’s development, President Akufo-Addo said every economic activity undertaken by man had a relation to land.
He noted that the quest to transform Ghana’s economy, to bring about the desired development and prosperity, cannot be achieved without effective land administration.
Thus, the country must move away from manual processing of land and pursue aggressively the digitization of land records to builds an efficient land administration in Ghana.
The President called for concerted efforts to deal with challenges in the land administration sector.
He charged stakeholders to pursue institutional reforms necessary to anchor efficient land administration in the country
Mr. Samuel Abu Jinapor, Minister for Lands and Natural Resources said the ministry was urgently working to ensure that all aspects of land administration were fully digitalized to make the processes at the Lands Commission efficient and corruption-free.
“We are working rigorously to ensure the digitization and digitalization of the records of the Lands Commission…This will lead to improved maps and spatial data, digital transformation, systematic recording, verification and creation of national cadastral and implementation of national spatial data infrastructure,” he said.