THE NATIONAL LAND INFORMATION MANAGEMENT SYSTEM (NLIMS) – A SYSTEM FOR KENYANS

The National Land Commission Act of 2012, section 5 (2) (d) mandates the National Land Commission with the task of developing and implementing a nationwide land information management system at both national and county levels. To help the Commission in this quest, the National Land Information Management System (NLIMS) directorate was created. The system to be developed and implemented goes by the same name as the directorate (NLIMS). What is the purpose of NLIMS the system? From a theoretical standpoint, this is a system that comprises of subsystems that would support all processes usually encountered in land administration and management including but not limited to guaranteeing land tenure rights, documenting responsibilities, restrictions and risks, valuation and taxation, property registration and land use regulation in relation to a particular parcel of land (plot).

When we talk about tenure rights, responsibilities, restrictions and risks, the land parcels take center stage and to address this we have the notion of a cadaster. The basic building block in any land information system is the land parcel as identified in the cadaster. What is a cadaster you ask? According the International Federation of Geodesists and Surveyors (FIG), a cadaster is a parcel based, and up-to-date land information system containing a record of interests in land (e.g. rights, restrictions and responsibilities and risks). It usually includes a geometric description of land parcels (cadastral maps) linked to other records describing the nature of the interests, the ownership or control of those interests, and often the value of the parcel and its improvements. It may be established for fiscal purposes (e.g. valuation and equitable taxation), legal purposes (conveyancing), to assist in the management of land and land use (e.g. for planning and other administrative purposes), and enables sustainable development and environmental protection. From this viewpoint it is clear that while NLC is charged with implementing and maintaining this system, there needs to be synergies and harmony in operations between the Commission, the land registries, national mapping agency, county governments, and treasury as they all need portions of the parcel based NLIMS.

What do Kenyans expect from this system when fully implemented? Firstly, they expect that technology will be leveraged with a clear impact on the efficiency with which they are served when they visit various agencies charged with land matters. This means that this system will have to help reduce bureaucracy and by extension, corruption through the streamlining and putting in place appropriate processes and procedures removing need to have direct payments at the public agency premises. Secondly, there is expectation that some services will be accessible from the comfort of the citizens’ homes and offices without having to visit the public agencies through use of the online and mobile platforms. For purposes of fee payments, online and mobile payment platforms will be used and such payments will reflect in the system. Finally and importantly they expect that land transactions will be secure, transparent and straightforward and that once completed will reflect the correct status of a parcel in the system and on the ground. This will help avoid some of the issues that are usually encountered that have facilitated anomalies e.g. where easements have been granted and affected owners compensated, but this is not be reflected in the respective departments and units allowing the lands office to allow further transactions in unmodified parcels, with the extremity being cases of double allocations.

The central and county governments also have their own expectations of what this system will accomplish. Key among this is support for sustainable development. This will be supported through having a system that can be interrogated at various levels by players (who of course need to be granted access to just what is relevant to them) who will subsequently use the information for appropriate decision making. Another expectation is that this system will support revenue generation, collection, budgeting and disbursement of funds. In implementing the system, all transactions that will be encoded in the form of workflows requiring payments will be connected to a very secure payment module supporting various modes of payment. This means that a client will make a payment using the system and the token evidence of payment will be what will be required when they interact with the system to initiate service delivery. This includes both transactions that may be fully automated (such as online search requests) to transactions that require actions by officers but utilizing the systems such as various approvals towards the issuance of a title, processing of survey works among a host of others. Additionally, this system should be able to plug in to the ‘One source of Truth’ initiative being spearheaded by the Information and Communication Technology Authority (ICTA) on behalf of the national government.

To actualize this system, the NLC has a number of expectations too, from both the public and the other players in government and private sector. The first is that given that this is an onerous responsibility, there is need for patience as the Commission goes through the process of procuring and implementing the solution. The second is that the Commission will be facilitated with commensurate budgetary allocations, timely disbursement of these allocations and support in its effort to whip up public support for the various programmes that will be put in place to actualize and operationalize NLIMS. The third is that the various entities charged by law with tasks that feed into NLIMS and also derive services from NLIMS will cooperate and support the NLC as it implements an all-encompassing solution. This will include being granted access to relevant data, support in testing and securing the system. When this is realized, then we will have a system that will support the Commission and the government by extension, deliver on its promise of reforming the land sector and making it responsive to the needs of Kenyans.

While the vision is to have an all-encompassing system, this cannot be realized overnight and not all functions need to be implemented at once. In this regard, we plan to have some quick wins on the way towards full implementation. Some of these quick wins include, the ability by Kenyans on the payment of necessary fees (using online or mobile solutions) to perform searches of land parcels, access to survey data by professionals registered in the system and ability for persons to visualize spatial locations of various parcels and some of the information (attributes) held in the registry about the parcels. Later functions to be implemented include support for various workflows that allow updating of registry information, survey data and other transactions. Any system is as good as the data held in it and especially for a spatially supported one as the NLIMS will be, the quality of data is paramount. A lot of this data is in analog (hard copy) format and it takes time to convert data. The conversion process will have in place various quality control and quality assurance measures. The most costly part will be this conversion process, and it requires to be hosted on capable and secure infrastructure.

Kenya has had a NLIMS blueprint prepared by the Ministry of Land but its implementation has dragged over the years due to bureaucracy, vested interests and tuft wars amongst various departments with respect to identifying the driving entity. Given the clear responsibility granted to NLC by law, it is the considered view of the Commission that this time round Kenya will succeed in implementing NLIMS and have this implementation serve as the regional reference. The NLIMS directorate will take the coordinating role and with support of the other players (various directorates in the Commission and departments in the Ministry) and adequate financing, offer leadership in implementing this system. We will proceed incrementally starting with implementation of the high impact but easier to implement modules, and transitioning to the more complex modules. To implement the system it has to be borne in mind the various tasks and resources that need to be put in place. Due to the sensitivity of the land subject, we need a high availability and secure system guaranteeing round the clock all year round system availability. This means we will need capable servers and network infrastructure, secure data repositories and backup mechanisms which have to be accessed from the headquarters and also from the counties.

Given that most of the survey data and land records data are still in paper form, there needs to be concerted efforts in conversion to forms ready for digital consumption and dissemination. This conversion goes beyond the mere scanning of documents and archiving them, but includes extraction of information held in these documents and their storage in a well-designed database. The extraction of the information varies depending on the type of documents: for non-spatial records, these can be extracted by either manually reading off and entering the data in the database or by using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology to read, decode and store the information; for spatial records, these will be geo-referenced first and the spatial information captured by onscreen digitization or tablet digitization thereafter. In both of the cases, the elaborate quality control and quality assurance mechanisms alluded earlier will be enforced. If we use the fact that Nairobi has about 300,000 parcels as a reference, escalating this to the whole country informs that we are talking about preparing a system to host about 3,000,000 parcels. Each parcel in existence has a history from when it was created to its current state and each stage has documentation supporting the various transactions. From this it can be seen that to have the system fully implemented, procurement of the system is but the first step (which is itself going to be costly) acquisition and conversion of the data will form the main body of the system (and will be much more costly though it can be spread across years). We are thus talking of an initial procurement of the system, development of some custom applications, some data acquisition and conversion in the region of 4 Billion shillings spread over a three – four year period, with the overall costs easily going to upwards of 10 Billion shillings by 2020 when all records and survey data will have been converted and entered into the system. But over the same period, enhancements in revenue collection will be orders of magnitude higher than these costs of conversion and implementation.

Quick wins will be rolled out within 2015 and early 2016 subject to provisioning of the necessary supporting resources (human resources, infrastructure, database servers, GIS software and the data itself). Given that NLIMS implementation has been conceptualized as a time bound directorate, the overall system development, testing and rolling out will be completed within four years. While the system will be ready in two to four years, data entry will continue throughout as transactions in land take place in perpetuity. In conclusion, the directorate recognizes the import of cooperation and collaboration among the various players in the land sector and we are convinced that this is what will unlock the immense economic potential our land resource portends.