In an effort to fight forgery of titles and fraudulent land registration, the ministry of lands has imposed restrictions on access to the land registry that covers its staff as well as the public.
Johnson Mukaga, the Competitiveness and Enterprise Development Project (CEDP) coordinator at the ministry headquarters in Kampala, says the restrictions were placed in order to secure land titles in this era of cyber-crime as the land registry moves to embrace computerisation.
“The Uganda National Land Information System (UgNLIS) is designed in such a way that nobody can access, transfer or delete data without being identified,” he says. Mukaga explained that for any illegal or irregular transaction that is attempted an alert is immediately registered.
“We have fire proof systems and backups for every transaction that happens at the UgNLIS centre. In essence, we have both hard and software systems where in extreme cases if one has access to a document, it can only be a mirror image of the original,” he stated.
The computerised UgNLIS, which is operational in the land ministry’s 22 zonal offices countrywide, was set up in March 2013 to digitise land titling, registration and mapping after the Government secured a World Bank loan of $65m (about sh246b).
It was initially rolled out under the Second Private Sector Competitiveness Project and later CEDP.