Addis Abeba will begin a second round of cadastral mapping covering 110,000 parcels of land starting on February 1, 2016, with a total budget of 203 million Br.
A cadastral map shows the boundaries and ownership of land parcels and registers in the real estate of a country. The first round in the last fiscal year had a similar budget, of which it consumed 85pc.
Addis Abeba City Administration Land Holding & Registration Agency will be responsible for the cadastral surveying and demarcation project, which, when completed and put to use, could bring an end to illegal urban landholding. It should also help protect citizens’ rights to land use by availing a complete cadastral map and better documentation process, the officials say. Parcels of land in all 10 districts are expected to be covered by January 1, 2017, according to the plan.
The demarcation of the city is carried out through an aerial photographic survey, which is checked against a ground survey. It includes a digitalized landholding adjudication by a new software system, Oracle 11G, that is supplied by a German company named Hansa Luftbild Group. The software and the infrastructure cost 67 million Br. and Hansa Luftbild has completed its five year agreement to manage the system, which the Agency is now fully handling on its own. The network infrastructure is developed by Huawei, a Chinese company.
The Oracle 11G has two systems. The Real State Cadastral System (RECS) calculates the coordinates of a land parcel and enables merging and splitting of parcels in the interest of landholders.
The second system, Real Property Registration System (RPRS), is the next stage where the Agency registers all the information related to landholding, including legal registration, name transfer documents if the land is transferred to a third party, mortgage documents, court documents, and lease or other documents of landholding. Then the agency will digitize all documents it has on hard copy to transfer into the system.
In 2014/15 the agency gathered 27,000 documents that include every bit of landholding information after a survey of 52,117 sections in the 10 districts. Out of this 12,121 landholders obtained their certificates, which should now prevent any problems related to losing documents.
“Five years after buying the house I am currently living in, I lost the name transfer document, and I will never forget the ups and downs I passed through to get a copy from the Document Authentication & Registration Office (DARO) and the administration. I hope this will abolish all the long and tiresome process of gaining back of documents,” said Hagos Gebire Ezgi.
He was at a meeting the Agency called at the conference hall of Fana Broadcasting Corporate to submit its report for 2007 and for awareness creation for the second round. Hagos was there as a residents’ representative from Paulos area in Gullele District.
Indeed such ups and downs will no longer be, according to Gifawosen Desisa, director of the Agency, who said that all registration and documentation would take place at the Agency even for new buyers. Once approval is obtained from the land management office for the land transfer, the rest is the Agency’s work, Gifawosen said.
As the Agency prepares to launch the second round, cables were broken in Addis Ketema District during excavation works, causing the system to crash, Tesfaye Assifaw, information system and development deputy director of the agency told Fortune.
“We are fixing it so that it will be ready for next Monday,” he said.
The Agency is deploying a workforce of 700 people to go door-to-door for the cadastral mapping, during which residents are expected to have their documents ready for handing over, to be replaced with new certificates. In the first round 54,000 households were required to avail those documents but because of little advance promotion, few were ready with documents in hand when the mappers arrived. They had to go to the districts in person to deliver the documents, Gifawosen said.
“Now learning from this, we are using every possibility to inform the society including broadcast and print media,” he said.
According to the data from the Agency there are 600,000 parcels in Addis Abeba including those suitable for residence, green areas, facility centres and roads. By processing 120,000 every year, all are expected to be covered by the cadaster by 2020.
Source:: addisfortune