Land digitization to be used by all land registry offices by March, 2020 -Land CS Frida Karoney

Lands CS Frida Karoney. PHOTO | BMS

Lands digitization is complete. The Ministry is ready to use the process in all the land offices countrywide by March 2020. Land CS Frida Karoney has confirmed that all land offices to move from analogue to digital system.

The Ministry of Lands together with the National Intelligence Service have finished setting up a new digitised system of land transactions to tame the increasing cases of fraud and forgery of documents in the sector.

The Sh490 million new digital Land Information Management System (Lims) is expected to be operational in all the 61 land registries countrywide before end of April. 

Information Technology (IT) officers from the National Intelligence Service (NIS) have already embarked on testing the system in Nairobi. They are expected to have finished and operationalised it by March 31, this year.

“The NIS was brought in to ensure the security of the records. The system is not new per say as we had worked on another system but we realized there were problems with the software. The current system which is under test has security features to avert forgery,” said the officials. 

Ministry’s Cabinet Secretary Faridah Karoney and her Principal Secretary Nicholas Muraguri failed to respond to questions about the development, the source disclosed that already the clerks at the Ministry have started scanning documents as the trial continues.

“We have started with Nairobi as a pilot. Data is being scanned, verified and uploaded. We want to verify the new system starting with Nairobi and later roll out to the counties by the beginning of April 2020,” stated the officials.

The registrars are still in the dark about the new system with one of them saying they have not been made aware about it.