A development of a prototype communal land rights information management system

Contexte and background : Customary land management is a challenging task to many developing countries, due to limited financial and technological resources. Customary land suffers from the lack of advanced techniques that help and support land registration using GIS technology. The currently-used-system for land registration in customary land is extremely traditional, takes long processing time and not able to meet the increasing demand. Conflicts among data on maps and on ground are frequently faced and decisions relating to these problems cannot easily be made. Such an out of date system leads to difficulties in tracking and updating land owners and identifying the actual current owners. Goal and objectives: This study was conducted to address these limitations by focusing on a case study area to assess the existing land registration techniques and to exploit the use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) based land registration techniques. The hypothesis is that Zimbabwe customary lands rights are being documented manually.  Methodology : This study was conducted using quantitative methods. Quantitative data was obtained through participatory enumeration for mapping and documenting the land rights of community members within the case study area. Collected land information that included village, farm,grazing and household boundaries, parcel sizes, types of interests held in land, and nature of tenure. Methods included on the one hand the use of PostgreSQL with a geospatial database that stores land holding details in a database format for textual data; and on the other hand the use of Javascript to create a registration system for easy registration, management and user friendly interface. Results:   A prototype of the system was developed and tested; and its relevance was validated by users. The data collected was used to create a land parcel based registration system for the case study area.