Land Administration Census: A Plea for a bottom-up, brute-force solution

The battle against poverty in developing countries has always been associated with the issue of land. Since the turn of the millennium, the focus has been on facilitating the official registration of land rights by the poor and the vulnerable. Many countries in sub-Saharan Africa still lack a well-functioning land administration system, notwithstanding many dedicated aid programmes. Such programmes were designed by Western institutions and often copied Western land administration architectures. In this article, the author advocates a bottom-up approach using census-taking as a paradigm. First the capabilities of advanced technologies are identified, then the way aid is brought to the vulnerable is explored and lastly an approach based on conducting population and housing censuses in sub-Saharan Africa is considered.