Towards a Profile of the Land Administration Domain Model (LADM) for Nigeria
ANTHONY A. ADEOYE, Nigeria
GEORGE O. OKUSANYA, Nigeria
AAC Consulting, Lagos
Key words: Land Administration, LADM, Land Policy, Social Tenure Domain Model, PTCLR
aacogis@yahoo.com, anthony@aacogis.com
1.0
Introduction
The importance of and improvement to land policies and good governance are goals shared by
several international organizations. This is the case with the African Union Land Policy
Initiative, World Bank with its Land Governance Assessment Framework (LGAF), Food
Agriculture Organisation with the Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of
Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forests (VG) and UN-Habitat GC23/17 Resolution calling
member states to promote security of tenure for all segments of society by recognizing and
respecting a plurality of tenure systems, adopting alternative forms of land administration and
land records alongside conventional land administration systems.
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Approach Adopted for Land Administration Domain Model (LADM) in
Nigeria
LADM is a common standard for the land administration domain. It stimulates the
development of software applications and will accelerate the implementation of proper land
administration systems that will support sustainable development. The LADM covers basic
information-related components of land administration (including those over water and land,
and elements above and below the surface of the earth); the standard provides an abstract,
conceptual model with four packages related to:
• Parties (people and organizations);
• Basic administrative units, rights, responsibilities, and restrictions (ownership rights);
• Spatial units (parcels, and the legal space of buildings and utility networks);
• Spatial sources (surveying), and spatial representations (geometry and topology).
LADM defines terminology for land administration, based on various national and
international systems that are as simple as possible in order to be useful in practice. The
terminology allows a shared description of different formal or informal practices and
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procedures in various jurisdictions; the standard further provides a basis for national and
regional profiles; and enables the combining of land administration information from different
sources in a coherent manner. The development of LADM is an initiative of FIG which is a
comprehensive and extensive formal process with a continuous review and a continuous
creative approach to find common denominators in land administration.
With these global initiatives, the Federal Government of Nigeria strives to provide the
security of tenure and equitable access to land, fisheries and forests, in order to eliminate
hunger and poverty to support sustainable development and improve environmental
management based on international best practises.
Consequently, The Federal Government of Nigeria formally inaugurate the Presidential
Technical Committee on Land Reform (PTCLR) with its objectives in developing pro-poor
land tools (such as the Social Tenure Domain Model, Gender Evaluation Criteria and
transparency in land administration) that supports the Land Policy Initiative whose goal is to
allow the use of land in order to give impetus to Nigeria's development.
This is because a large number of the people-to-land relationships in Nigeria are not
documented. This concerns about 165 million people with a growing population; this situation
results in land disputes, land grabbing and neglecting of rights of local people. There is an
urgent need in Nigeria for proper land administration systems and standards in land
information. The standards are needed for information exchange both for initial data
acquisition and for data maintenance. In Nigeria, modeling expertise is lacking when setting
up Land Administration Systems.
A Land Administration System (LAS) will provide Nigeria with the infrastructure to
implement land related policies and management strategies. It is not a new discipline but has
evolved out of the cadastre and land registration areas with specific focus on security of land
rights and the need to address land management issues systematically pushes the design of a
LAS towards an enabling infrastructure for implementing Land policies. In Nigeria, the
LADM is being designed and validated in an incremental approach with the feasibility study
to select avoidable IT system for the Solutions for Open Land Administration (SOLA).
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2.1
FAO Solutions for Open Land Administration (SOLA)
The FAO Solutions for Open Land Administration (SOLA) was adopted so as to promote
affordable IT-systems that enable improvements in transparency and equity of governance. It
was started in 2010 with a Road Map for the Pilot Programme of the Presidential Technical
Committee on Land Reform and Nigeria SOLA Feasibility Report.
The feasibility report looked at the Functional Overview, Functional Requirements and
Architecture of SOLA Systematic Registration Solution for the LADM. The purpose of this
feasibility document is to define the scope of the SOLA Systematic Registration software
application in terms of:
•
What business processes the SOLA Systematic Registration software
application will support,
•
What functionality from the generic SOLA software (expressed in terms of the
functionality available in the “Candidate” Release (5 September 2012) needs to
be modified,
•
What additional functionality (relative to the “Candidate” Release of the generic
OLA software) needs to be added
•
What new reports and certificates are required to support systematic registration
activity
The information used in the preparation of this document has been gathered through
international best practise in the knowledge of systematic registration practices together with
the documentation describing the proposed Nigerian Presidential Technical Committee on
Land Reform (PTCLR) systematic registration processes
The Feasibility Report has a comprehensive set of guidelines which include National
standards to be developed for the shared use of information, so as to ensure that the publicly
held tenure rights are recorded together with tenure rights of indigenous people and other
communities with customary tenure systems and the private sector in a single recording
system or are linked to them by a common framework.
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2.2
The Implementation of the LADM
The FAO Solutions for Open Land Administration (SOLA) are been used to implement the
LADM in such a way to record, maintain and publicise tenure rights and duties, including
who holds those rights and duties, the parcels or holdings of land, fisheries or forests to which
the rights and duties relate. The LADM is a common standard for the land administration
domain which will also stimulate the development of software applications and will accelerate
the implementation of proper Land Administration Systems that will support sustainable
development in Nigeria.
The model integrates essential data such as party names and rights with source documents
such as titles, deeds, survey field data, court decisions, decisions made in participatory
mapping and other decisions. All essential data can be related to authentic sources (e.g.
documents or imagery with evidence from the field). Available ISO standards are re-used to
support multimedia archives, measurements and observations as well as spatial
representations.
The scope of LADM includes the definition of a reference model, covering all basic
information-related components of Land Administration and provides conceptual schema with
five basic packages, related to (1) People (2) Parcels (spatial units in LADM terminology),
(3) Property Rights (rights, responsibilities, and restrictions in LADM terminology), (4)
Surveying and (5) Geometry and Topology.
- A terminology for Land Administration, based on various national and international
systems, as simple as possible in order to be useful in practice. The terminology allows a
shared description of different practices and procedures in various jurisdictions,
- A basis for national and regional profiles, and:
- It enables the combining of land administration information from different sources in a
coherent manner.
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2.3
Procurement of the LADM Projects/Programmes Equipment
The Presidential Technical Committee on Land Reform began a procurement process for the
1.
Procurement and installation of GNSS/CORS and accessories at different locations
in the country.
Scope: The project included the acquisition of Continuously Operating Reference Stations
together with 24/7 power source and other related equipment, installation, Testing and
Commissioning in selected locations across the country.
2.
Procurement of technical equipment to support the implementation of pilot
systematic Land Titling and Registration (SLTR) in the locations.
3.
Consultancy for Field Data Capture and Analysis in Pilot States
Scope:
The scope included inventory, capture, analysis and preparation in
appropriate format for entry into the Database in each of the five pilot Local
Government and respective State Land Registry Headquarters.
4.
Consultancy for the establishment of National Data Centre for coordinating the
implementation of Systematic Land Titling and Registration Nationwide
Scope of service included the establishment of National Digital Land Management
Database and implementation of the adopted FAO SOLA software.
5.
Consultancy studies for Land Administration Service Delivery System
The scope included collection and analysis of detailed information on the status of
land administration systems and service delivery in Nigeria by documenting the
status of land administration service delivery at all levels of government and
identifying options to strengthen land administration and monitoring systems in
Nigeria as well as exisiting classification and development of typology at Federal,
State and LGA levels to guide the implementation of the national inventory of
public lands
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3.0
LADM Workshop on Social Tenure Domain Model (STDM)
As part of the efforts in Nigeria towards the development of LADM, workshop in the use and
application of LADM for Social Tenure Domain Model (STDM) was organized by FIG
Young Surveyors Network activities during the 2013 FIG Working Week in Abuja, Nigeria,
from 4 to 6 May 2013 in association with the Nigerian Institution of Surveyors. The training
provided participants with an appreciation of the concepts behind the STDM. Participants
developed an understanding of the STDM’s contribution to addressing key land issues and the
role of land surveyors in partnership with grassroots communities.
There was also a technical element to the training, with participants engaged with the
elements of database management and gaining an overview of the structure of the software
itself which include learning how to enter, manipulate and analyse data. To ensure the
ongoing use and development of the STDM, participants further took the opportunity to
provide feedback on key STDM concepts and its accompanying information system, and
shared how the STDM could fit into their own work and country context.
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Opportunities and Challenges being faced
Addressing the land issues at global, regional, country and city/municipal level is indeed one
of the major challenges in Nigeria, both in regard to addressing poverty issues as well as
sustainability issues. Complex global challenges such as climate change, rapid urbanisation,
food, water and energy insecurity, natural disasters and conflicts have a clear land dimension.
Land challenge issues in Nigeria include unequal access to land and other natural resources,
unsustainable land use, insecurity of tenure, weak institutions to resolve conflict,
dysfunctional land markets
LADM offers opportunities for land professionals, researchers, grassroots organisations and
government authorities. These opportunities include the empowerment of the grassroots
communities to develop and manage its own information system (and its own data) with all
the benefits that advanced technologies can offer, with less investment of resources and with
less reliance on high paid experts.
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5.0
The potential impact of these changes in the current and immediate future
Land administration systems not only support tenure security, but the information on the
system makes land management at a bigger scale possible. Without land information
problems in urban and rural land management emerges. This technical gap impacts access to
safe water, sanitation, community facilities by the poor and contributes to unequal access to
land, conflicts over land, land grabbing and the destruction of the environment. It also
negatively affects quality of life and livelihoods.
It was therefore necessary to create a land information system which would address these
issues and contribute both to increasing security of tenure, particularly for the poor, for
overall land management, and to make it possible for land administration as a system to go to
scale and cover the majority of a country, both in rural and urban areas. It is only through
such a system that the problems outlined above could be addressed.
The LADM is a concept which makes it possible to bring the social element into the land
administration framework and address the issues outlined above. The LADM is a conceptual,
standardised basis for Land Administration which supports the non-formal recordation of land
use rights. The concept is based on observations of how social tenures work in the real world,
rather than starting from the perspective of land ownership and the legal framework alone.
LADM is a way of making all the social tenures visible beyond the local community,
including overlapping claims, family and group rights, women’s rights which are often nested
Main political objectives, such as poverty eradication, sustainable housing and agriculture,
and strengthening the role of vulnerable groups (e.g. indigenous people and women), are in
many ways related to access to land and to land-related opportunities. This implies as a
requirement that the model should be able to present all possible relations between people and
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land: formal and informal tenure, customary tenures, etc. The development of the LADM is
based on user needs.
Open markets and globalisation require a shared ontology allowing communication between
involved persons within one country and between different impact, ISO standardisation is a
comprehensive, extensive, formal process with continuous peer reviews and iterations based
on experience of earlier implementations.
For the LADM, this (creative) approach resulted in finding common denominators in land
administration. The innovation is in the availability of the LADM as a basis for structuring
and organising representations of people-to-land related information in databases in a generic
way. This means that the LADM is one of the tools (or better: conditions) for the
implementation of the continuum of land rights and for the FAO’s Voluntary Guidelines.
The wide range of functionality of the LADM is in support of:

The continuum of land rights (management of different tenures in one environment),
the continuum of approaches, the continuum of recordation, the continuum of spatial
units and subjects. The LADM now opens up options for bridging gaps between
cultures where people-to-land relationships are concerned, definitively not only in
support of globalisation, but also with a strong focus on offering support in the
protection of land rights (tenure certainty) for all

Land administration system design and development with coverage of all tenure types,
upgrading the quality of existing (and not properly maintained) datasets consistencybuilding and validation)

The development of software and databases. Since developers like stable (but
extensible) standards as a starting point for developments, both industrial software
developers and open source software communities are enthusiastic. The LADM allows
a flexible, step-by-step approach in the development of a Land Administration System
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based on the needs, priorities and requirements of users and society. This can be
combined in a natural way with organisational development

A link to workflow management processes are not integrated in the LADM; linking is
possible by role types, versioning, quality labels and exchange of data between
involved organisations

Structuring and organising data in interaction with data in other databases. The LADM
can be used within a Spatial Data Infrastructure
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Conclusions
Up to the 1970s work on land at the country level in the developing world tended to be focused on
conventional land titling. From the 1970s onwards extensive work was done by political and
social scientists to show that most poor people, who were the majority of the population, lived
under social forms of tenure. This social approach was validated by the seminal work of
Deininger (2003) on land policies for growth and poverty reduction. The adoption by African
governments of new forms of tenure, as described in this paper, together with the overall global
thinking about land, has brought an increased realisation that we need to use the framework of a
continuum of land rights. This continuum of land rights has been widely adopted at the global
level. However, the implication of adopting the continuum of rights meant that new tools would
have to be designed, as the conventional land administration and land record systems could not
accommodate the range of social tenures being discussed. Without new tools the social tenure
form of thinking cannot be implemented. By 2005 the discussion within the land community
meant that the LADM underpinning conventional approaches had to be re-thought to also take
into account the social tenures, hence the development of STDM. However, we are not there yet.
STDM has to date been used to interrogate our conventional systems, learn lessons and develop
innovative approaches, but until we have a robust software modelled on the STDM which delivers
the approaches, concepts, framework and values outlined above, for free as well as within a
business environment, we will not have filled the technical gap.
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7.0
References
1. Federal Republic of Nigeria, PTCLR (2010) A Road Map for the Pilot Programme of the
Presidential Technical Committee on Land Reform
2. Neil Pullar, NRC Land Tenure, FAO (2012) Nigeria SOLA Feasibility Report
3. Lynn Holstein, Land Equity International (2012) Systematic Registration Workflow
Charts (Ondo State)
4. Palmer D., Fricska S., and Wehrmann B. (2009) Towards Improved Land Governance
5. Tenure Working Paper 11, Italy, Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United
Nations and United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-HABITAT).
6. United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat) (2009a) The Global Land
Tool
7. Network (GLTN) – A Multi-Sector Partnership on Secure Land Tenure and Reform.
Kenya.
8. Williamson I., Enemark S., Wallace J. and Rajabifard A. (2010) Land Administration for
Sustainable Development, USA, ESRI Press Academic.
9. Zevenbergen J. and Haile S. (2010) Institutional Aspects of Implementing Inclusive Land
Information Systems like STDM, FIG Congress, Sydney.
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