Building Fit-For-Purpose Land Administration Systems: Providing Secure Tenure for All

New solutions in land administration are required that can deliver security of tenure for all, are affordable and can be quickly developed and incrementally improved over time. The Fit-For-Purpose (FFP) approach to land administration has emerged to meet these simple, but challenging requirements.
This paper discusses the building of the FFP approach at country level. Implementation is strongly related to the recognition of the continuum of land rights. Implementation of the FFP approach means to recognise, record and review land rights:
 ’Recognise’ involves a procedure for recognition, classification and development of a typology in land rights on the basis of an assessment of existing legitimate rights at the country level. The result of this process can be published in a National Tenure Atlas.
 ’Record’ means collecting data on evidence of land rights based on FFP approaches in land administration following the FFP principles for building the spatial framework. The Social Tenure Domain Model (STDM) is recommended.
 ‘Review (Conversion)’ means assessing the evidence of rights and any possible out-standing claims and when conditions are met, the security of the rights will be increased.
A complete overview is required of the tenure systems and land rights related to the areas affected. All formal and informal tenure categories and sub-categories should be identified and related to space. It is recommended that a National Tenure Atlas will be developed in order to get overview of the spatial distribution of legitimate tenure types across a country.
The STDM allows modelling and managing the complex social tenure relationships between people and land found within legitimate rights. STDM provides a standard for representing the recorded people to land relationships independent of the level of formality, legality and technical accuracy. Such flexibility also relates to the recordation that should be organised at various levels rather than through one central register. The land administration system can then be upgraded and incrementally improved over time in response to social and legal needs and merging economic opportunities. Gender equity should applied and should be seen first and foremost as a universal human right, independently of any other argument in favour for it.
This should allow for security of te