Rwanda's new electronic certificate system for land registration known as e-Titles, is expected to improve service delivery, address title loss and damage as well as fraud cases, officials have said.

They made the observations on Friday, in Kigali during the launch of the digitized land title system.

E-titles is in line with Rwanda’s goal to fully digitise land transactions.

"We want to ensure that land services are fully paperless by 2024,” said Esperance Mukamana, Director General, National Land Authority.

Underscoring the importance of the technology-based land titles, Mukamana pointed out that since there will be no paper-based land titles being circulated across communities, fraud cases will be reduced.

"There are ways the fraudsters were forging the land titles we had, and even our signatures,” she said, citing areas such as Biryogo in Kigali’s Nyarugenge District as one of the areas where such malpractices were being committed.

"There have been fraud cases where some dishonest people were selling the land belonging to other people by lying that they are their owners, ending in the buyers losing their money to them. But, we hope that such issues are going to be tackled,” she said.

According to NLA, the advantage of electronic land title also will be the smooth access to other services such as financial, building permits, justice, tax clearance, and fertilisers and agriculture services, as well as other transactions requiring land title as a triggering document.

Jean Claude Musabyimana, the Minister of Local Government said that they realised about 80 per cent of the citizen complaints that local leaders deal with are related to land issues, including those related to land registration and land title issuance.

He said the recent annual assessment carried out indicated that for a citizen to get a service from local administrative entities, they go to Government offices at least three times on average.

"It is obvious that the electronic land title will help us, first to bring services closer to the citizens by reducing the journeys they make to get land related service,” he said, adding that the time they were using to get the services could be translated into economic gains.

Musabyimana, who served as Permanent Secretary of the then Ministry of Lands and Forestry (MINILAF) from 2017-2018, said that the electronic land titles will also fight conflicts associated to land.

"When I was working at the land and forestry institution, most of the frequent issues were land cases where people were accusing us that the land authority might be issuing many titles to one person (for the same plot),” he said.

Such cases, he said, were happening because forging a paper document was easy.

"You found that among three hard copy land titles that they brought claiming they were given to one person, only one was genuine, while others were counterfeit and were used in various fraudulent acts,” he observed.

"Even judges sometimes did not have enough time to verify them for authenticity, and when they did that, it required a long procedure. But now, the verification will be easier for the users, which will help us to curb land related conflicts” he said, emphasising the security being brought about by the electronic land certificates.

The issuance of land titles has always been done on printed certificates, which is costly due to high printing expenses, and paperwork, indicating that for each new title, citizens have to pay Rwf5,000. With the e-Title, this cost will no longer be paid by the land owner.

With the above-mentioned progress, NLA observed that Rwandans including those living in diaspora, are able to enjoy automated land services and instantly get access to their land titles at their fingertips through their devices, without making any single visit or involving third parties, which would necessitate provision of the power of attorney for representation purpose.