The land registration project supported by the Ministry of Trade and Industry (MINICOM) and the Investment Climate Facility for Africa (ICF) was officially handed over by the Dutch Company, Kadaster International, on Monday.

The project which was carried out through the Rwanda Investment Climate Project focused on three aspects that included commercial dispute resolution, business registration, and land registration reforms.

According to the Minister of Trade and Industry, Monique Nsanzabaganwa, who presided over the event, the project was in line with government efforts to enable reforms in various sectors for a sustainable development.

According to the minister, the project had drawn a roadmap to a more comprehensive investment environment in the country with more sophisticated systems that would make the whole process, especially in land registration, quicker, reliable, transparent and efficient.

"The results of the project will help the government deal with land problems more easily and enhance investment while helping Rwandans acquire legal certificate of ownership of their lands,” said Nsanzabaganwa.

"We have helped the establishment of an ICT database which will store all necessary land information and that will enable land registration on a very short period of time with high efficiency. The system brings Rwanda into a new era of digital land registration from the time consuming and bureaucratic analogue or manual systems” said Martien Tomberg, Kadaster International team leader.

In his remark, the Director General of the National Land Centre, Emmanuel Nkurunziza, commended Kadaster for a job well done and assured that his entire staff was prepared to take the work forward.

It was also revealed that in the course of two years, a total of 242 employees in the sector had been trained in ICT concerning land administration.

Meanwhile the ICF CEO, Omary Issa, hailed the achievements of the project and requested the National Land Centre to put more effort in communication and sensitization to make people aware of the benefits of the new systems.

The estimated $21 million project into which government injected $12 million and ICF contributed $9 million started in 2008.

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