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A woman holding her child stands beside a Medici Land Governance field officer, the two of them holding up her newly issued certificate of title

Lusaka, Zambia

Active · 2019

Systematic Land Titling

A systematic land titling process developed with Zambia’s Ministry of Lands and Natural Resources and tested across more than 50,000 parcels in Lusaka.

Titles the process was built to carry
5M
Parcels documented in the Lusaka pilot
50,000+

Why fifty thousand parcels

Under Zambia’s 7th National Development Plan, the government set out to issue 5 million land titles on State Land through systematic land titling. The instrument existed; the throughput did not.

Medici Land Governance partnered with the Ministry of Lands and Natural Resources to establish, test, and implement a process that could carry that volume — and to deliver 50,000 titles in Lusaka as the proof.

The programme ran public meetings, adjudication, verification, corrections, and title issuance. Through a mobile application built on pre-vectorized property imagery, house-to-house collection, community verification, and machine learning validation, MLG processed documentation for more than 50,000 parcels.

Following the pilot, Lusaka City Council selected MLG to lead its property titling programme and develop the supporting land governance platform.

The Zambia survey team outside their office with the vehicle and the fixed-wing UAV used to fly imagery

The survey team in Lusaka, with the aircraft that flies the imagery the titling programme is built on.

The process

How a city gets titled

Systematic land titling in Lusaka, from the first aerial survey to final government approval. The six stages connect survey, GIS, field enumeration, community verification, and council review.

  1. High-resolution aerial imagery of a Lusaka neighbourhood, individual roofs and the roads between them legible from the air

    Stage 1: Imagery Acquisition

    Areas of interest are selected and surveyed by drone, aircraft, or satellite to capture high-resolution imagery for the land survey.

    The imagery is post-processed into georeferenced high-resolution tiles for GIS software, so the information a title certificate requires can be extracted under the land survey and planning regulations.

  2. The same kind of aerial imagery with property boundaries drawn over it in a GIS — every parcel in the block outlined

    Stage 2: Pre-vectorization

    Engineers and technicians delineate property boundaries from the high-resolution imagery in a Geographic Information System, working to planning standards.

    Property attributes are assigned and checked through quality-assurance procedures. This is the step that makes the field work possible: enumerators arrive with boundaries already drawn, rather than drawing them at the door.

  3. Screens from the ENUM application — personal information and national ID, marital status and joint owners, and record, plot and boundary confirmation

    Stage 3: Enumeration

    Enumerators collect spatial and ownership data from property owners across a demarcation area — house to house, with the pre-vectorized imagery in hand. The ENUM application records the GPS position required by the field workflow.

  4. A GIS technician working through records on a laptop in a darkened office

    Stage 4: Data Review

    Field data returns with boundary corrections confirmed by owners on the ground.

    The GIS team applies the spatial adjustments, associates the ownership data with each parcel, and checks the result against surveying and planning standards.

  5. A field officer with a tablet standing among a group of women and men outdoors, confirming what was collected

    Stage 5: Community Verification

    The field team returns to central locations and demarcation areas to present the reviewed information to property owners for confirmation. Owners sign a second time.

    Layout, land use, and verification maps are displayed publicly, so a community can see where the boundaries fall and how the land around them has been recorded.

  6. A woman signs on a screen at a records desk while an officer works at a terminal beside her

    Stage 6: Government Approval

    The council uploads and approves the layout and land-use plans. The surveyor’s report and general plan then move through the required review and signature steps.

    The examiner checks the signed general plan against the supporting records before government approval. Once approved, the parcels covered by the plan can proceed to title issuance.

A woman holding her child stands beside a Medici Land Governance field officer, the two of them holding up her newly issued certificate of title

Outcome

What the six stages produce

A certificate of title, in the hands of the person who lives on the land. Everything above exists to get from an unrecorded roof on an aerial photograph to this.

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