According to a Thomson Reuters Foundation’s recently released article about women rights in Tanzania, the implementation of the Mobile Application to Secure Tenure (MAST) project which started in 2014 at a cost of USD 1 million, has helped to issue 940 titles so far to help women in Ilala Simba village to secure their property rights.
mast-mobile-application-land-rights-tanzaniaThe project undertook by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), is being implemented by Cloudburst Group, a US based company focused on advisory for land issues, on its pilot stage in Ilala Simba village with plans to extend it to two more villages which names have not been released yet.
Cloudburst which developed a friendly-interface mobile application to capture all information required for the issuance of formal documentation of land rights, is using its cloud-based data management system to store geographic and demographic information to help mostly women and young villagers to save time and money when registering land rights.
Tanzanian Ministry of Land’s Coordinator of the Land Tenure Support Programme, Mr. Adam Nyaruhuma, explained that mapping land rights with the new technology will help to reduce land disputes while helping locals to use their property deeds as a collateral in credits to improve their businesses.
The project is meant to cover all rural Tanzania working directly with villagers to map and record individual land rights to strengthen local governance institutions and build government capacity, while providing training on land law to raise aware of local women on legal rights.
According to USAID, the MAST project is a solution to the Formal Land Administration Systems (LAS) that in Tanzania have not met population’s needs for accessible, cost effective and appropriate land registration with only 20% of total women in the country possessing a land in their own names.
MAST project in Ilala Simba village, has so far registered 30% of lands to women names, 40% jointly to men and women, while the 40% remaining to only men.
