Digital Cadastres Facilitating Land Information Management

 
3. Research Problem 
Population growth is directly associated with an increase in pressure on land and the 
environment. The effect of the pressure on land and other natural resources is that communities 
develop a need to own land exclusively. This facilitates the emergence of various types of rights to 
use and develop the land as more permanent holdings. To ensure secure land holdings to the 
community, there is need to document the land rights in some form of legal register. This essentially 
brings into light the need for a proper and up-to-date land information system for managing land. 
This requires the cadastre to evolve so that it can capture and represent all new tenure arrangements 
that emerge with modernization and sophistication of society. As a result, cadastral models should 
be dynamic and adaptive rather than static (Zevenbergen, 2002; Barry et al., 2013).
Proper management of land is necessary to good governance and benefits from an adequate and 
functional cadastral system. Citizens also need to have confidence with the land transaction system 
which requires good land information (Mwabukojo, 2011). Citizens are now more interested in 
cadastral information as they seek new property to buy or directions to reach a certain address. The 
public nowadays wants to be involved even in town planning issues. In this regard, citizens are 
becoming more spatially enabled. The problem within Zimbabwe’s cadastral system is the lack of 
coordinated efforts in the collection of land information. Several agencies collect land information 

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South African Journal of Geomatics, Vol. 3, No. 1, January 2014 
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for their own use (EIS, 2000; Kurwakumire and Chaminama, 2012) while there is minimum formal 
sharing of this information. As a result, there is duplication of information as organisations collect 
similar information. Also, huge amounts of land information are available but inaccessible as there 
is no metadata catalogue which can specify which organisation has what information. With 
communal land there is poor land information as only the village and ward boundaries have been 
demarcated (Kurwakumire and Chaminama, 2012). The systems in use by the Department of the 
Surveyor General and municipalities are still paper based (Kurwakumire, 2007, 2013a, 2013b) and 
are largely inefficient. This study puts into perspective the role of a digital cadastre in improving 
land management and good land governance though improved availability and access to 
information. This, in turn becomes one way into democratisation of land information (Sawicki and 
Craig, 1996; Kurwakumire, 2013a) which is primarily public information. This research points out 
some technical and software specifications that can be employed towards implementation of a 
digital cadastre and strategies to improve spatial data collection.