Land Admin SystemsSummary
Draft for Ken's approval
In many developing countries, Land Offices have artificially long waiting times and backlogs. The chapter describes how they can be kept long to create a market for informal "go fast" fees. The key performance indicator is the "climate for informal fees". Three interdependent stocks set it: how adequate staff salaries are, how strong laws and regulations are, and how willing managers are to act against noncompliance. The aim is to cut informal fee payments significantly while keeping waiting times and backlogs low.
The schematic of the core structure adds an unofficial go fast processing lane, and six scenarios were run. Scenario #1 combines all three improvement proposals and works best. Every indicator reaches its target. But even here, the key indicator takes about 55 months to get there. In several scenarios, targets are not reached, or take so long that will and focus may be lost.
Strong political support is a major critical success factor. The provincial government chose a proof of concept pilot before scaling up.
Key points
- Trying to remove informal "go fast" fees carries risks, and Strategy Dynamics lets officials understand, test and reduce them and build them into the strategy.
- Drawing a schematic together by hand makes people think hard about how the system is built, how it behaves and what interventions might do.
- Even in the best case, the key performance indicator took about 55 months to reach its target, which shows how delays can hurt.
- Scenario and risk results are indicative, not predictive, and a pilot run as a living business model lets the model be refined with real data.
- Removing "go fast" fees aims to raise integrity, reputation and tenure security, and in time to see titles used far more widely as collateral.