Investigating the potential of blockchain technoloy in transforming Uganda's land registries.

Abstract

The purpose of the study was to investigate the potential of blockchain technology in transforming Uganda’s land registries. The land registry is one of the most important departments in any governance system because it stores the records of ownership. There are a number of loopholes in the current system, which give rise to corruption and disputes. This has discouraged people from registering their land, which makes it hard for the government to plan and reduces revenue from land. Blockchain has the potential to counter these loopholes and sort out issues like trading the same piece of land to more than one buyer and tampering with land records. In this study, a framework for land registry system using Blockchain was proposed. The framework uses the concept of smart contracts at various stages of the land registry. The study outlines the potential benefits of employing Blockchain technology in the land registry system and presents a number of case studies. The target population of this study was 13 technical officials from Kampala City Council Authority Ministry Zonal Office, 66 values and 1 official from the Blockchain association of Uganda. Data for the purposes of this research was collected using questionnaires, which were uniform to all the respondents. Study findings indicated that the land registry system is plagued with a number of concerns like falsification of documents, delays in executing transactions, poor management of land records and inability to access land related information. As a result, people have been discouraged from registering their land. For this reason, this study proposed a framework to offer reliable, safe and accurate means through which interested parties could register land, transfer it and access land related information.