Wa, Sept. 2, GNA - The government would, by December come out with an inventory of all public lands in the country to determine lands for which compensation has been paid and that government has utilised. Lands that the state does not intend to develop immediately or in the near future would be returned to their owners.
Alhaji Mahama Sulemana, National Co-ordinating of the Land Administration Project (LAP), said this at a three-day workshop on the project for chiefs, landowners and officials from the lands sector agencies in the Upper West Region on Tuesday.
Alhaji Sulemana said nobody in the lands sector agencies at the moment could tell the quantum of government lands or identify those lands that had been paid for by the state.
Alhaji Sulemana said DFID had pledged nine million dollars grant for the provision of facilities and to build the capacity of traditional authorities to manage their lands property.
He said the government has also signed a 20.5 million dollars concessionary loan agreement with the World Bank to finance the LAP project.
Some 54 million dollars has been earmarked for the execution of the project with other sources of funds being Nordic Development Fund, GTZ, KFW and CIDA.
The LAP Co-ordinator said one million dollars grant pledged by CIDA would be used to finance land administration in the three Northern regions.
Apart from reducing litigation, the project, when fully implemented, would minimise corruption in the lands sector.
Alhaji Sulemana said five communities in the Nadowli District of the region have been selected by the Institute of Development Studies of the University of Sussex, UK in partnership with Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology to pilot a scheme that would look at how land rights are managed within certain areas.
The communities are Bussie, Loho, Issa, Tabiasi and Tangasia. Mr Sahanun Mogtari, Upper West Regional Minister, said land is a critical factor in the "Golden Age of Business" declared by the government and urged land sector agencies to formulate workable plans for proper development and management of land.
Mr Mogtari called on landowners and other stakeholders to eschew land litigations and find ways of making land acquisition easy and more liberalised.
