The FAO SOLA open source software pilots : a step towards transparent and responsible governance of tenure
Pullar, Neil
In 2012 the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) completed a project to develop and pilot open source cadastre and registration software. This project has been called the Solutions for Open Land Administrationn (SOLA) Software Project and has been primarily funded by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Finland. During 2012 the focus of the project was on the three customisation pilots in Ghana, Nepal and Samoa. With the SOLA pilots now complete, the paper explores how the generic SOLA software developed by FAO was customised in each of the pilots, the common lessons learnt and how the approach to further SOLA customisations in other countries has been largely standardised. Now that the Voluntary Guidelines for the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forests have been endorsed by the Food Security Council (FAO, 2012), the attention has moved to what support can be given to countries wanting to implement the Voluntary Guidelines. In that context the SOLA software is an enabling technology and directly addresses the Records of Tenure (Section 17) provisions and also facilitates, to varying degrees, most of the other guidelines. The paper outlines proposed extensions to the SOLA software that will further support the implementation of the Voluntary Guidelines and concludes that now with the interest by countries in how to implement the Voluntary Guidelines, the experience of the SOLA pilots and the finalisation of the Land Administration Domain Model (LADM) as an International Standards Organisation standard (ISO 19152) there will be further SOLA implementations and the growth of the SOLA open source software community.
Event: Annual World Bank Conference on Land and Poverty 2013
Only personal, non-commercial use of this document is allowed.