Land titling through mobile technology: Project of Frontline SMS and Landesa, funded by large Google grant

A project led by FrontlineSMS and Landesa to enable citizens to obtain land titles via mobile phone in Odisha, India, has been funded through a $1.5 million Google Global Impact Award.

Here is an excerpt of the announcement:

[...] Landesa and FrontlineSMS are delighted to welcome and share the announcement today of a US $1.5m Google Global Impact Award, which will enable them to use mobile technology to transform the way that the government in the Indian state of Odisha helps landless families gain secure rights to their land and homes.

Land titling through mobile technology

With the Google award, FrontlineSMS and Landesa will work directly and through barefoot lawyers already in place in Odisha to build and roll out a mobile technology-based land titling system. Mobile telephone technology will allow government officials to exchange information with remote locations, enabling the state to provide land titles more quickly and more efficiently to as many as 80,000 poor rural households.

Approximately 1.25 billion poor people across the globe depend on land for their livelihood, but lack secure legal rights to land they occupy or cultivate. The largest concentration of those extremely poor, landless people is in India, where landlessness is the best predictor of poverty. Meanwhile, mobile phones are the most widespread digital communications technology the world has ever seen. This project will harness the comparative efficiency of mobile technologies to help vulnerable families gain legal control over their homes and homestead land. [...]

Sean Martin McDonald of Frontline SMS says that are “building the system to be adaptable to a broad range of contexts.”

For more details, please see the complete announcement.

HT @McDapper

Filed under: Applications, Grants, Projects, Technology developments, Technology tools Tagged: FrontlineSMS, Google Global Impact Award, India, Land records, Land title information systems, Land titling through mobile technology, Landesa, Property information systems, Real property information systems, Sean Martin McDonald, Sean McDonald



via Legal Informatics Blog http://legalinformatics.wordpress.com/2013/12/13/land-titling-through-mobile-technology-project-of-frontline-sms-and-landesa-funded-by-large-google-grant/