Angola Modernizes Land Administration with GIS and Cadastre Management

Millions of people move to cities to seek better livelihoods, education, and health to improve their quality of life. This rapid population growth within cities is posing challenges for governments worldwide. The African nation of Angola, for example, has an urbanization rate of 68 percent. The capital city, Luanda, has experienced population growth of 3.8 percent from 2022 to 2023. Struggling to keep up with this growth, the country’s real estate sector is facing issues such as illegal land occupations and informal, unregulated land transactions. Many buildings are constructed without proper registration or documentation of property and land ownership. Most of the citizens in urban areas lack official ownership documentation and security of tenure. The high demand and tenancy turnover have also created problems for public institutions that must collect the appropriate fees and taxes for property sales. This has led to a lack of necessary revenue for basic infrastructure such as water, electricity, roads, and education for municipalities.

Land management in Angola is also complex and involves many stakeholders and entities. The country’s two main land management entities are the property registry offices Conservatória do Registo Predial (CRP) under the Ministry of Justice (MINJUS) and the national mapping and cadastre agency, Instituto Geodesía e Cartografia de Angola (IGCA). IGCA works under the Ministry of Planning, Urbanism, and Construction (MINOPUH), which is responsible for mapping Angola's terrain and infrastructure and for managing the national cadastre—a comprehensive land registry that records property boundaries, land values, and land concessions details.

Understanding the lack of sufficient accurate legal documentation of ownership and parcel boundaries, and with an ambitious goal to provide affordable housing and improve the real estate market and land-based taxes, Angola’s government contacted the Mitrelli Group. The Mitrelli Group is an international group of companies that promotes and executes sustainable large-scale social and economic growth projects in the developing world, with two decades of proven experience in Africa.

Angola worked with Mitrelli Group subsidiary and Esri partner GEODATA, which specializes in advanced land management GIS and mapping solutions for national entities, and implemented a solution to modernize and streamline the country’s land administration process.

One specific focus of Angola’s government has been to improve land cadastre accuracy and consistency. Cadastre plays a critical role in preventing land disputes and provides essential details such as ownership, boundaries, and the value of real property in a given area.

The Angolan government faced the challenge of mapping hundreds of thousands of parcels in a cost-effective way in just a few years and registering properties on a massive scale.

To address these challenges, GEODATA purchased a software agreement with Esri to implement the Land Administration Modernization Program (LAMP). LAMP provides access to ArcGIS software for developing countries to enable land agencies to undertake needed modernization initiatives. Utilizing the LAMP program, GEODATA was able to develop a distributed cadastre system with ArcGIS Pro professional workflows coupled with ArcGIS Enterprise for distributing, viewing, querying, and managing by authorized stakeholders.

GEODATA leveraged drone-acquired imagery with photogrammetric mapping techniques using ArcGIS Drone2Map and geospatial AI (GeoAI) to automate feature extraction and analysis. By creating centimeter-level accurate orthophotographs and 3D mapping, GEODATA helped IGCA save time and dramatically improve data accuracy. Address surveys using the mobile app ArcGIS Collector were also conducted to create a more accurate and updated address database including street names with all historical name versions and house numbers.

The imagery, 3D mapping, and address database combined with existing historical data, maps, and other documentation, were used by GEODATA professionals to create 450,000 accurate urban parcel boundaries. These were implemented into the cadastre system and the entire process was completed within less than three years. 

GEODATA also developed a system for the registration process at the CRP offices to support and automate the legal mass registration of 100,000 properties as part of an affordable housing project managed by the state.

GEODATA implemented the registration system in all 22 registry offices in all 18 provinces of Angola. The new cadastre system was distributed throughout all 18 province offices of IGCA with comprehensive training, technical support, and knowledge transfer. The two systems are connected via a bidirectional interface which enables the registry office to view related properties on a map.

Implementation of a geospatial-based cadastre system and the integration with the land registry achieved several objectives, including the following:

• Increased security and legal certainty for registrants regarding ownership of the property as well as fostering public land tenure
• Accurate boundaries of the property parcels
• Reliable property information used to improve land management and collection of taxes
• Improved land information to support urban planning

With a multitude of agencies involved in land management, the government of Angola has an ambitious goal to provide affordable housing to millions of people and increase the number of registrations to more than a million properties by 2027. The Esri LAMP program has provided critical technology in helping to realize that goal. The new interconnectivity of the cadastre system with the registration system now enables the generation of a deed or legal document and displays an accurate map of the property. Since Angola’s General Tax Administration will interface with this system regularly, property-related taxes and fees for the government are expected to increase significantly.

As the national economy grows throughout the country and the number of individuals looking for housing increases, the Angolan government expects to see a marked expansion of new home construction. Having accurate boundaries of parcels of land with efficient digital land registration processes will assist the government in its goal of one million new homes built on those vacant parcels with appropriate right-of-use and ownership.