The Ministry of Lands has availed over 100,000 land assets on the Ardhisasa platform essentially unlocking properties worth billions of shillings.
Media reports indicated that the agreement was arrived upon in a crisis meeting held between Lands CS Farida Karoney, Institute of Surveyors of Kenya (ISK) and officials from the Law Society of Kenya (LSK).
The move was in a bid to quell the uproar over transactional delays on the platform.
"The Ministry will activate the application for searches on Ardhisasa. For the 100,000 verified properties, searches will be issued immediately. For the 74,000 that are still undergoing the process of validation, applicants will get a prompt on the reasons for the rejection within 14 days," the CS stated.
The LSK officials had threatened to stage a protest over the delays, adding that members of the public could not access, register, or replace title deeds within the platform.
The delays had caused an uproar from bankers, lawyers, and surveyors who lamented that the processing of property search results on the platforms took hours and at times did not show results.
Earlier in the year, the Kenya Bankers Association had indicated that the delays had stalled over Ksh102 billion of transactions. In its defence, the ministry attributed the delays to the strenuous process involved in cleaning up land data.
The Ministry also faulted the owners of the lands for failing to register the properties hence locking potential sales from the assets.
"The meeting acknowledged the achievements in the digitisation of land records, conversion, and implementation of the Sectional Properties Act, 2020. This has been a rigorous process involving data cleaning, coding, and scanning of records,” Karoney previously stated.
Ardhisasa was launched on April 27, 2021, by President Uhuru Kenyatta with the aim to speed up land transactions and enable Kenyans to access all services on a digital platform.
"At the click of a button, users will now be able to search and carry out various land transactions, drastically reducing human interactions, delays and other inconveniences previously experienced at land registries," Uhuru stated at the time.
