Traditional rulers, staff of Customary Land Secretariats (CSL) and other stakeholders in the Upper West region have been sensitized on programmes and activities that would be carried out during the second phase of the Land Administration project (LAP 2) in the region at a workshop in Wa at the weekend.

The programmes and activities of LAP 2, which is an improvement of LAP 1, seeks to consolidate and strengthen land administration and management systems for efficient and transparent land service delivery.

The $72 million-dollar project would reduce time and cost of delivering service through a re-engineering and decentralization of business process and automation, and also establish CLS to help with documentation of land transactions of the various customary land ownerships.

Naa Sohamininye Danaa Gore, President of the Upper West Regional House of Chiefs, said that the LAP was a commendable project that was reducing the inconvenience that people went through in having their land documents processed.

He called for the establishment of district offices for the Administrator of Stool and Skin lands, for proper land documentation to be carried out through the supervision of officials of the Administrator, to avoid increasing litigations in the courts.

Mr. Joseph Abandoh-Sam, Upper West regional Coordinator of LAP, stated that a meeting he had with Land owners in Wa revealed that the patronage of the CLS among them was very low.

At Tumu in the Sissala East district of the region, it came to light that the landowners in the town did not know the processes by which the CLS could be established in their area.

He attributed the numerous Land disputes in the region to the non-existence of record keeping by landowners.**