Public Administration Re-engineering (PAR): A Case of Land Administration in Kenya

Abstract

Public administration all over the world is under pressure to improve its effectiveness by providing better services to the public. The pressure to provide timely services has been attributed to public demand and minimal resources. In Kenya, land administration has not met the expectation of an ordinary Kenyan; many reports have been written to communicate this dissatisfaction from the public through government initiated forums e.g. the Njonjo Commission, National land policy. Ministry of Lands in Kenya is mandated to provide land administration services to the public. But the public who expect cheap, convenient and effective services has not been satisfied with the services and this has resulted in public complaints which have impacted negatively on the image of the Ministry. In order to address these problems, researchers have prescribed public administration re-engineering facilitated by use of information communication technology. As part of this study, field visits were made to land and survey departments of the Ministry of lands to analyze the current situation of land administration as well as identify user requirements for a re-engineered land administration system. The finding shows that the system is basically manual, inefficient, bureaucratic, customer unfriendly and marred with a lot of fraudulent dealings. This study identifies the need for public administration re-engineering to address the problems of public administration and introduces the concept of Public administration Re-engineering to fulfill this need in Land administration. This research project aims to propose a re-engineered land administration system that addresses the need of the customers based on the analysis of the current land administration system. The proposed re-engineered system is based on re-engineered business processes and using ICT as an enabler for the re-engineered system which will be customer friendly in terms of improved services. The research also proposes a Land Information Management System architecture which will ensure customer satisfaction, transparency accountability, effectiveness and productivity of staff involved in land administration.