VILLAGE DELIMITATION AS A MEAN FOR DEFINING PROPERTY RIGHTS IN A COUNTRY WITHOUT AN ORGANIZED CADASTRE

Small scale farmers in developing countries live in a local society, which by tradition provides a sufficient tenure security. Without official land titles, the tenure security could easily be threatened by claims by aliens, through governmental land concessions. A national cadastral campaign would last for decades if all single land parcels should be surveyed and adjudicated properly. The traditional land tenure system has its own land management units, though rarely integrated into the governmental cadastral system.

Departing from a general idea on village delimitation in a project ToR, field surveys in different tribal areas in Guinea-Bissau have shown that an optimal cadastral unit is difficult to identify, as the property rights for land parcels are found in very different shapes within same village area. The ultimate land management unit is the total village area, which is controlled by the village authority (elders and the headman). GPS and georeferenced photos from satellite images have been used. Smaller units for cadastral registration have been identified, though not easily recognized as totally independent property units from the village authority.

Les petits payson dans les pays de développement vivent dans une societé locale, qui par la tradition donne une securité foncière sufficiente. Sans des titres fonciers officials, la securité peut facilement être menacé par des demandes de personnes étrangers, dans le system de concession de l’État. Une campagne cadastrale nationale durera plusieurs décades si’il faudra mésurer toutes les propriétés e les formaliser correctement. Le système foncier traditionel a ses unité d’aménagement, mais sans integration dans le système cadastral de l’État.

Avec une idée génerale de delimitation de village, decrite dans des termes de reference, études de camp dans quelques régions ethniques differentes ont montré que c’est difficile identifier une unité cadastrale optimale, como les droits fonciers des parcelles se sont rencontrés des façons plus differents dans le même territoire villageois. L’unité ultérieure d’aménagement foncier c’est la superficie totale du village, qui est controlée par l’autorité villageoise (les vieux et le chief de village). GPS et des photos géoreferencés des images de satellites ont éte utilisés. Des unités moindres pour le registre cadastal ont été identifiées, mas elles ne sont pas facilement reconnues comme des unités foncières independentes de l’autorité villageois.

In Entwicklungsländern sind Kleinbauern in der Regel Bestandteil einer lokalen Gesellschaft, welche traditionell ausreichend Sicherheit hinsichtlich der Landnutzung gibt. Ohne staatlich garantierte Rechte ist diese Sicherheit jedoch fadenscheinig und kann durch von der Regierung an Fremde vergebene Konzessionen bedroht werden.

Die Einführung eines gut organisierten Katasterwesen würde Jahrzehnte in Anspruch nehmen, insbesondere da traditionelle Landverteilungseinheiten kaum in ein modernes System integriert werden können.

Ausgehend von herkömmlichen Vorstellungen hinsichtlich der Abgrenzung dörflicher Lebensgemeinschaften hat eine Feldstudie in Guiné-Bissau gezeigt, daß die optimale Katastereinheit nur unter großen Mühen festgelegt werden kann, da selbst innerhalb eines Dorfes unterschiedliche Eigentumsrechte existieren. Aus diesem Grund wurde die gesamte Fläche, die zu einem Dorf gehört, als Landmanagementeinheit definiert, wobei die Dorfältesten an der Definition ausschlaggeben mitwirkten. GPS und Satellitenbilder kamen darüberhinaus zum Einsatz. Weitere katastrale Untergliederungen sind im Folgenden hinzugekommen, die allerdings nicht ohne weiteres von den Dorfauthoritäten anerkannt worden sind.

Guinea-Bissau is a small country in Western Africa, with a national territory of 36,126 km², which represents 0.12 % of the area of the African territory. It has been a Portuguese colony, but after an armed struggle it became independent in 1973. It is surrounded by Guinea-Conakry and Senegal, with French as official languages. The population is estimated to about one million.

There are 15 ethnical groups in Guinea-Bissau, which means a very differentiated ethnical mosaic. Except from Portuguese as official language, there is also the Creol as a common communication language, though known by the urban population and part of the rural population. Literacy rate is about 40 % (women 25 %). The urban population is 20 % of the population, with only the capital Bissau as a big city. The other urban population lives in about dozen townships, with less than 10,000 inhabitants. The BNP is very low, 180 US$/capita (1991), even though a considerable part of the rural production never gets recorded in the official BNP-statistics. According to the HDI (Human Development Index), in 1995 Guinea-Bissau was classified as n° 161 of the 174 countries in the world. More than 80 % of the population has agriculture as their main economic activity. Even the urban population has a strong link to their rural village. The social network is very important, with the extended family, the lineage village population and the ethnical group as the main social units.

The village delimitation in Guinea-Bissau is a new concept, which was not inherited from the colonial land legislation. The delimitation is essential for the use and management of the land ressources. It permits a physical demarcation of the common village area and the area used by the different families of the village. It requires as well that the villagers participate in a joint process of identification of the land tenure system in cooperation with the staff of the Cadastral Department.

The process should permit the population to get to a stated definition of the village area and agree on the land management system. This should facilitate an efficient control and an equitative distribution of fields and extensively used areas by villagers and aliens.

Village delimitation is not an easy task, and it will demand quite some time for implementation. The specific ethnical heterogenity of Guinea-Bissau makes it furthermore complicated. For this reason, the implementation requires a preparatory study of the land tenure system in different ethnical groups of the country.

Five case studies have been done in different parts of Guinea-Bissau, with technical assistance of an international land management expert. Some conclusions were drawn for the development of the land resources, based on a general analysis of the present situation and the experiences from the field work. This paper is based on these experiences, and some topics from the field work will be presented.

The idea of village delimitation cannot be isolated from the general context of the official land tenure system in Guinea-Bissau. We will therefore partly describe some village systems and the official one in order to better understand the idea of village delimitation.

A general framework for land concessions is defined in national policies, the land law and occasionally in regional and local physical plans. Specific conditions are defined in the concession procedure for the land area. The national land use policy was approved by the Guinean Government in 1996. It defines the conditions for all kind of agricultural activities in a general way, eg, that private investments in agricultural production should be promoted, and that the village population also should increase their role as cash-crop producers. The policy determines that land held by the rural population should be protected by the State, which includes village land. The practical way to provide this security of tenure is to be defined in the land law and its regulations. The present land law dates from 1961, but a new land law is expected to be approved in February 1998.

The present system of land registration is based on a concept of grants of land in three classes: urban land, village land and rural land holdings. The specific procedure for land concession was developed during the colonial period for the rural land holdings, while it was not developed at all for village land. Urban land concessions should be handled by the Local Government Authority, but the capital Bissau is the only one with technical capacity. The other urban centres (smalltowns) are depending on technical support from the Ministerial department for Urbanism in Bissau.

The formal procedure for land concession and land registration is cumbersome. It embraces 32 steps (see annex 1). It is an inheritage from the colonial regulations.

Land concessions and the subsequent cadastral record are essential for persons or companies alien to the village population, as it gives permission to develop land that by tradition belongs to the village. In many cases the formal procedure is used for legalization of land holdings, as the governmental cadastral system has not been able to cover the need for land concessions and registration, due to the cumbersome procedure and limited technical capacity. A practical alternative has been to reach an non registered agreement with the villagers, who informally "grant" the land to the person. The development of the area could be done on this agreement basis, and the legalization could be done after some years. However, other cases occur as well, with minimal contacts and absence of agreements with the village, and that a non villager gets a concession for an area to be developed. A minor part could be legalized, while the other part could be an additional area requested for future development. Sometimes, the granted area could interfere with an intensively used area by the village farmers.

The formal procedure for land concession and titling is unknown by most applicants. They are able to make the efforts to get a complete application form, ie, the official application letter, a map extract and a declaration of the village commitee. However, the next stages in the procedure are unknown or unachievable for the applicant. Some persons contact the district or regional Government Authorities to get some kind of concession. Even though the formal system demands that the National Land Survey Authority handles the application, these district and regional Authorities sometimes take own decisions, which create a non-coordinated land concession system. The district and regional authorities have no surveying or mapping competence. However, the applicants claim that an authorization by the district or regional Government Authority must be valid and that it provides them with a legal right to the land area. This could also be emphasized by the demands for decentralization and democratization at municipal level.

After Independence, the land concession system was questioned and more or less cancelled during 10-12 years. However, there was a change in the national policy in 1987, by a Structural Adjustment Program. The program created a renewed interest for private land concessions, and the number of applications increased rapidly.

The present official land record has 6,384 process files, covering the period 1900-1997. About half of them were submitted during the colonial period (until 1973), while the other part refers to applications since Independence. Many applications from the colonial period are out-of-date, but they must be officially cancelled or up-dated. Most applications after Independence date from the last 10 years, but many of them are still in an initial stage, and need to be reviewed. Due to lacking resources at the Cadastral Department, an application is progressing if the applicant actively participates in the procedure, ie, he/she must personally push the process forward. The applications without any continued participation and "pushing" of the applicant, will remain in the pending situation. Due to this situation, there are a lot of pending process files, with land claims to be clarified. A revision is expected to be done in 1998. There is a need to review the concession procedure as well as the land registration procedure. This should include an increased decentralization of the Land Survey Authority. Public financial restraints make it difficult to establish regional departments, but studies are being made, and in particular on self-financing through fees and land taxes.

The pending processes will be reviewed and finally titled, after the required controls, surveys and formal procedures. Some of the claims cover big areas, which should be reduced before the final granting. It is due to the state leasehold system, still without leasehold fees or land taxes. Some processes must be cancelled, ie, those without continued activities or without agricultural/economic conditions. Eg, there are processes from the colonial period without persons in charge or representing the previous owners. It will require quite some efforts to identify eventual remaining claims, but a special cancellation procedure will be demanded in order to avoid eventual future claims.

One step has been taken to store the existing applications in a database created in Access. The main stages have been registred, namely: application, regional/local stated opinion, temporary concession and final demarcation/concession of the granted area. The database is convertible to MapInfo, which is the chosen programto be used as cartographical support to the database.

As described above, the present cadastral system is based on the Colonial model, being the Government authorities in charge of the land grants to the persons with a process file for his land holding. The villagers were considered as native people in charge of their common area, with its proper tenure system, but without access to the land through an official procedure.

In the application for land concession, an area is identified, to be surveyed, granted and finally registred. These areas could be quite large and developed to a land holding with employed workers. In a traditional village, the land holding units are small, as the parcels of each family are small. It would be a huge task to identify, survey and record all these parcels. The magnitude of such a technical and administrative work is too huge to be realistic with the present cadastral procedure. There are several reasons to search for another approach to land registration for the village areas, namely:

There is evidently a need for a more adequate land registration process for the villagers. A cadastral unit should be based on the concept of the existing villages. However, the village unit does not correspond to one land holding/parcel, but to one land management unit in a broader sense. The internal distribution of tenure rights could be recognized as the role of the village administration. We have found that these units could be quite operational for the cadastral registration, though with another concept of property rights than for the land holdings. The village area and village borders can be identified with a certain degree of confidence.

Even though this concept of the village cadastral unit is different than the land surveyors’ concepts of individual land parcels, one could eventually compare with some of the big land holdings. Sometimes, there is a landlord that is in charge of a big area, and he could allow his workers to cultivate some minor areas for their own production, though within the area of the land concession. Such internal "concessions" could be more or less permanent, even though conditioned by the landlord-worker relationship. During the colonial period, large areas be granted as a kind of management units. The concession could be used in order to get the unique right for commercialization of the cash-crops, with the price fixed by the landlord or by central decisions (with strong influence of the big landlords). Thus, the land concessions had one unique area, but the internal distribution of property rights could have been developed in an informal way. The land law prohibited sub-lease, but in practice it was recognized.

The idea of the tabanca as a cadastral unit must be understood from the present socio-economic context in Guinea-Bissau. It was found necessary to make a deeper analysis of the concept of traditional land tenure system before embarking on a programme for village delimitation and cadastral registration. Except from the theoretical understanding, the analysis was found useful in a training aspect for the staff at the Cadastral Authority. Due to the present system, the technical staff was acquainted with the formal system for land concessions for landholdings, but they had no specific understanding of the costumary system and how that could be integrated into the formal system. Thus, a specific analysis on these aspects had a pedagogic purpose as well.

Being part of the methodology design, case studies on land use and management were done in six villages with different ethnical background, namely Fula, Balanta, Mandinga, Mancanha, Manjaco and Felupe. They represent 75 % of the population of Guinea-Bissau. The first two ethnical groups are biggest, with about half of the total population. We will describe part of the land tenure system for the Mandinga and Balanta groups, which will be used as reference for the analysis of cadastral unit.

The village headman is an important representative for the village, and he is a general land manager. His competence is specific for each ethnical group. Eg, the Mandinga are known as less hierarchical than the Fula.

The field work in the Mandinga village Jaima in Eastern Guinea-Bissau showed that the heads of the extended families (morança) are considered as the legitimate representatives for their respective family, and they are not subordinated the village headman for land management. The morança families are considered as independent units within the village area. By the costumary "granting" of the area to the morança, neither the village headman, nor the village elders have any land management rights to this area. However, the villagers and elders in Jaima agreed that for cadastral purposes, it might be feasible to consider the whole village as one unit.

A further analysis of Jaima showed that the village area is very well defined. The internal land area of each morança is well organized. The cultivated land is divided in four categories:

The quintal is an area distributed to the morança family, and it is parcelled out to the smaller household units (fogão). This parcelling is done by the head of the morança. The men are cultivating corn and manioc at the quintal, while women cultivate vegetables.

The shifting cultivation fields (lugar) close to the village settlement are used for intensive crop cultivation. The access to these fields is not very strictly defined, but they are distributed by the morança leader. They are used for cultivation of corn in common household fields, while the fields for ground-nuts are used individually of the household members.

At more distance from the village settlements, burnt-clearing is practised and the field (called lugar) is used for a few years, followed of a long fallow period. The rules for access to the fields used to be less rigid, even though the village headman should be informed about these claims. After the fallow period, a person from another household or even another morança can clear the area. Normally, the farmer that clears and cultivates the area is considered as the owner to the field during the years it is cultivated. However, nowadays people are converting these cleared fields to plantations of cashew (called horta), which creates problems with eventual claims of previous owners of these areas.

The socio-political organization in Jaima determines that the region headman (Régulo) is the overall land manager, being the general representative of the area. It could be noticed that the Régulo for Jaima is of the Fula tribe. Jaima is a Mandiga "island" in the Fula dominated area. The Régulo’s delegates at the village level are the village headmen. At the foundation of a village, the headman receives its village area at an official cerimony.

The village headman is the manager and general "owner" of the village area. The head of the extended family household (morança) is considered to be the real owner of the land and the daily land manager of the land handed over by the village headman. The morança head should inform the village headman about all land grants to individuals or collective persons not belonging to the village.

Even though the village headman is considered as the general land manager, the Mandinga society has established quite a decentralized system for land management. Thus, traditional land "grants" are done in a general act of the village leader to the morança leaders, who consider themselves as main land owners, and they are in charge of all decisions about land management. The land should be used by the members of the morança, which is sub-divided into household units (fogão), being the consumption unit. The morança head makes the internal distribution of cultivation fields to the fogão, ie, the quintal, intensively used fields (lugar) and rice fields (bolanha).

The land management rules are somewhat different in the Balanta ethnical system. It is a horizontal society, which determines the land tenure system. One field survey was done in the Balanta village Banta el Sila in Southern Guinea Bissau. The village is divided into four moranças, and their land is distributed to the households (fogão).

The fogão household is considered owner of garden plot (quintal), the intensively shifting cultivation fields (lugar) and the irrigated rice fields (bolanha). The quintal is used by the women for production of vegetables and fruit trees. The men assist the women by fencing the fields and ploughing.

The distribution of the area for quintal was initially made by the village headman. Today, the criteria for land grants to the members of the morança is defined by each morança leader, though in collaboration with the oldest person in the village.

The Balanta people were not used to have fields for perennial crops (horta), but during the last 10 years the cashew plantations have become quite common, being the main cash crop. A tabanca member does not need to ask anyone for permission to plant perenial crops/trees.

The main agricultural activity of Balanta villages is rice cultivation at low-lying fields. The tide is causing some sea water infiltration. The Balanta people have good knowledge on how to recuperate mangal areas, ie, the low tree vegetation inundated by the tide, in order to get productive rice fields. The women are in charge of most parts of the cultivation, while the men are assiting them for specific physical work, eg, digging and maintenance of banks and ditches, and the drainage system.

The rice fields were divided by the founder of the village (called Djonta) and distributed to the morança heads. Each morança head is responsible for his rice fields, and that his fogão households get access to rice fields for proper consumption.

Being a quite horizontal society, the village headman does not play any specific role in the distribution process of fields to the households. He is mainly a supreme authority, with a more distinct role as mediator in land conflicts, guarantee for the village limit and coordinator for the religious cerimonies in the village.

The morança heads organize the daily land management, and delimitates the borders between the household (fogão) fields. If an alien asks for a plantation field or field for extensive shifting cultivation field, the permission is given by the village elders’ council.

The rice fields have been allocated by the village headman to the morança heads, according to the number of fogão households. Due to the horizontal structure of the Balanta society, the fogão household heads participate in the decisions about access to land.

The Balanta society recognizes a certain delegation of decision to the fogão household and even to the individual women in this household. The women in the household are represented by the household chiefwife, but the women can take their own decisions about crops to cultivate on their fields, though in agreement with the fogão head. The oldest woman is considered as the chief advisor of the household.

We have described the land concession procedures and some features in the costumary land tenure systems. It is evident that an individualization of the small land holdings of the villagers and a cadastral registration of these plots is not the ideal solution. The rural societies are not static, but they develop and adapt their costumary tenure systems to the surrounding requirements. It is necessary to find a convenient way for providing security of tenure for the village land, which should be guaranteed by the State, but designed in a comprehensible and accessible way for the population. The village territory as a cadastral unit is a way to define an area where land claims of aliens could be faced towards the locally recognized property rights of the villagers.

A method for identification of the village area and the identification of the property rights was developed. After some pilot experiences, we have reached a preliminary way to proceed:

The Rapid Rural Appraisal is a method to get to understand the land use and management system in rural societies. It is faster than a traditional statistical survey, which could provide a detailed statistic understanding of the land tenure issues. However, traditional interviews with written forms can blockade the village people or make them answer the question in a strategic or defensive way. Alien civil servants from the cities are sometimes considered as a potential threat to the farmers, as they represent the state that could officially grant the land to aliens, even though it is held by the village in their costumary tenure system. A participatory appraisal is supposed to overcome eventual suspicious attitudes and make the village understand that the State and the costumary authority could collaborate in an innovative way.

The ethnical heterogenicity and the distinct village organization are characteristics of Guinea-Bissau. During the case studies we found it necessary to promote an active participation of the villagers and the local village authority. We found that a village could have people from more than one ethnical group. In such a case, the costumary rules are based on that of the majority or the founder.

The ethnical groups have different characteristics, which affects the costumary land management systems. One could identify two main features, being one a horizontal society, eg the Balanta and Bijago, and the other one a vertical society, eg the Fula.

The case studies have shown that one cannot make a delimitation of one village without consulting the neighbouring villages. Normally, the villagers, or at least the elders, know the exact limits of the village, but one must cater for an active participation of the local authorities of the confining villages, so that no future claim would appear after the delimitation.

The limits of the village could change, and in some cases there could be doubts about the limit. It could be a matter of temporary permits to use land by neighbouring villagers, or even permanent changes of roads or other physical features. The concept of prescription is not defined with an exact or uniform time limit, which also causes problems when a limit should be officially identified and surveyed.

The limits have some breaking points, but the exact intermediate border line is not always exact or straight. The two confining villages should agree on the border and the accuracy of the surveyed border line.

The delimitation can departure from the original or "mother" village, as it should be able to describe the development and parcelling out of new villages from the original one. We have also found that the limits of many villages coincide with the administrative division from the colonial period. It might be understood that the colonial administration tried to make an adaptation to the costumary system, or on the contrary.

An officialization of the village area requires a physical survey and mapping. The area can be quite big, but it is usually quite well known. Using traditional surveying techniques, such a job would take quite a long time. The use of traditional theodolites should demand several decades or even centuries to complete, which cannot be afforded by the State. The technical quality is also difficult to maintain for quite vast areas to survey, and the experience of the surveying staff is not sufficient. Surveying a village area, usually exceeding 100 hectars, with a big number of breaking points, is a huge challenge. The accuracy of such a network of coordinates would not be high.

In order to make the surveying more efficient, we have found that the accuracy requirements must be reviewed. GPS receivers with low accuracy are able to reach 2-5 meters accuracy, which is quite unacceptable to the traditional surveying standards, even though the declared coordinates (in cm or mm) could differ more than these meters, depending on the surveying conditions.

The breaking points between villages are traditionally defined with different natural features, eg, big trees, roads, rivers and water lines. In some cases the limit could be more unprecise. A centimeter accuracy of these breaking points is not top priority for the villages, in particular if a total cost recovery is demanded for such a job. The GPS receivers of low accuracy is a more adequate solution. Anyway, the coordinates represent the reference point for the surveying authority, while they are uncomprehensible for the villagers. The important part of the delimitation work is that the concerned villages define the demarcation beacons. Demarcation of land holdings in official land concessions is done with cement beacons, which require quite some investment and work. As traditional marks are existing, they could be identified in the official adjudication process with participation of the local government authority and the land survey authority. One could also propose to use eg one specific tree as beacon, to be planted at the breaking points. The villagers should show the borders, and the technician survey the indicated breaking points. As big trees are quite common as breaking points, the GPS survey must be done of a supplementary point some 10-15 meters besides, in order to get the visibility towards the satellites. Even though the accuracy of the GPS coordinates is lower than traditional surveying standards, they will be complemented by the physical beacons, which should have priority over the coordinates. In case of disputes, the coordinates should be the legal back-up reference, and the errors due to lacking accuracy must be accepted by the concerned villages. We pressume that such disputes would be very rare.

Except the GPS surveys, georeferenced satellite images should be used as a complement. Panchromatic Spot images were taken in 1997, and processing of them and production of georeferenced photomaps are being produced, in a scale of 1:50,000. This is the same scale as the topographical maps, produced in the 1950’s, and that still are used as cadastral map. The pixel size of the satellite images is 10 meters. Thus, the accuracy of the produced maps is almost the same as the coordinates obtained from the GPS receivers.

The satellite photomaps have a different visuality than ordinary topographical maps. This is important as a pedagogic mean during the field works, as the photomaps can be used with the villagers, in order to identify the village area. If a border is situated in an inaccessible point, the coordinates could be identified at the photomap, and the coordinates picked up at the digitalization table.

The village delimitation must be based on the concept of management system of the land resources. The field studies have shown that the traditional social structure should be a basis for the cadastral work, and that the village authority should be recognized as cadastral unit. For this reason, the registry of village should not be limited to the identification of the village area, but the following parts should also be included:

The definite procedure to make the registry of the village area has still not be defined. A registry of the village area with the village headman as grantee is not the ideal solution, as it does not correspond to the reality in the traditional land management concept. In such a case he could use the title as his private property. The concept of his sovereign tenure right depends on the specific costumary system, as some systems have a more hierarchical system, while other have a more decentralized system. During the field works we have discovered applications of large areas, submitted by an influent village member or village headman. Such applications must be scrutinized regarding his authority in the village and how the internal property rights should be defined. Otherwise, we could easily reach a situation of traditional landlords with a formalized property right, which is much more extended than his real property right in the costumary system.

Any kind of approach of land titling in a country with a high rate of analphabetism and existing costumary land tenure systems have several risks, but it provides quite a challenge for the Cadastral Department. The colonial system was convenient (and designed) for the settlers (Portuguese and other aliens), while the village tenure system had just a formal protection, but without efficiency in situations of competing claims.

The village delimitation programme, as described about, is not a streamline way to get to a well organized official land tenure system. Sometimes, voices are heard that costumary tenure systems should be kept untouched, and that they cannot be converted into a formal system. Opposite voices argue for official registration of all land parcels, and that the small scale farmers are individuals and that they need an individual land record. In fact, the proposed land law states that village farmer could proceed with registration of his/her plots, and thus leave the village land community. The present cadastral campaign and the future development will determine how the villages will face the demand for individualization of land plots.

	Main stages	Detailed steps	Example Process nº 5442/91
1.1	Application	Application of concession with enclosed documents: Map extract with localization of the claimed area Declaration of village commitee	19/11/91 19/11/91 19/11/91
1.2	Stated opinion	Technical information from the Cadastral Department Application for stated opinion from Regional Government Department Stated opinion from Regional Government Department	03/12/91 05/10/91 01/06/93
1.3	Publication	Payment for publication Letter for publication in the Official Gazette Letter to Local Government Office for local publicity Official answer from Local Government Office after publicity	03/10/94 05/10/94 05/10/94 -
1.4	Temporary demarcation	Application for temporary demarcation Official letter to the Local Government Office, with request for permission of demarcation Answer from the the Local Government Office about the permission (fixing the date for demarcation) Temporary demarcation and design of a survey plan Official report	25/05/95 24/05/95 05/06/95 31/10/95 -
1.5	Inspection	Application for inspection Official letter by Cadastral Department to the Local Government Office for fixing a date for Inspection Answer from the Local Government Office with proposed date Inspection Letter to the Local Government Office Official report from the inspection Letter to the Local Government Office for signing of official report	10/07/95 03/07/95 05/07/95 07/07/95 01/08/95 07/08/95 10/08/95
1.6	Permanent demarcation	Application for permanent demarcation Receipt of publication in the Official Gazette Permission for issuing of the title Permanent demarcation Official report from the permanent demarcation Letter for publication in the Official Gazette Official communiction by the Cadastral Department to the Local Government Office about the demarcation	17/08/95 25/08/95 28/10/95 - 09/02/96 10/08/96
1.7	Title	Official information for issuing of the title Letter to the Deeds Department of the Ministry of Justice Request for property title. Offical delivery of the title	11/10/95 15/03/96 12/02/96 08/05/96

Mr. Quiante Lêm Nafantcham-na, MSc in Land Surveying/Cartography (1991) at the Moscow Land Surveying Institute, is the Head of the Cartograpic Department at the National Land Survey Authorithy of Guinea-Bissau. He is actively involved in the Projet de Mise-en-Valeur des Ressources Foncières en Guinée-Bissau. Address: SEOPCU/Direcção do Serviço Nacional de Geografia e Cadastro; C.P. 14; Bissau; Guinea-Bissau; Phone: +245 253615; fax: +245 253614.

Mr. Klas Ernald Borges, MSc in Land Surveying (1981) and PhD in Real Estate Planning (1996) at the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden, is actually the long term technical assistant for Kampsax International A/S at the Projet de Mise-en-Valeur des Ressources Foncières en Guinée-Bissau until 1999. His permanent business address is Kampsax International A/S; Stamholmen 112; 2650 Hvidovre; Denmark; Phone: +45 36390700; fax +45 36772829. His address until 1999: see above.

VILLAGE DELIMITATION AS A MEAN FOR DEFINING PROPERTY RIGHTS IN A COUNTRY WITHOUT AN ORGANIZED CADASTRE

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