Keynote Address
by
Dr the Honourable Andrew Holness ON, PC, MP
Prime Minister of Jamaica
at the
Land Administration Capacity Enhancement Project
Inception Ceremony
on
May 12, 2026
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Ministers Montague and Johnson Smith,
Permanent Secretaries,
The Korean delegation,
Excellencies of the Diplomatic Corps who may be here with us.
There are many Jamaicans alive today who have worked the same piece of land, some for more than 50 years, built a home on the land, farmed the land, raised family on the land, and who still cannot provide proof on paper that the land belongs to them. That gap between possession and title is not a bureaucratic inconvenience only, it is a barrier to finance, to security, to inheritance, and to the formal economy.
There’s a way to write your speeches so that the positive point stimulates the clap. This was written in the negative, but you understood the positive point, that giving title to land, giving formal access improves the economy, and that’s the positive point.
Land Administration Capacity Enhancement Project is about to change that. Through a partnership with the Government of Jamaica and the Korea International Cooperation Agency, we are strengthening the institutional skills, systems, and technologies that will enable Jamaica to administer land more efficiently, more transparently, and more productively.
KOICA is providing a grant of up to US$9 million, that’s approximately JMD$1.42 billion, and this will run from 2025 to 2031. On behalf of the Government of Jamaica and the people of Jamaica, I express our sincere gratitude to the government and people of the Republic of Korea and to KOICA.
Korea’s development record speaks for itself. What is perhaps less known is that land formalization was a part of its foundation. In 1949 to 1950, Korea restructured its agricultural land tenure system, abolishing absentee landlordship and transferring ownership to those who actually cultivated the land. It was an early hard-won lesson in a principle that holds across development contexts, that knowing who owns the land and ensuring that the record reflects the reality of who owns it, but more importantly, that the people who are going to make use of the land in a formal system have ownership of the land. This is the precondition for rapid and sustained growth.
The Korea of today, with its advanced digital infrastructure and world-class institutions, was built on many things, but clarity of tenure and the discipline of public administration to manage that were among some of the important early foundations of the Korean success. We hope to develop the same structure, the same disciplined system of ownership and maintaining the administration of land that Korea developed and so we welcome the partnership. We see it as strategically important and beneficial to Jamaica’s development.
The Land Administration and Innovation Centre, which this supports, will be located at 84 Hanover Street in Kingston.
This property has been reacquired for this national purpose. It will be renovated and equipped as a modern training and innovation facility for the National Land Agency and the wider government. The renovation will include office spaces, conference rooms, computer laboratories, and storage. The project will supply equipment, desktop computers, office furniture, rugged laptops, land surveying equipment, unmanned aerial vehicles, drones, and specialized software. This is the kind of investment that shifts institutional capacity in a tangible and lasting way. The real value, however, lies in the people who will be trained there and the capability that will take root.
The programmes will include geoinformatics, cadastral mapping, surveying technician training, cybersecurity for government, land record management, and advanced GIS training using ArcGIS Pro. The ArcGIS component is particularly significant. It will prepare the NLA staff for the transition to electronic land registration solutions. Jamaica must move from fragmented, paper-heavy, manual systems to integrated, digital, and secure accessible systems. This is essential for efficiency, transparency, and public trust, and for competitiveness.
Many Jamaicans have experienced land administration as slow, opaque, and difficult to navigate. We are determined to change that. We are building a system that is faster, more accurate, more accessible, and more responsive to citizens, investors, planners, and communities.
When land is properly surveyed, mapped, recorded, and titled, the effects ripple outward. A family can access a mortgage. A farmer can use the land as collateral. An investor can access a site with confidence. Government can identify and unlock the value of public lands. Communities can establish tenure security. But importantly, disputes decline, which helps quite a bit with the reduction in domestic violence, which is now featuring as a significant component of overall violent crimes in the country as we reduce our murder rate. But infrastructure planning is also improved. Environmental management becomes more precise, and housing delivery accelerates. All these are the benefits that will be generated from this project.
A land title is more than a document, it is a platform for opportunity, and this project is about building that platform at scale. Across the world, public administration is being transformed by data, digital platforms, geospatial intelligence, automation, cybersecurity, and artificial intelligence. Jamaica must keep pace. We need public officers who are not merely users of imported systems, but skilled professionals capable of managing, adapting, protecting, improving, and eventually creating our own indigenous digital systems.
And that is why the capacity-building component matters. The project includes expert deployment, training, invitational programmes in Korea, in-community technical instruction, and support for student surveyors to become commissioned land surveyors. Commission surveyors will guide and supervise practical training. This addresses one of the sector’s most pressing constraint. We need a deeper pool of trained professionals.
Technology alone does not transform institutions, people do. When people have knowledge, discipline, systems, and leadership to use technology effectively, institutions change, and they change rapidly and this project recognizes that. It combines infrastructure, equipment, technical support, training, and institutional development.
The government recognizes its obligations under this partnership. We will provide the administrative support, project management, approvals, customs facilitation, and institutional coordination necessary for success. The National Land Agency will be central to this work, collaborating with the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Economic Growth and Infrastructure Development, and with our Korean partners to ensure real effective delivery of all that we have promised.
I want to commend the National Land Agency for its leadership. The NLA sits at the intersection of land, law, planning, technology, economic development, and public service. Its work is technical, but its impact is profoundly human. Every improvement in land administration means a farmer, a homeowner, a small business owner, a developer, a public agency, or a community can move forward with greater certainty.
I also want to recognize the groundwork already done, the feasibility study in 2025, engagement with KOICA and partners, the record of discussion, Cabinet approvals, and the careful coordination required to transfer the Hanover Street property for public use. These unseen steps make the progress that we are seeing now visible.
As we begin this project, keep the larger goal in sight. We are building a Jamaica where land supports productivity, where public records support certainty, where technology supports service delivery, where government capacity supports national development. The Land Administration Capacity Enhancement Project aligns with our vision of a modern, efficient, digital, and development-oriented public sector. It supports inclusive growth. It supports investment. It supports resilience. It supports better planning. It supports formalization of assets and empowerment of citizens. Let this centre become a place where knowledge is transferred, skills are sharpened, innovation is encouraged, and public officers are prepared for the next generation of land administration. Let it be a symbol of what partnership can achieve when it is practical, strategic, and focused on national transformation.
On behalf of the Government of Jamaica, I again thank KOICA and the Republic of Korea for this partnership. I thank the National Land Agency and all participating ministries, agencies, experts, and technical teams for their work and commitment. It is now my great pleasure to declare the Land Administration Capacity Enhancement Project officially launched.
And at the same time, I take this opportunity, since I have the rapt attention of this audience and those listening to this broadcast, to appeal to all Jamaicans. We are entering into a new phase of our development. We have, over the last decade and a half, greatly sacrificed to achieve fiscal stability. The next phase must now be robust, sustained economic growth. And as I had said earlier in my presentation, one of the important pillars of the economic growth which we seek is proper land administration. And when we say proper land administration, we want to be able to identify uniquely who owns the land, and we want to ensure that we know about the land, we have a cadastre.
We want to ensure that people who want to use the land for productive purposes can get access to use the land for productive purposes. We want to ensure that land, which is a natural asset, can also become a financial asset by acting as collateral for financing. We want to ensure that we can make proper decisions about the land, the environmental features, the geospatial features, and all of this can only be done if there is a public administration that can do two things. One, systematically register land. A few years ago, this administration went through the process of putting in the legal basis for systematic land registration. This was done also with the support of our Korean partners.
The NHT provided financing to support the process, and it is done by the government declaring certain areas and putting in place all the requirements to have land properly registered, including dispute resolution mechanisms and that has gone well. The objective was to do about 20,000 titles under this. We’re almost there. But the traditional, conventional process of ad hoc, as the minister pointed out, are voluntary, where the average person who has a piece of land but has no title can come into the NLA, bring all the documents that you have for the land, and apply for a title. That has not moved as quickly as the systematic land registration. In fact, my estimate is that in the last five years, we would have registered more titles under the systematic registration, maybe three times as many titles under the systematic registration than under the ad hoc voluntary system.
I want to appeal today to Jamaicans, go and register the land that you are on. Go to the NLA’s office. They’re not quite ready yet, and I see Cheriese, the CEO, smiling and saying, “Why is the Prime Minister setting me up like this?” However, what I do know about bureaucracies, you have to challenge them. If you leave bureaucracies in their comfort zone, nothing gets done.
I’m encouraging Jamaicans to take careful assessment of your land. Instructive in this presentation, which I’m certain that it will be glossed over or probably missed, that an important part of South Korea’s development strategy was to abandon this notion of the absentee landlord. At our stage in development, Jamaica must protect absolutely property rights, but if we are to develop, we cannot have land idle only for rent or for capital gains; that’s not realized economic benefit. Minister understands what I’m saying.
We have to realize the economic benefit of the land, and you only realize it when you’re reaping from it, you have a factory on it, you have developed housing on it, or you have protected it for an environmental asset. So, what we want to do, and it’s our stated policy, is to accelerate the utilization of all our assets in Jamaica. We have too many assets that are underutilized, and one of the main assets for us is our land, and before we can actually utilize the land fairly, transparently, and strategically, we need to know about the land. We need to have a register of it. We need to have all parcels of land titled.
Titling the land, establishing ownership, also reduces the issue of domestic violence. I call it domestic violence, but it’s inter-family violence. In Jamaica, I think people understand when I say, ‘quarrel over dead lef’. So many things today tied up in what we’re doing here, and I hope that I’ve been able to explain to the public why this is a major step. But what we will accomplish here from this is the augmentation of the systematic land titling, and give more capacity to the ad hoc or voluntary land titling process by increasing the capabilities of the NLA, by training the persons who can do the survey, by integrating technology to give greater efficiency, and by looking at the systems and making sure that they are all integrated and that will build capacity, give us more horsepower to be able to increase at scale the registration.
It is not impossible for Jamaica within the next decade or two to have every single parcel of land titled. And once you start to have titles, and you know about every square inch of land, then we can have a proper system of addresses, which we now don’t have. It becomes easier to sell and transfer land. We have a better system of estimating the value of land, and your land market, which supports your housing, construction, agriculture, becomes more efficient. These are the things that governments do, that people who write their name in the poll book don’t necessarily give credit to the government when they go to cast their vote, but these are the things that we have to do, nonetheless.
God bless you and thank you.
