According to AllAfrica.com, Liberia’s Inquirer newspaper recently honored Philomena Bloh Sayeh as 2012 Director General of the Year. Ms. Sayeh is the Director General of Liberia’s Center for National Documents and Records Agency (CNDRA) and is a key partner in USAID’s Land Policy and Institutional Support (LPIS) project. This award recognizes the ambitious reform efforts that Ms. Sayeh, with the support of USAID, has overseen at CNDRA during the past year.
According to the article, “Madam Sayeh has worked tirelessly in modernizing land records and recording systems following a 20-year civil conflict in Liberia”. Insecure rights and disputes over land played a major role in Liberia’s internal conflict, which ended in 2003 and Ms. Sayeh’s determined efforts to improve land administration systems are essential to strengthening resource governance and reducing conflict in Liberia.
USAID’s LPIS project has supported Ms. Sayeh’s efforts to modernize CNDRA since 2010. The LPIS project provided assistance to CNDRA in adopting an electronic deed registry software solution that will allow Liberia to digitize land records for the first time ever. The project also supported the rehabilitation of the CNDRA customer service center, which opened on September 17, 2012, and now employs 14 staff members trained in digitizing land records. More than 500 deeds have been scanned and registered in the two months since the center opened, compared with 806 deeds registered in all of 2011.