LOGAR, AFGHANISTAN- On May 19, 2007, the newly renovated Logar Province Makhzan was inaugurated by Appeals Court Chief Judge H.E. Mr. Amrullah Abdali.  Funded by USAID through the Land Titling and Economic Restructuring in Afghanistan (LTERA) project, the renovated Makhzan now contains accessible, catalogued legal documents and digitized property-related deeds, enabling residents of Logar to easily access their legal documents and property deeds from the Makhzan of Logar, the central Primary Court, or the Primary District Courts in Mohammad Agha, Azer, Baraki Barak, and Kulangar.

 

Afghanistan’s land records, including property deeds and transfer deeds, were almost completely destroyed during two decades of war. Searching for a land document took weeks or months and this cumbersome process inhibited land transactions.  In late 2004, USAID funded the Land Titling and Economic Restructuring in Afghanistan project (LTERA) that is helping to renovate, reorganize, and digitize the land records of Makhzans.  Since then, the project has renovated more than half of the provincial land offices in the country in close cooperation with the land administration offices. The project has also helped the Supreme Court restore and reorganize more than 6 million legal documents around the country.

 

Using a recently created land information database, property records are now accessible to land offices and the general public.  The project also funded the training of land administration personnel in document cleaning, reorganization and protection.  

 

To date, reorganization and digitization are complete in Logar, Paktia, Khost and Paktika Makhzans.  Makhzans that have completed reorganizing their collections and are in the process of digitization storage include Kabul, Mazar-e-Sharif, Kunduz, Parwan Ghazni, Sar-i-Pul, Samangan, Nangarhar, Herat, Jawzjan, Faryab, Badakhsan and Baghlan.