Abstract:
The Kenya government together with development partners has embarked on the development of
informal settlements. Mombasa County has more than 70 informal settlements; information about the
settlements and their relationship to the existing cadastral spatial layer covering the entire Mombasa
County needs to be determined in order to support decision making for sustainable development. This
study evaluates the Social Tenure Domain Model (STDM) land tool in the development of an informal
cadastre by capturing, storing, and manipulating social and spatial information in Kwarasi informal
settlement in Mombasa. This case study is an example that can be replicated to the rest of the informal
settlements in Mombasa forming a single informal cadastral database for the entire county.
Participatory enumerations and the STDM tool were used in this research to present the situation of
Kwarasi informal settlement. The housing structures were adopted as the spatial unit for the informal
Cadastre over which the rights of the inhabitants were adjudicated, customized and uploaded into the
STDM where social tenure relationships were created to form the cadaster in the STDM system. The
spatial component of Kwarasi informal cadaster was overlaid on the Mombasa cadastral layer and their
relationship determined. It has been demonstrated that the relationship would be useful for decision
making to support sustainable development intervention, and ease land administration by maintaining
a detail record of the informal settlements.
