October 16 (SeeNews) - Albania and the World Bank launched a $20 million (14.12 million euro) project aimed at supporting the management of the country's Central Property Registration Office (ZQRP), a bank official said on Tuesday.
This project worth $20 million is part of a bigger project – the Land Administration and Management Project - to the total amount of $55 million, the communications officer with the World Bank's country office in Albania, Ana Gjokutaj, told SeeNews.
The project aims to improve the quality and the efficiency of the agency’s services, to strengthen the agency’s financial management and to accelerate the registration of some 500,000 rural and urban landplots, ZQRP said in a statement.
Of the total cost of the Land Administration and Management Project, the World Bank provides $35 million, the Swedish International Development Agency (SIDA) has come up with $4.5 million, Japan with $1.54, and the remainder comes from the Albanian central and local government.
The overall goal of the project is to improve land management in Albania, where there are still about 600,000 urban and 300,000 rural landplots not yet registered.
In 1991 Albania began a process of restitution of property and land to owners whose land was confiscated prior to 1945, but the process of registering the land ownership and the property transaction still is not closed. The past few years too saw a number of informal settlements and illegal houses emerge, mainly near the cities, tourist areas on the Adriatic and the Ionian Sea and the capital Tirana. The still unresolved land ownership problem hampers the flow of direct investments into the country. The World Bank’s projects aims at addressing the problems of uncontrolled urban growth, inadequate public infrastructure and the lack of governance and public services both at the central and local levels.
($=0.7059 euro)