Ghana Lands Commission

The Ghana Lands Commission is digitising the country’s land register, from physical files to a governed digital record. The Command Centre is where that programme is watched and run: registration coverage, cases and how long they take, revenue and what leaks from it, fraud, the physical files themselves, and how far the data can be trusted.

The client’s requirements named two people, each with a different job.

I designed this one in the browser. I directed Claude Code to build the MVP in React and TypeScript, with Leaflet and Mapbox for the map, so every layout was tested against real geography, real data shapes and a real browser from the first day.

The data is mock, but it was generated to agree with itself. The same 16 regions and 261 districts give the same figures on the map, in every report and in the Commissioner’s office, so a number never says one thing in one place and another somewhere else.

Before building, I explored three directions for the national view. Map first, with the figures condensed into a floating rail. A sidebar for navigation, to give the map more height. Or a strip of figures above the map.

The product combines the first two. A grouped sidebar holds the screens, the map fills the rest, and the figures float over its bottom edge, where they change with whatever the map is showing.

The app opens on a sign-in with the Commission’s own ID and password, laid out the way serious products do it: a quiet form on one side, and the institution on the other, with the Commission’s building and the scale of what it governs.

Leadership either looks at the country or looks at the numbers, so the map gets its own place at the top of the navigation. It drills from Ghana to a region, a district and a single parcel, and the figures along the bottom follow it all the way down.

A parcel opens its 360° record: title, tenure, land class, planning scheme, legal interests and restrictions. It’s the screen most likely to be mistaken for real data, so it says on its own face that every detail is illustrative.

Six heat layers show where something needs attention: low registration coverage, records not yet linked to a parcel number, overdue cases, fraud and competing interests, boundary conflicts, and outstanding revenue. Each says what “hot” means in one line, and a small key explains the colour once a layer is on.

Clicking a figure on the map opens what it’s made of, one level down. Cases overdue nationally break down by region, with a chart for how concentrated they are and the full ranked list below.

Not every number gets a chart. A percentage isn’t a share of a total, so registration coverage shows a ranked comparison instead of a pie, and says why in one line.

Behind the map sit five reports from the requirements: transactions and service performance, fraud and land integrity, physical records, data quality and digitisation, and revenue and leakage. Each starts with the same row of six headline figures, then the panels that explain them, on one shared grid so every edge lines up down the page.

Funnels show where things drop off, because in a migration or a revenue cycle the drop-off is the story. The workflow pipeline flags its own bottleneck, ranked by how long cases wait, not by how many there are.

The second workspace is the same product, one level down. The Land Commissioner opens on their own region, on the same map, and their office’s figures reconcile exactly with the district the Super Admin sees.

Their screens are about running the day. Case flow and its bottleneck, each officer’s workload in the language of capacity rather than performance, and an approval queue where every case sits in one bucket, in the order that should decide what happens to it first.

Cases requiring attention are grouped by what blocks them, from documentation and legal caveats to boundary disputes, because a missing document is a phone call and a caveat stops a registration outright. Physical files show where each one is and which ones are holding up a case, and twelve months of trends show whether the office is catching up or falling behind.

Zala answers questions about the whole programme in plain language, with the figures, the sources it used, links to the screens behind them and suggested follow-ups. It’s careful about what it is: the figures are recorded facts, and the reading of them is labelled as an AI-generated summary, not a statutory one.

The Ministry’s green and gold are kept for the product’s chrome, like the header, the navigation and primary buttons. Status has its own palette, deliberately a different green, so a healthy trend never disappears into the brand. Sora sets headings and every number, and Lato sets the rest.