The operating system
for resettlement work.

When a road, dam, transmission line or pipeline takes land, the people who lose homes, fields, trees or businesses are entitled to be made whole — and, under lender safeguards, to be made whole before construction displaces them. A Resettlement Action Plan is the document that sets out how that will happen, and then the evidence record proving it did. Most of that record is still assembled from spreadsheets, paper census forms, photographs on somebody's phone and a folder of scanned payment vouchers. That is why the completion audit at the end of a project is so often a reconstruction exercise rather than a report — the information existed, but never in one place, and rarely with a reliable trail of who changed what and when.

One chain, from census to completion audit

Land acquisition and resettlement runs in a fixed sequence, and every step inherits the integrity of the one before it. A census of project-affected persons fixes who is eligible, against a cut-off date that has to be set, disclosed publicly and then defended for the life of the project. A socio-economic baseline captures what livelihoods looked like beforehand, because restoration can only be measured against it. Valuation puts a defensible figure on every affected asset at full replacement cost — no depreciation, no deduction for salvage. An entitlement matrix turns those losses into specific entitlements by loss category and tenure, including for occupants with no formal title. Compensation is then delivered by the project or its paying agent, recorded against each entitlement and reconciled back to the register. Grievances are logged, investigated and closed inside the timeframes the grievance redress mechanism committed to. Livelihood restoration is tracked until outcomes, not merely payments, can be evidenced.

Holding all of that in one system is the difference between a report you can produce and a report you have to rebuild. Every change is attributed to a named user and time-stamped, so an independent monitor or lender's reviewer can trace any figure in the final report back to the field record it came from.

Built around the standards that gate financing

The workflow follows IFC Performance Standard 5 and World Bank ESS-5, the two frameworks that govern involuntary resettlement on donor-financed and commercially-financed infrastructure, and it maps cleanly onto AfDB Operational Safeguard 2 and the Equator Principles for projects financed under those regimes. These are not documentation preferences — deliverables have to be cleared by the lender, and disbursement is increasingly tied to compliance milestones. Audit-ready exports are therefore a first-class output rather than a reporting afterthought, and national requirements sit alongside the lender's, since gazetted crop and tree rates and statutory acquisition procedures still apply.

Field data collection that assumes no network

Census and valuation work happens where the project is, which is usually where connectivity is not. Enumerators register households, enumerate structures and crops, photograph assets and capture GPS boundaries entirely offline; records sync when a connection returns, with conflicts surfaced rather than silently overwritten. Supervisors see coverage and data quality as the survey progresses, instead of discovering gaps weeks later during quality assurance.

Who it is for

Three groups, with different reasons for wanting the same record. The environmental and social consultancies who are contracted to deliver the RAP and currently rebuild a bespoke database on every project. The implementing agencies and project owners who carry the obligation and must answer for it long after the consultant has demobilised. And the lenders and independent monitors who have to be satisfied that compensation reached the right people, at replacement cost, before displacement. SmartLARMS is built in East Africa for projects in emerging markets, where field conditions, customary tenure and mobile-money disbursement are the normal case rather than the exception — not a Western enterprise tool with a regional configuration bolted on.