Assessing Technological Possibility Against Societal Need: Smart Sketch Maps for Fit-For-Purpose Land Administration

This paper explores the potential of smart sketchmaps for delivering fit-for-purpose land administration in Eastern Africa. It does this by assessing whether smart sketchmaps include the fit-for-purpose land administration elements according to different stakeholder perceptions. Whilst the use of sketch mapping itself is not new in land administration, smart sketchmaps’ technologies and processes allow for conversion of hand drawn sketch maps into topologically and spatially corrected maps. Smart sketchmaps can provide qualitative spatial information in areas where conventional cartographic and geospatial knowledge is often limited. Including these maps in the land administration system not only adds to existing data about visible boundaries, but importantly introduces records of those less obvious socially or temporally constructed de facto boundaries that are significant in customary tenures.