Its4land - Innovative geospatial tools for fit-for-purpose land rights mapping

Mapping millions of unrecorded land rights in large parts of Sub-Saharan Africa remains a challenge. The results of many existing ICT-based approaches for recording these rights have often proven to be inappropriate; therefore, a new generation of tools needs to be developed to map land rights faster, cheaper, easier, and more responsible. This is the main goal of its4land, a European Commission Horizon 2020 project that aims to develop innovative tools that respond to the continuum of land rights, fit-for-purpose approach, and provide cadastral intelligence. To deliver innovative, scalable, and transferrable ICT solutions, the its4land project builds on strategic collaborations between the EU and East Africa. The innovation process incorporates a broad range of stakeholders and emergent geospatial technologies including smart sketch maps, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), interactive feature extraction, as well as sharing and publishing land information through geocloud services. The aim is to combine these innovative approaches with the specific needs, market opportunities and readiness of end users in the domain of land recording in East Africa. Moreover, the land recording tools target both top-down and bottom-up approaches and thus support formal land registration processes, as well as informal community-based land resource documentation. The project consists of a four-year work plan, €3.9M funding, and eight consortium partners collaborating with stakeholders from different case study locations in Ethiopia, Kenya, and Rwanda that cover different land uses such as urban, peri-urban, rural smallholder, and (former) pastoralists. Major technical tasks include tool development, prototyping, and demonstration for local, national, regional, and international interest groups. However, equal emphasis is placed on needs assessment, as well as governance, capacity and business modelling. This paper will present the unique its4land land administration toolbox in which the exploitable results of the its4land project are integrated. It will describe each of these exploitable results which cover different software tools for recording land tenure information based on hand-drawn sketch maps, UAV-driven workflows for land tenure data acquisition, and semi-automatic and interactive delineation of visible cadastral boundaries, all integrated in a software platform to publish and share land information via geocloud services. The toolbox also combines consultancy services in the fields of needs assessment, and the development of governance and capacity building models for innovative technologies.