In the 2000s, Rwanda undertook significant policy and legal reform with regards to land. The aim was to regularize all existing lands under private, leasehold, and state tenures: customary tenures and informal arrangements would no longer carry legal recognition. The policies were generally seen as positive by the international land sector with regards to gender recognition, minority group recognition, and overall equality.

Part of the land reforms involved a nationwide adjudication, surveying, and recording program. Supported by international donors, around 12M parcels were mapped over a period of 4 years at a cost of around $8 per parcel. The Rwandan Natural Resources Authority (RNRA) is responsible for the maintenance of the land records, both the spatial and textual components. The establishment phase was considered a great success. In order to achieve such speeds and coverage, use was made of hardcopy aerial imagery, or high resolution satellite imagery (depending on availability). In each district, large numbers of local inhabitants were employed by the project as para-surveyors, adjudicators, and recorders. Training in some cases only took a few days. Accuracy was sacrificed in the name of speed and cost: most boundaries were digitized within 1-5m of the ‘true’ position.

The specific problem is that now with establishment phase now completed, attention has now turned to maintenance; whilst procedures for transaction processes are established, it is understood that many transactions are not being recorded in the new system, particularly in rural areas (Biraro, 2014). There are several issues at play: 1) all final recording must be done centrally in Kigali: this might mean 2 days walk for a rural dweller; 2) district land offices lack highly trained staff and ICT capacity meaning waiting times can be lengthy – even more than a day; 3) unlike the establishment program, higher fees now apply for transactions: it is felt some land owners might not be willing to pay the fees; 4) surveying and mapping capacity is limited across the country: there are only a few surveying companies and public capacity to carry out surveys is limited to a few staff in the central ministry.

The challenge is to determine if geospatial tools might be used to improve the speed, cost and quality of land information updates in both urban and rural Rwanda.

Rural Ethiopia is food insecure and current responses have limitations. Technology investment by smallholders is encouraged, but, is ultimately impeded: land tenure security is not perceived by farmers, so why invest? Therefore, since 1998 large resources were afforded to providing certification of rural land holdings. Millions of certificates delivered via local land administration committees resulted. A fit-for-purpose approach is used: preliminary non-tradable certifications are created and a book of holdings generated. A secondary map book is intended, however, the national land information system is only embryonic.

The program, managed by Ministry of Agriculture, is considered successful, however, despite such efforts, smallholder productivity remains underwhelming. Therefore, the rural certification program, particularly the mapping program, and the establishment of national rural land information system need to be accelerated. Subsequently, a sustainable and inclusive land consolidation could then be developed (land consolidation requires land tenure information as input): land fragmentation is the key problem for Ethiopian smallholders. The process could deliver long-term sustainability for smallholders and the landscape.

Opportunities to incrementally increase farm sizes are needed, as are opportunities to exit farming and enter urban service economies (Bennett and Alemie, 2015). Determination of the conditions under which land consolidation can succeed is needed. Specifically, the following is needed: a comprehensive needs assessment, initial design and piloting work, a scaling and dissemination plan, and a future impact evaluation.

The project reinforces cooperation and strategic partnerships with selected countries and regions of mutual interest, in sub Saharan Africa. The project ambition, concept, objectives, and approach are built around reinforcing existing collaborations in sub Saharan Africa. To ensure wider impact, the three East African countries of Ethiopia, Kenya, and Rwanda are the focus of the work: however, the tools developed are likely to be transferrable to other parts of the continent. These countries are already the subject of multiple ongoing collaborations between Europe and sub Saharan Africa (e.g. IST-Africa): the consortium members play significant roles in many projects. For its4land, consortium members are equally drawn from sub Saharan Africa and Europe: as later demonstrated, extensive collaboration in research, education, and innovation is undertaken. In addition, project stakeholders (above and beyond those participating in the consortium) are drawn from public sector, private sector, civil society, and academia. The project aligns with Living Labs methodologies, and the work packages provide excellent opportunity for aligning, or outright linkage, to existing East African Living Labs activities and workshops (e.g. in Ethiopia).

The project is ICT-based. It instigates a set of collaborative work packages based around emerging ICTs: UAVs, smart sketchmaps, automatic feature extraction tools, and geocloud services are co-designed, adapted, integrated, demonstrated and validated, by the consortium, for the specific domain of land tenure information recording. The project is innovative. Building from the mind-set of reinforced cooperation and strategic partnership building, the project goes beyond pure R&D to ensure an innovation process is activated: technology-push meets societal-pull via the involvement, interaction, and participation of actors from private sector, public sector, civil society, and academia – across two continents. The developed suite of technologies, for land tenure recording, will be scalable and implementable: two innovative work packages on governance models and business models ensure the latter is achieved. The project responds to contemporary end-user needs. Land administration systems, the technologies and processes that maintain information about people, land, and tenures, are recognized as a crucial tool for delivering sustainable economies, environments, and social cohesion (Williamson et al, 2010). The sentiment is a corner-stone of modern development cooperation activities between the EU and sub Saharan Africa: it is the focus of many projects, intended to support fair investment, as recently championed by Mrs Lillian Ploumen, Dutch Minister for Foreign Trade and Development Cooperation3. However, only around 30-50 countries maintain complete land tenure administration systems: roughly 75% of the global population does not have access to formal land tenure security (Roberge, 2012). This means approximately 4 billion of the world’s 6 billion land interests are not recorded or known by governments (Zevenbergen et al., 2013). Many of these are found in sub Saharan Africa, including East Africa, where systems are in various states of development or decay. Using current approaches and at current rates, it will take decades, if not centuries to deliver adequate coverage. Therefore, there is a need and opportunity to develop new approaches that are faster, cheaper, and more fit-for-purpose for public sector, private sector, and civil society end-users and that also take into account diverse tenure contexts in sub Saharan Africa (e.g. communal and customary lands rights). In this project, these end-user needs and subsequent market opportunities drive the work. Whilst some needs are already identified, they are further crystallized in the opening phase of the project: requirements and readiness are assessed via a comprehensive multi-sector, multi-layered data collection across the three countries with a specific focus on stakeholders on land tenure recording in each country.