Only around 30-50 countries maintain complete and up-to-date land tenure recording systems: 4 billion or 75% of the world’s land tenures are neither record nor secured. In sub Saharan African countries, the percentage of recorded land tenures can be as low as 3%. In Ethiopia, the majority of the population are rural dwellers (80M people): only 25% are likely to have some form of land record – and far less are spatially mapped. In Kenya, almost 10M pastoralists do not have a means for demonstrating legitimate land uses and holdings. Whilst Rwanda managed to recently map and record its 13M land parcels in around 4 years, several million records remain uncollected by smallholders. Moreover, crucial updates relating to land transactions are not being recorded into official systems. The technological approaches used in these contexts have often not been fit-for-purpose: its4land sees ICT as a solution, not the problem, and is based on the premise that emerging geoinformation technologies can rapidly expedite land tenure recording. The overarching impact will be the dissemination and scaled utilization of a suite of technologies that responds to the specific challenges mentioned above.

In terms of the impacts on the ICT-based nature of the work programme, sketchmaps: i) allow collection of land tenure information that is not accessible via orthophotos; ii) reduce the digital divide (people without access to technology can participate); and iii) provide a voice for people who have do not have cartographic expertise (language, cartographic expertise, education in general) to talk to authorities, although they are directly affected. Concerning the use of UAV this project will enable communities to produce maps for land tenure recording independently, or in collaboration with, nationwide initiatives. Current obstacles regarding regulation and (expensive) ground truthing will be addressed in this project with the aim to give clear advice for practice. The automation of image interpretation supports people in understanding the image and to delineate borders consistently (for different areas, from different times). Similar to sketchmaps this supports people who are not familiar with working on such images. Finally, geocloud services coupled with mobile mapping tools or crowdsourcing approaches enable previously unforeseen methods for rapid spatial data acquisition and validation. Along with proliferation of smart phones in sub Saharan African, its4land intends to exploit an ICT opportunity already having an impact in other domains.

its4land reinforces the innovation aspects of Horizon2020 – particularly through international cooperation and low and middle income countries. The three selected sub Saharan African countries are all low or middle income. The four technologies are primarily developments from the EU, however, their adaption to East African contexts requires local expertise and inputs: one-size-fits-all approaches rarely succeed meaning ICT programs require true internationalization activities. The project responds in this regard. The consortium is balanced with four consortium members representing each region. Importantly, private sector organizations are included in both the EU and East Africa. The project phases and associated work packages rely on a collaborative approach between consortium members and broader stakeholder groups: this is built into the project design. In addition, actor-network analysis, UAVs, smart sketchmaps, automatic feature extraction, and geocloud services are absolutely novel, or almost untested, in the land administration domain. The project is pioneering both new technologies and contextual applications. In this regard, the ICT internationalization and innovation aspects of the Horizon2020 are clearly satisfied.