Sub Saharan Africa needs to rapidly and cheaply map millions of unrecognized land rights in the region. 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: land tenure recording helps to deliver tenure security, dispute reduction, investment opportunities, and contributes to good governance. Existing recording and mapping approaches have failed: disputes abound, investment is impeded, and the community’s poorest lose out.
Geospatial technology
its4land combines an innovation process with emerging geospatial technologies, including smart sketchmaps, UAVs, automated feature extraction, and geocloud services, to deliver land recording services that are end-user responsive, market driven, and fit-for-purpose. The transdisciplinary work also develops supportive models for governance, capacity development, and business capitalization. Gender sensitive analysis and design is also incorporated. Established local, national, and international partnerships drive the project results beyond R&D into the commercial realm.
H2020 on ICT
The project receives its grant from the EU Horizon 2020-programme, more specific the ICT working programme focused on international partnership building in low and middle income countries. The work programme aims to reinforce cooperation and strategic partnerships with selected countries and regions of mutual interest, in sub Saharan Africa – by enabling collaborative, ICT-based, innovative projects that respond to end-user communities, and broader EU themes on content technologies and societal challenges.
Collaboration
Hansa Luftbild will work together with the ITC Faculty of the University of Twente, the University of Muenster (Germany), KU Leuven (Belgium), Institut d'Enseignement Superieur de Ruhengeri (Rwanda), Bahir Dar University (Ethiopia), the Technical University of Kenya (Kenya), and Esri Rwanda Ltd (Rwanda) in order to develop the land tenure tools. The company’s main contributions in the project will be a) the development of the IT platform to publish and share the data based on the Land Administration Domain Model (LADM), and b) the exploitation of the project results by developing a business model for marketing the results as products.