Implementing Innovative Land Tenure Tools In East-Africa: SWOT-Analysis of land governance

In developing countries, formal land administration systems and related land tenure processes are not able to keep up with the pace of development. At this contemporary land tenure recording rate, it would take centuries to deliver adequate coverage. Within this context, the its4land project aims to address the challenge of improving the formal recordation of land tenure information by producing a fit-for-purpose suite of innovative geospatial tools including small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV’s), smart sketchmaps, automated feature extraction and geocloud services that can be adopted by stakeholders in Ethiopia, Rwanda and Kenya. To ensure that these technologies can be adopted and sustained, it is crucial to examine how these innovative geospatial tools need to be governed. As a first step, this paper explores the current land governance context to identify potential implications for implementation. Specifically, the three different case countries are analysed based on five different land governance factors, namely socio-economic country context, the types of tenure that exist, the operation of current land market, land reforms and organisations that are responsible for administering and regulating land tenure. Based on these factors, the preliminary SWOT-analysis identified preliminary insight into how current land governance conditions may or may not be conducive to the introduction and implementation of the geospatial tools.status: publishe