English - EMRC

Mapping Africa to unlock wealth
Infoterra is a leading provider of geo-information products and services, which have become
vital for managing the world’s environment, development and security. The Infoterra Group has
approximately 300 employees in the UK, France, Germany and Hungary and an extensive network
of partners covering all five continents.
”
What we are looking to achieve
using geospatial mapping, is
to unlock Africa’s wealth”,
says Simon Ashby, Principal
Consultant with Infoterra. He goes on to explain
that security of land ownership is key
to development, while reliable mapping is a
prerequisite to land and property registration
and ownership.
The total landmass of Africa is 30.3 million
square kilometers while, by contrast,
Argentina, India, China, Western Europe
and the USA, together make up 28.8 million
square kilometers. Meanwhile, the
maps of Africa are completely out of
date, going back to Colonial times. For
instance, the massive urbanisation, which
has taken place in recent decades, has remained
essentially unrecorded.
Geospatial mapping, a digital technology,
which provides detailed and reliable spatial
data, is the 21st century’s answer to
those old fashioned, hand drawn maps to
be found in antique shops.
Raw data, such as accurate land statistics and
infrastructure, is transformed into business
information for the benefit of both the public
and private sectors. The examples of areas of
application of this technology are impressive:
improved land, water and forest management,
biodiversity and conservation,
determining crop prospects and desertification
risks, alerts on natural disasters,
communication network planning
(roads, railways, electricity, telecom…),
establishing accurate topology such as
building heights, etc.
The technology of geospatial mapping
is already being considered and implemented
in a number of developing
countries in Eastern Europe, such as Bulgaria,
Romania, the Balkans, Macedonia and Kosovo
– in particular to settle land ownership issues
exacerbated by the fact that many records
of ownership were lost or destroyed during recent
conflicts.
Today national spatial frameworks can be
created and constantly modified to reflect
changed circumstances on the ground, such as
urbanisation. Britain has had a national mapping
agency since 1791 and, following a comprehensive
digitisation programme, resulting
in the release of Ordinance Survey’s MasterMap®
in 2001, now has one of the most
sophisticated national geographic frameworks
in the developed world.
Infoterra’s online spatial application supporting a
Land Administration business process
The MasterMap® references over 440 million
natural and manmade landscape features
to which 5,000 changes are made daily. This
is an example of what is technically possible,
provided the political will is there and the finances
allocated.
The technology of
geospatial mapping is
already being considered and
implemented in a number
of developing countries in
Eastern Europe
“The challenge we face is implementation”,
says Ashby. In 2006 the Africa Land Policy
workshop in Kampala recognised that implementation
was far from straight forward.
A policy document has been drawn up, but it
must be translated into a comprehensive programme
of land sector reform. “Governments
need to give the concessions to implement the
available technology and investment banks
should provide the funding”, says Ashby.
Population drift to the cities increases informal
land tenure systems, which in turn, increase
slums. Approximately 70% of African
land is managed informally, with profound
consequences on sanitation, water and access.
Such un-formalised rural, peri-urban and urban
tenures affect the poorest people.
Since they do not formally own the
land, they have no rights on it nor incentives
to develop it.
Currently countries that have recognised
the importance of land administration
are trying to develop individual
approaches, but this is not cost
effective. Therefore, the Land Administration
Retreat hosted in November
2007 by the World Bank in Washington
and attended by several UN agencies,
recommended the establishment
of universal principles and standards.
It was also recommended that the importance
of technology for good governance
should be recognised and that
countries should be identified for case studies.
Subsequently, the Land Registrars Expert
Group Meeting in Nairobi, highlighted the
value of communicating with Land Registrars.
These a-political civil servants are responsible
for registering land tenure.
“Typically, registration of property will
take 400 days in, for instance, Nigeria.
Reducing this procedure to a tenth of
this, for instance by establishing a state
data-base to support registrations, would
be an enormous incentive for development.
Once people have secure ownership
of their land, they will then feel
safe to perhaps purchase their neighbor’s
land, allowing the neighbor to pursue
another profession or trade, to which they are
perhaps better suited” says Ashby. “Needless
to say, such a data-base would also be of great
help in land feuds and in preventing corruption.
The African Union is very interested in
the potential of geospatial systems and, fortunately,
some African countries are moving in
the right direction”. ■
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