Table of Contents
Spatial Collective in Kenya
Where do we stand going into 2019? What do these advancements mean for community land mapping? In a previous article,1 we covered the MAST mobile mapping app used by USAID to record communal land rights in Africa beginning in 2014. Now we present a more recent example. In 2017, Spatial Collective conducted a study to assess whether current mobile GNSS technologies and community mapping techniques could meet surveying standards in Kenya. Their methodology, reproduced from their report Putting Community and Rights on the Map in Southern Kenya, is below.
Box 1
Methodology of Spatial Collective Initiative in Kenya
From Putting Community and Rights on the Map in Southern Kenya2
- The idea of communities demarcating their own land is predicated on a series of assumptions:
- Cheap and widely available tools that can be used for land demarcation exist.
- These tools can reach the demarcation threshold required by the Kenyan government in terms of accuracy and attribution.
- The communities, using these tools, can replicate the work of a professional surveyor.
- To test these assumptions, we conducted a series of experiments in Taita Hills, Taita Taveta County:
- We examined the process of demarcating land both for new grants and for subdivision of land. Specifically, we focused on the accuracy and attribution of spatial data required by the professional surveyor and government offices.
- We tested a series of affordable and ubiquitous technologies for capture and demarcation of land to see whether they achieve the thresholds required. We tested these tools under varying environmental conditions to see how they affect the measurements.
- Finally, we assessed whether communities can replicate the demarcation of land by the professional surveyor using these tools.
Their Findings
Spatial Collective found that current mobile devices were not accurate enough to meet the three to four centimeter survey requirements for demarcation of fixed boundaries, but were able to meet the much less stringent requirements (up to three meters) for general boundaries in rural surveying. They also found that the field performance of the smartphones they tested was not constrained by network availability. Access to mobile data had no impact on accuracy, while environmental factors like tree cover had a major impact.
The handheld Bad Elf and Garmin GPS units were far more accurate than the mobile phones, but as single-purpose devices they did not share the phones’ usefulness in gathering attribute and ownership data. The same can be said of any single-purpose device, even the $30,000 Leica survey receiver used as a control.
The report emphasizes that community mapping is not just about geospatial data. Additional information must be gathered (e.g. to tie occupants to properties and demonstrate agreement over boundaries). Processes might include taking photos or videos of neighbors agreeing to a boundary between their properties, or filling out and storing digital forms. Smartphones, increasingly prevalent in the developing world, are the best candidate for an accessible, low-cost platform to perform all of these functions. The report identifies bottlenecks and how they can be addressed using the affordable mapping tools tests, which are reproduced below.
Box 2
Bottlenecks and Related Solutions from Spatial Collective Initiative in Kenya
From Putting Community and Rights on the Map in Southern Kenya3
1) Lack of affordable tools.
The tools are widely available, affordable, and easy to use by communities.
2) Local communities have no access to information.
With these tools, information can be easily collected, stored and shared.
3) Local communities are not able to value their land.
Applications can be built to streamline the valuation of land based on the data input.
4) The registration process is unclear or unknown to the communities.
The tools can be used for information sharing.
5) The relationships between Kenyan national, community and individuals in terms of property rights is difficult for communities to comprehend.
This is a systemic issue that the tools cannot address on their own.
6) Antiquated procedures sustained through inertia in the titling process and an inability to explore, let alone adopt new technologies to replace old methods.
This is still an issue in Kenya, however, the tools provide for an excellent alternative to the current system of paper based data storing, etc.
7) Technical tools used to capture vital information on mapping are often too expensive, difficult to operate, rely solely on connectivity, and require extensive training/maintenance and complex processing solutions. In some cases the skills needed to record information accurately often built up over many years of experience including formal qualifications.
Training is relatively simple and most processes repeatable to a satisfactory standard, and the possibility of having units available at sub-county level that can be rented out to communities makes it cost effective and affordable.
Several of these bottlenecks (1, 6, and 7) can be addressed directly by high-accuracy GNSS smartphones. For others (2 and 4), smartphones can help to improve information access and sharing, though this is dependent to a great extent on the degree of device ownership and network connectivity. Systemic and legal obstacles remain and, as the report notes, are issues that “tools cannot address on their own.”4
The greatest missing element which has prevented a single-device solution for geospatial and attribute data collection is GNSS accuracy. Adding this capability to smartphones can help consolidate both device functions and data collection roles. Trusted members of the community will be able to gather geospatial and attribute data. The collection of this attribute data introduces privacy concerns, especially when it comes to storage and sharing. Fortunately, with the right software, smartphones also provide a platform for secure data handling. Once high-accuracy GNSS becomes standard in smartphones, they will become the best tool for most mapping applications.
Citations
- See Graglia and Mellon, “A Mobile Application to Secure Land Tenure” in appendices.
- Putting Community and Rights on the Map in Southern Kenya, Spatial Collective Limited, April 2018, accessed November 7, 2018, 9.
- Ibid., 33.
- Ibid.