Appendix: Background Research for This Report

The following appendices consist of lightly edited earlier writing related to the report. In addition to providing greater detail on the evolution of GNSS and mobile mapping, these articles introduce and explore in simple terms the technical concepts referenced in the report.

The pieces are the following:

• “Peering into the Future: How Dual-Frequency Receivers Will Democratize Land Surveying,” by Michael Graglia and Christopher Mellon (March 23, 2017).
• “The Price of Precision: How Autonomous Vehicles Will Drive Down the Cost of Dual-Frequency Receivers,” by Michael Graglia and Christopher Mellon (June 20, 2017).
• “A Mobile Application to Secure Land Tenure,” by Michael Graglia and Christopher Mellon (August 3, 2017).
• “Arrival of the Future: Dual Frequency Satellite Receivers, Smartphones, and Property Rights,” by Christopher Mellon (July 10, 2018).

By Michael Graglia and Christopher Mellon

This post originally appeared in the Future of Property Rights blog here.

March 23, 2017

Drawing Lines

Across the developing world nearly a billion people live without legal title to their land. In order to formalize this property, governments need to issue deeds and create registries in which to record them. But unlike other types of property, parcels of land cannot be registered until they have been defined. Delineating one person’s property from another’s is a serious technical challenge and a prerequisite for granting secure legal titles.

Precise surveying is expensive, requiring specialized equipment operated by professional surveyors. This means that precision is often inaccessible to people in the marginalized populations who most require it.

When professional surveyors are asked to compromise on price, the accuracy of the service they provide also becomes subject to compromise. Walter Volkmann, a third-generation land surveyor and president of Micro Aerial Projects L.L.C.,¹ saw firsthand how one such negotiation combined with the politics of apartheid to jeopardize formalization efforts in Namibia in the 1980s:

In the late 1970s South Africa decided to no longer rule Namibia, formerly known as South West Africa, as a fifth South African province. Instead it began to follow a policy in terms of which Namibia would gradually be granted administrative autonomy until it would ultimately gain full independence from South Africa. In 1978 the first “one man, one vote” elections were held. Although boycotted by SWAPO, a major anti-apartheid movement, the newly elected “Government of National Unity” decided to extend the right to formally own land in the then racially segregated urban areas to all people, irrespective of skin color. For this purpose, the so-called “locations,” townships which were developed and reserved exclusively for the housing of non-white citizens under South African apartheid policy, had to be surveyed and registered in the Deeds Registry. My entry into the land surveying profession fell into that period in the early 1980s when the large volume cadastral surveys of the so-called “locations” were being rolled out. While the small number of professional land surveyors were welcoming this sudden abundance of work, the government was of course facing the challenge of funding these surveys. And, as so often happens when budgets are being discussed for survey work, an attempt was made to negotiate a reduction in fees in exchange for a relaxation in the prescribed accuracy standards. Given the prevailing technology at that time, accuracy standards were indeed a legitimate factor in the cost of cadastral surveying. One could argue that lower fees would result in the survey of a larger number of properties and thereby facilitate formal ownership for more people than would otherwise have been the case. However, this would result in the absurd reality that although formal ownership of land would be made possible for all citizens irrespective of race, an ugly residual of racial prejudice would remain: your skin color would determine the accuracy to which your property was surveyed and thus the security of your title. In the end both parties agreed on reduced fees for the survey of formerly “black townships” without compromising accuracy standards. Although the introduction of the term “black township” in the text of the cadastral survey legislation is not exactly indiscriminate, it certainly is less detrimental and offensive than granting inferior security of title to formerly disadvantaged citizens. And, rather happily, the discriminatory language has long since vanished from the regulatory texts as now all formal townships in Namibia enjoy a homogeneous standard of accuracy and hence security of title.²

Subsequent advances in global navigation satellite system (GNSS) technology³ have weakened the correlation between precision and cost, but survey-grade accuracy is not yet widely and cheaply available.

Widespread access to this level of accuracy is critical for formalization efforts because expense is not the only problem with depending on professional surveyors to document the world’s informal property. There is a more fundamental problem of scale. A significant percentage of all land in the developing world is informally owned. There is simply not enough time for professional surveyors to register it all.

According to the Cadasta Foundation, there are fewer than two professional surveyors per 10,000 square kilometers of land in the Ivory Coast and Tanzania, compared to 41 per 10,000 square kilometers in the United States.⁴

There were only 74 registered land surveyors in Uganda in 2015⁵ and an estimated 15 million parcels of informally owned land. With more than 200,000 parcels per registered surveyor, Cadasta calculates that it would take them over a thousand years to finish the job.⁶

When everyone has access to survey-grade precision, formalization efforts can be expanded and accelerated. With the advent of relatively cheap, dual-frequency satellite receivers, this may soon become possible.

Dual-Frequency Receivers⁷

Position measurements using a single frequency are vulnerable to interference and accurate, at best, to about five meters.⁸ This is fine for most people’s daily use, and in developed areas Wi-Fi signals can be used to augment accuracy. All smartphones, for example, use single-frequency receivers. But errors on the scale of meters are not good enough for survey work, which should be accurate to the one to ten centimeter range, depending on local standards and the type of survey.

By making use of a second signal frequency, dual-frequency receivers can correct for delays caused by the ionosphere, which are the greatest single contributor to inaccuracy.⁹ Using a second frequency also provides greater signal redundancy, allowing for better error-correction and improved satellite availability in tree cover and urban canyons. With error-checking algorithms that can identify faulty satellite signals, dual-frequency receivers produce measurements that are not only accurate but trustworthy. This last property is important when it comes to registering land, as it allows the authorities validating title claims to have confidence in the integrity of the data they are given. Dual-frequency receivers also resolve positions more quickly than single-frequency receivers, so the surveyor does not have to wait as long on a reference point acquiring multiple satellites.

Using free, open-source signal processing software,¹⁰ dual-frequency receivers can achieve survey-grade accuracy. The downside of dual-frequency receivers is the cost of the hardware. In 2013, a $2,500 dual-frequency receiver could be described as “incredibly inexpensive.”¹¹

Two things need to happen in order for hardware prices to continue to drop: the deployment of large numbers of satellites operating civilian signals on at least two different frequencies, and a large, competitive market for survey-grade receivers. It appears that both of these conditions will be met in the near future.

Open Signals

When the U.S. launched the first navigational satellite constellation, GPS, it broadcast signals on two main frequencies. The first signal, called L1 (1575.42 MHz), was intentionally degraded, limiting the accuracy of the single-frequency receivers that used it to around 100 meters.¹² The second signal, L2 (1227.60MHz), was available only to authorized users, like the U.S. military, who were issued encryption keys. This policy prevented civilians and foreign governments alike from getting precise GPS coordinates without ground-based augmentation systems. This policy was eventually reversed,¹³ but not before a few civilian companies figured out how to use the L2 signal without an encryption key and patented the techniques.¹⁴ Until a second civilian signal becomes available to replace L2, these patents will continue to restrict competition in the development of dual-frequency receivers.

In 2013 the governments of the United States and the United Kingdom announced their commitment to “ensuring that GPS civil signals will remain perpetually free and openly available for users worldwide,” agreeing to place all technical information and intellectual property relating to civil GPS signals in the public domain.¹⁵ Manufacturers will be able to patent specific receiver designs, but not techniques needed to track the signals themselves, like the patents filed on the L2 signal. A U.S. Department of State document from September 2013 notes that this commitment to open signals is intended in part to promote “open, market-driven competition” and “equal access for user equipment manufacturing.”¹⁶

One of these new, open signals, the L5 (1176.45 MHz) signal,¹⁷ is the best candidate to replace L2 for dual-frequency use. L5 is the most advanced civilian signal, designed for “safety-of-life transportation and other high-performance applications.”¹⁸ An open GPS signal called L2C (1227 MHz) is being introduced to replace the L2 signal, but it will be used by fewer satellites and the U.S. government may not continue to support it once the L5 constellation is complete.¹⁹ Survey-grade receivers need to be able to see at least eight satellites to function optimally, making the L5 signal, which is more powerful than L2C and will be used by multiple satellite constellations, a better option.²⁰ A modernized American GPS constellation broadcasting both L1 and L5 from its newer Block IIF and Block III satellites is scheduled to be completed by 2024. The European Union’s Galileo constellation is deploying satellites with the interoperable E5 signal, meaning that a full complement of 24 L5/E5 satellites will be available before either constellation is completed individually. Multi-constellation receivers that can also use Russia’s GLONASS and China’s BeiDou satellites in addition to GPS and Galileo could eventually have access to more than 100 satellites.²¹

New Markets

Recent technological advances are creating huge new markets for accurate GNSS receivers.

Autonomous vehicles, from tractors²² to taxis,²³ are poised for massive growth²⁴ and will require more accurate and reliable GNSS receivers for both functionality and safety purposes.²⁵ Single-frequency receivers can also achieve very high accuracy with augmentation, but the inherent accuracy and integrity offered by dual-frequency receivers makes them more attractive for safety applications.

Aerial drones,²⁶ used for everything from oil and gas exploration to grocery delivery,²⁷ will benefit from increased accuracy in vertical positioning.

Commercial aircraft will be able to use dual-frequency L1/L5 receivers for navigation and safety-of-life applications.²⁸

The average smartphone user will appreciate more accurate location services for navigation, fitness apps, even virtual reality.²⁹

Manufacturers are already developing dual-frequency receivers for these markets. Broadcom, for example, which manufactures GNSS chips for smartphone giants like Apple and Samsung, revealed in 2016 that it was testing a dual-frequency chip for cell phones.³⁰

Future Developments

Survey-grade GNSS receivers will continue to shrink, become cheaper, and may eventually be digitized altogether. A software-defined receiver (SDR) like the Trimble Catalyst³¹ can transform an Android phone into a dual-frequency receiver with a software download and a plug-in antenna. The Catalyst requires a monthly subscription to Trimble’s augmentation services and accuracy is pay-as-you-go, with meter accuracy priced at $40 per month, and centimeter precision at $350 per month.³²

But devices with open-source SDR and post-processing software could reduce the total user cost to the price of the antenna. As long as it had enough processing power, an SDR device could be updated to support additional constellations and signals without any hardware development costs.

Antennas for surveying receivers currently cost a few hundred dollars and are fairly large. They must be shielded from reflected signals, especially those bouncing off the ground, and usually have a plate around ten centimeters in diameter built into the bottom of the antenna.

New methods of compensating mathematically for these reflected signals promise survey-grade precision with antennas small enough to fit in a smartphone.³³ A team at the University of Texas, working with Samsung, is using these techniques to achieve centimeter precision with $5 antennas similar to those currently found in smartphones. They estimate that their system, consisting of an SDR and antenna, will “eventually cost less than $50.”³⁴

The hardware component of the Trimble Catalyst, introduced in November 2016,³⁵ costs $350,³⁶ seven times less than the “incredibly inexpensive” X90-OPUS introduced in 2013. With increased competition among manufacturers and increased demand, prices will only continue to drop. It is hard to predict how far, but the fact that a major chip-maker like Broadcom is experimenting with dual-frequency chips in cellphones is telling. Apple is unlikely to accept adding hundreds of dollars to the price of an iPhone for a dual-frequency receiver and antenna.

What Will This Mean for the Various Stakeholders in Property Formalization Efforts?

For governments and aid agencies, it will be easier and cheaper to organize large-scale formalization efforts when surveying is decentralized and pushed down to the local level. The government’s focus will move to providing the legal staff and registry system needed to validate and record property claims.

Crowd-sourced surveying will allow more property to be registered more quickly. The more complete a land registry is, the more useful it is to government officials managing land use, natural resources, and public utilities.

NGOs will also be able to expand their formalization programs thanks to reduced equipment and personnel costs. As data collection becomes easier and cheaper, they may dedicate more resources to addressing governance issues and bureaucratic obstacles that threaten to negate the positive effects of formalization.

Occupants will benefit the most from the democratization of surveying. In areas where the nature of customary ownership or usage does not translate easily into a formal cadastral system (as with shared lands with communal rights or lands used by different parties according to an annual cycle) land use arrangements decided at the local level are preferable.

Cheaper surveying should allow for the reduction of property registration fees, which currently discourage many small landowners from participating in formalization programs. According to the World Bank, registering property in sub-Saharan Africa costs, on average, eight percent of the value of the registered property.³⁷

For professional surveyors, documenting informal property is time-consuming and not especially profitable. When the task of data collection is crowdsourced, they will be free to focus on more demanding work which requires expertise in managing and analyzing geospatial data. This will include designing and supervising crowdsourced data collection projects.

By Michael Graglia and Christopher Mellon

This post originally appeared in the Future of Property Rights blog here.

June 20, 2017

Executive Summary: Investment in autonomous vehicles will reduce the cost of dual-frequency GNSS receivers by a factor of ten within the next five years.

In a previous article³⁸ we argued that the price of dual-frequency satellite receivers is poised to fall precipitously with the advent of new satellite navigation signals and new markets. We discussed the dynamics driving this process and its implications for the democratization of land surveying, but we did not quantify this price reduction or say when these new, cheaper devices would be available. In this article we address those questions in detail by looking at the projections that government agencies, think tanks, and market analysts have made regarding the development of dual-frequency satellite receivers for the transportation market. There is a widespread expectation that autonomous vehicles will become the first mass market application for dual-frequency GNSS receivers. The vehicle market is best positioned to adopt this technology both because it has the most pressing need and because it is not limited by the energy consumption, processing power, and miniaturization concerns that restrict the use of dual-frequency in drones, wearables, and cell phones. We anticipate that the mass production of dual-frequency receivers for the vehicle market will reduce their price by a factor of ten within the next five years.

The Race Towards Automation

There is no consensus on when fully autonomous vehicles will become common. A May 2017 report from the independent technology think tank RethinkX, entitled Rethinking Transportation 2020-2030, projects an exponential adoption curve that will result in 95 percent of U.S. passenger miles being served by on-demand autonomous vehicles by 2030.³⁹ Their conclusion, premised on economic feedback loops making individually owned cars prohibitively expensive compared to Transportation-as-a-Service,⁴⁰ is far more optimistic than most other estimates.⁴¹ Market reports from business consultancies, while more cautious, still project rapid growth. PwC said in its Connected Car Study 2015 that “fully autonomous long-range driving at highway speeds [is] expected between 2020 and 2025.”⁴² McKinsey’s Automotive revolution – perspective towards 2030, concludes that anywhere between 15 and 50 percent of cars will be highly autonomous in 2030, depending on the degree of market disruption.⁴³

Car manufacturers, tech companies, and ride-sharing services such as General Motors, Renault-Nissan, Daimler, Volkswagen,⁴⁴ Waymo,⁴⁵ and Tesla⁴⁶ are all working towards fully autonomous vehicles. Uber⁴⁷ and Ford⁴⁸ have announced plans to put highly or fully autonomous cars on the road in high volume by 2021. As a result, enabling technologies are receiving significant levels of investment, both because they improve human-driven connected cars and because they are a prerequisite for autonomous vehicles.⁴⁹

This is particularly true of technologies like dual-frequency GNSS that increase safety. In the words of Craig Giffi, leader of Deloitte LLP’s U.S. automotive practice: “to win consumers’ trust, automakers will need to integrate limited self-driving and advanced safety features into new product offerings steadily over time to introduce people to the technology, demonstrate the improvement in vehicle safety and develop a proven track record.” Autonomy is simultaneously appealing and frightening to consumers, who are enthusiastic about the potential of Transportation-as-a-Service to reduce travel costs, pollution, and urban congestion, but will be reluctant to adopt it until they are absolutely convinced it is safe.⁵⁰ Autonomous vehicles have the potential to greatly reduce road fatalities, but consumers fear the loss of control and are likely to judge them by a more critical standard than human-operated vehicles.⁵¹ More people are afraid of commercial air travel than of driving despite the fact that flying is statistically much safer.⁵² The confidence of regulators and investors is as critical as the confidence of potential users. PwC notes that in the scramble to control the emerging connected and autonomous car market, “no one will win…if security concerns undermine consumers’ trust in connected car technology.”⁵³

Why is Dual-Frequency Important for Autonomous Vehicle Safety?

Unlike the current generation of in-dash and phone-based car navigation systems, which only use a single frequency, GNSS systems used for autonomous vehicle navigation must employ at least two frequencies to achieve the highest safety standards, which mandate higher accuracy and signal integrity than single-frequency can provide. As the European GNSS Agency noted succinctly in its 2016 GNSS User Technology Report: “For safety-critical applications, where redundancy and resistance to jamming is important, dual-frequency (L1/E1 + L5/E5) is undoubtedly the best choice.”⁵⁴ The greater integrity⁵⁵ possible with dual-frequency allows a navigation system to detect when the navigation signal includes errors outside of a given confidence range and take appropriate action. In most cases, this simply means excluding any faulty data from the position calculation.

Dual-frequency also allows for greater positional accuracy and, crucially, is much quicker to resolve “integer ambiguities” when it has to re-initialize because the signal is interrupted. This means that if a car goes through a tunnel or loses sight of satellites in an “urban canyon” it can re-establish an accurate position fix in a matter of seconds once the satellites are back in view. Since highly urban areas will be the primary market for autonomous vehicles, this is a serious advantage.

New augmented single-frequency receivers—more advanced versions of what you have in your car today—can match the positioning accuracy of dual-frequency receivers under certain conditions, but dual-frequency options are superior because of their greater integrity and the fact that they are not dependent on augmentation from a local network of ground-based reference stations.⁵⁶ As the 2017 GSA GNSS Market Report says, “It is clear that autonomous driving technology requires highly accurate position and navigation in all scenarios. This means 100 percent position availability at decimeter level or less, anywhere, anytime and under any condition.”⁵⁷ The report points out that this is only achievable through the integration of a variety of sensor types, but given the stringency of this requirement, the only reason for a manufacturer to prefer a single-frequency receiver would be the reduced cost.⁵⁸

Liability

Single-frequency receivers may be cheaper for autonomous vehicle manufacturers in the short term, but skimping on safety-critical technology could be a serious risk. A 2017 Mobile World Live survey found that “only 5.5% of respondents felt the vehicle owner was liable for connected car security, suggesting that security will continue to be the responsibility of vendors and service providers rather than the users themselves.”⁵⁹ Every precaution will have to be taken to protect vehicle manufacturers and operators from liability and to protect user confidence in the safety of autonomous transportation services. Investors and adopters alike will be very sensitive to these concerns, and it will be well worth the additional investment in the safest guidance systems. GNSS will be a part of that investment, integrated into sensor packages including lidar, radar, and cameras.

The increased accuracy and integrity provided by precision GNSS will have important financial implications beyond consumer confidence and injury liability, as insurance and ride fees move to usage-based models.⁶⁰ Many other location-based services, including tolling, weather updates, traffic information, parking availability, and stolen vehicle recovery, also stand to benefit.

It must also be noted that autonomous and connected cars will provide a massive new target for cybercriminals to steal, hijack,⁶¹ or crash by spoofing guidance signals.⁶² Dual-frequency signals are harder to spoof than single-frequency and also more resistant to jamming and other interference. This is due in part to the increased complexity of simulating multiple signals and partly due to simple redundancy. Starting in 2018, the new European Galileo constellation will also help guard against spoofing by broadcasting an authentication signal on a separate frequency.⁶³

Price Reductions

A 2016 market report from ABI Research, entitled Low-Cost Precision GNSS Receivers, estimates that dual-frequency receivers will be available for $50 per unit by 2021.⁶⁴ This is consistent with the recent trends in price reduction and mirrors the autonomous vehicle deployment timelines put forward by Uber and Ford. It is also consistent with the forecast of the GSA, which said in 2015 that it expected “low-cost, multi-frequency chipset/receivers to appear on the market in the next few years” driven by “automotive and other machine-to-machine applications.”⁶⁵ Dual-frequency surveying units traditionally cost upwards of $5,000, but the new, more affordable receivers now available from companies like SwiftNav cost about $600.⁶⁶ Another roughly similar decrease to $50 seems plausible as dual-frequency receivers change from specialist, low-volume products to mass-produced car components.

There is no reason to believe that the price reductions will stop there. Many of the top chipset manufacturers are investing in dual-frequency systems for both mobile devices and wearables. Their biggest clients, cell phone manufacturers, are not interested in adding $50 to the cost of a phone for improved location services. One startup in Poland, ChipCraft, is developing a multi-constellation, dual-frequency system-on-a-chip with an integrated antenna that they project will cost only $10 per unit.⁶⁷ That project is a long way from completion, but it is a clear indication of the direction that receiver development is heading. As ABI principal analyst Patrick Connolly has said, “As the receivers’ unit price drops below $50, we expect to see a market develop for location technology services, such as artificial reality and head-up displays in higher-end vehicles.”⁶⁸ As the entry price for the adoption of the technology is lowered, more and more developers and users can be expected to embrace it for an increasing number of applications, including crowdsourced surveying.

Implications for Surveying

In the next five to ten years there will be massive new scaling opportunities for organizations who crowdsource surveying. Together with already available open-source post-processing software,⁶⁹ $50 dual-frequency receivers would allow parcels to be surveyed with decimeter accuracy—even without any supporting augmentation infrastructure—for a fraction of the current equipment cost. Where satellite-based augmentation or geodetic control points are available, accuracy down to the one centimeter level will be possible.

The rapid initialization and signal acquisition of dual-frequency—which allow parcels to be surveyed more quickly—may be an even more important long-term advantage than reduced equipment costs, which are amortized over long periods when surveying at scale. The speed of surveying can be further enhanced with the use of unmanned aerial vehicles. Drones equipped with cameras and dual-frequency receivers can rapidly create maps of land parcels. The V-Map system, from Micro Aerial Projects L.L.C., uses a dual-frequency receiver to record the drone’s location each time the onboard camera takes a picture.⁷⁰ Linking 2D images to precise GPS coordinates enables the system to use a technique called “Structure from Motion”⁷¹ to create a detailed 3D map of the surveyed area without the use of ground control points. In March 2017, V-Map receivers were certified to meet the international accuracy standards for first order geodetic control positioning by the National Mapping and Resource Information Authority of the Philippines.⁷² (Full disclosure: Walter Volkmann, the President of Micro Aerial Projects L.L.C., served as a technical advisor for this article.)

Crowdsourced surveying is already being conducted in some areas. Through funding from the United States Agency for International Development, citizens of rural African nations are using the Mobile Application to Secure Tenure (MAST) smartphone application⁷³ to record formal land holdings.⁷⁴ MAST was launched in Tanzania in 2015, expanded to Zambia in 2016, and is being rolled out in Burkina Faso. MAST uses GPS in existing cellphones that is only accurate to a few meters, supplementing this GPS data with satellite imagery. Once dual-frequency receivers are widely affordable, programs like MAST will become feasible in countries, like Jamaica, where there is a legal requirement for higher accuracy, as well as in urban and peri-urban settings where greater property density and property value demand increased accuracy and resistance to interference.

Even as hardware costs are reduced, challenges to property rights formalization will remain. It will still be resource intensive and regulations must evolve to allow for these technologies. Governments must be convinced of the trustworthiness of crowdsourced survey data. In most jurisdictions, laws require that surveying is conducted only by licensed surveyors. Crowdsourced data cannot be used to register land no matter how accurate it is. We believe, however, that as the quality of crowdsourced data converges with professional survey standards these policies will change despite resistance from entrenched interests. When trust can be placed in the integrity of the data rather than that of the operator, the argument for restricting surveying services to licensed professionals will be weakened significantly.

More accurate surveys will also help avoid problems down the line when the formalized land is bought, sold, or inherited. When conflicts arise between owners who were not party to the original, mutually-recognized boundaries, inaccurately surveyed land can lead to costly disputes. In such cases, there would be a real risk of deformalization. If a land title is less secure it is less valuable, and there is less incentive to keep an insecure parcel registered.

As we previously noted, there are not enough professional surveyors in developing countries to help formalize all the land that needs attention. Only crowdsourced surveying, enabled by tools like dual-frequency receivers and programs like MAST, can bring about significant progress. The potentially transformative impact of these technologies is hard to overstate, and increasingly hard to overlook. The GSA’s May 2017 summary of emerging trends in the GNSS surveying market begins simply: “falling device prices drive the democratization of mapping.”⁷⁵

By Michael Graglia and Christopher Mellon

This post originally appeared in the Future of Property Rights blog here.

August 3, 2017

The Future of Property Rights initiative believes that property rights matter and that technology can play a critical role in helping countries accelerate the pace of property rights formalization while simultaneously reducing costs.⁷⁶

We analyze multiple technologies, looking at the tools that are currently in use, the established technologies that could replace them, and the emerging technologies we believe will be used in the future.⁷⁷ We are in the process of doing this for each essential task—from mapping to database management—required for property rights formalization and land administration.

For the task of demarcating informal lands, for example, the prevalent solution is to contract professional surveyors who use expensive tools. A widely available and more cost effective technology which could be used instead is a GPS-enabled smartphone coupled with cloud-based data processing, and the technology we can see improving land demarcation in the immediate future is dual-band GPS,⁷⁸ paired with either smartphones or drones⁷⁹ to create ortho-maps.⁸⁰

Cadasta illustrates the inadequacy of professional surveying for property formalization in emerging economies with a compelling infographic.⁸¹ They argue that given the scarcity of professional surveyors in the developing world, “documenting land rights through traditional methods [surveying] will take generations.” In Uganda, for example, they estimate that it would take the country's “few dozen” surveyors a millennium to survey the “estimated 15 million parcels of unregistered land.” They go on to point out that Tanzania only has 1.9 surveyors per 10,000 square kilometers compared to 26 in Norway, and 41 in America.⁸² It is fair to assume that wealthy, developed countries like Norway and the U.S. have significantly less informal land. So how can countries like Uganda catch up?

There’s an App for That

As smartphones have become ubiquitous over the last decade, an ecosystem of mobile data collection apps has emerged, making the prospect of cheap, crowdsourced data collection more feasible than ever before. Most of these apps have been aimed at users in the developed world, where the use cases impose very different cost and accessibility requirements. An app that only runs on a late-model iPhone, for example, would be unsuitable for community mapping in the developing world no matter its functionality.

In her 2016 Master’s thesis, “An app for land administration: criteria, functional requirements and a prototype in Ethiopia,” Julinda Dyli of the University of Twente examined 30 of these apps for their suitability for community mapping. The two fundamental requirements she identified were that the apps must be “designed to support poor people and communities” (pro-poor) and “designed to support management of land administration systems” (fit-for-use).⁸³ Dyli breaks these two requirements down into sixteen criteria.⁸⁴ Many of these overlap, and for the sake of simplicity we will distill them down to four broad criteria:

1) Affordability

The app must be free or very inexpensive. If the purchase price or subscription fee is high, or if the app can only be run on an expensive phone, then it will not be suitable for community mapping.

2) Accessibility

The app must be simple and intuitive to use for people with limited education and literacy. If it is too complex to operate it will not fit into the sort of collaborative, inclusive methodology that is best able to guarantee fairness and transparency. The geospatial data cannot be abstract; it must be tied to a map that shows people what it corresponds to on the ground. The data produced must be in format that is easily shared and read by the different parties involved.

3) Adaptability

Different regions and jurisdictions have different requirements for land and tenure attribute information as well as GPS accuracy. The app must therefore be flexible in its ability to collect both kinds of data. It must be able to collect complex usage and tenure information across the continuum of rights.⁸⁵ The app must include forms to enter attribute data, ideally ones that can be customized without programming. Compatibility with external GPS receivers is also important for simple adaptation to regional accuracy standards.

4) Accuracy

The integrity of the information collected must be high so that everyone involved in the process, from the landholder to the government land agency, has trust in the data. The accuracy of the GPS data should be high enough to satisfy legal standards in the area where the mapping takes place, but no higher if increased accuracy will impose greater costs.

Apps designed with these criteria in mind are already being used to record property rights, notably by the USAID Mobile Application to Secure Tenure (MAST) program.

USAID – MAST

MAST is an approach that includes a participatory process for land documentation and a suite of open source⁸⁶ applications customizable for GPS-enabled smartphones and tablets. After a brief training, villagers can use the app to “map the boundaries of their land and gather the demographic and tenure information that government officials can then use to issue formal land rights documents.”⁸⁷

MAST is designed to address the social, logistical, and legal challenges of property rights formalization, not just the technical ones. At the highest level, MAST’s strategy is to engage citizens in the work of mapping, freeing up government personnel to focus on validating and registering land claims. This process starts with education and capacity building, efforts which are required to build trust in the process among everyone involved, from landholders skeptical of the value of the program to government officials skeptical of the value of community mapping. Special attention is paid to women and other vulnerable groups, ensuring they understand their rights and are empowered to exercise them.

Local committees are formed to represent the interests of customary landholders. Any disagreements that arise, such as boundary overlaps, are reviewed by these committees before being validated by government land officials.⁸⁸ USAID does not pass judgment on contested land claims, deferring instead to local authorities.⁸⁹

Landholders and their neighbors walk the boundaries of their lands and overlay the collected data onto a satellite map. In addition to capturing geospatial data, MAST allows users to record the names and photographs of landholders and document various types of property rights arrangements, such as joint holdings between a wife and husband. Critically, MAST allows data to be collected offline and uploaded to the cloud when 3G or Wi-Fi service becomes available. Without this feature it would be useless in many of the rural areas where it is most needed. Once all parties, including community, government, and traditional authorities have agreed on the accuracy of the maps and attribute data, they upload it to the cloud, where it can be accessed by land officials through a web application to be cleaned and validated.⁹⁰ By making the data and registration requests available through a browser-based platform, MAST eliminates the need to send it by mail, cutting out a major source of latency in the registration process. After processing, a cadastral map can be rendered in jurisdictions where they are used. In Burkina Faso it took three Rural Land Service officers less than two months to complete this process for 2,638 parcels, with verification taking about 30 minutes each—a dramatic increase over previous methods.⁹¹

MAST has for the most part been used to issue occupancy certificates, which recognize customary land rights. The rights afforded by these documents vary substantially, and may be communal or individual, depending on the jurisdiction.

In Tanzania, documents called Certificates of Customary Right of Occupancy (CCRO) are issued. These are not statutory freehold titles, but they can be issued to individuals as well as communities.⁹²

Burkina Faso issues a document called a Rural Land Certificate of Possession (APFR). Similar to CCROs, these can be issued to individuals, and occupy a middle ground between statutory and customary land rights.⁹³

The certificates issued in Zambia, by contrast, were both communal and customary. These certified the landholder’s right to occupy as part of a greater, communally-owned parcel, such as a village.⁹⁴

MAST was piloted in Tanzania in 2014 and later scaled up as part of a larger Feed the Future program;⁹⁵ it was rolled out in Zambia in the same year;⁹⁶ and it was brought to Burkina Faso in 2016.⁹⁷ A detailed summary of the results in each country follows, but what is most significant is that MAST was able to use smartphones, a widely available technology, to crowdsource data collection, bypassing the professional surveying bottleneck.

MAST in Tanzania

MAST debuted in Tanzania, where the government and USAID recognized that the lack of registered land was having a negative impact on the business climate, ecology, and social institutions of the country.⁹⁸ The $1 million initiative—originally called the Mobile Technology Pilot and renamed MAST⁹⁹—ran from 2014 to 2016 and was a successful proof of the crowd-sourced formalization concept, mapping land quickly with low-cost mobile technology.¹⁰⁰

Laying the groundwork for the project, the village government organized educational councils and committees to teach the community the basic land laws of Tanzania, as well as the technical and procedural details of MAST’s operation.¹⁰¹ The village government also established a special council of land dispute resolution. Groups of young people were trained to be the project’s data collectors, known as trusted intermediaries.¹⁰² Women were allotted half of the seats on the council, which performed the critical task of ruling on arguments between landholders.¹⁰³

This measure was intended to safeguard the property rights of women. Women are afforded equal property rights under national law, but are often denied these rights because of customary norms. This proved to be a successful strategy; women became proprietors of 50 percent of the newly mapped land.¹⁰⁴

The expanded MAST program resulted in CCROs being issued quickly and at low cost. The villagers were able to map nearly 1,000 parcels in less than three weeks, though it took several months for the District Land Office to issue the CCROs.¹⁰⁵

MAST in Zambia

In 2014 MAST expanded into Zambia, where there was widespread public demand for more secure property rights. One survey conducted in rural Zambia found that 91 percent of respondents “stated a desire to acquire some form of paper documentation for their land.”¹⁰⁶ According to a 2015 USAID publication, 26 percent of rural households in Zambia’s Eastern Province reported having experienced “at least one land conflict in the past three years, with the vast majority [being] over boundaries or inheritance.”¹⁰⁷

According to a Devex article on climate-smart agriculture and tenure in Zambia, this pervasive lack of formal property rights had consequences beyond the frequent land disputes: it discouraged farmers in one of Africa’s most fertile countries from investing in their own land to increase food crop yields.¹⁰⁸ Zambians needed to farm more sustainably, for example, by planting nitrogen-fixing fertilizer trees to improve crop yields,¹⁰⁹ but were afraid to do so because of the lack of formal property boundaries.

The land laws in Zambia introduced new complications for MAST. The land system in Zambia is split into parallel statutory and customary systems, which have very little interaction with one another. The customary system is informal and undocumented, while the state system is largely absent in these rural areas.¹¹⁰ In addition, the process of converting customary land to state land is irreversible under national law, which has created islands of long-abandoned but technically statutory land. According to a 2017 paper presented at the World Bank Conference on Land and Poverty, this includes “hundreds of hectares of pre-colonial farms which technically rest in the state system yet have been inhabited exclusively for decades by local communities.”¹¹¹ This introduced a risk of formalization efforts exposing customary landholders to these latent statutory claims.

An important methodological development in Zambia was the introduction of a randomized control trial evaluation to measure the program’s effectiveness.¹¹² The mapping process was otherwise similar to the one in Tanzania. It was implemented in 150 villages by a team of less than 50 people with less than three weeks training. The program issued over 6,000 customary land certificates, one-quarter of which were issued to women.¹¹³

USAID, in partnership with Tetra Tech, Terra Firma, and the Petauke District Land Alliance, is also engaged in a follow-up activity in which MAST would be brought to a larger customary territory with a diverse set of resource management challenges to be tested for scalability.¹¹⁴

MAST in Burkina Faso

Burkina Faso’s USAID MAST pilot,¹¹⁵ which began in late 2016, required a customization of the MAST-Tanzania approach and applications in order to meet the requirements of a major land reform law passed in Burkina Faso in 2009.¹¹⁶ The law was enacted in response to “pervasive and increasingly violent” land conflict, driven by a variety of factors including migration, drought, and rising demand for natural resources.¹¹⁷ The land law it replaced, the Agricultural and Land Tenure Reform law of 1984, sought to bring all customary lands under the centralized control of the national government. Though it was intended to bolster development, the law has itself been cited as a major driver of land conflict. The intent of the 2009 law was to replace this system with a more decentralized and inclusive one which would formalize customary land rights instead of excluding them from the statutory system as the old law had done. The recognition of customary rights was seen as key to ensuring equal access to agricultural land, promoting investment and productivity, reducing conflict, and promoting more sustainable resource management.

To this end, the law created a system of rural land departments and village land commissions to be responsible for land registration and management. The law also called for the technical departments of the state government to provide management and capacity building assistance to the rural land departments, and established a national fund to finance these activities.

Also introduced was a three meter accuracy requirement for rural land surveying, which necessitated the addition of external GPS receivers to the USAID MAST platform. The unit selected, the Bad Elf GPS Pro, cost about $200 per unit in Burkina Faso. These receivers were paired to the mappers’ phones by Bluetooth and powered by external batteries. Including the 32GB Android phone, the total cost of each handheld data collector was $720, still a substantial reduction in cost compared to the $3,000 sub-meter GPS unit used by the government topographer in the previous survey system. Other changes to the original mobile app, data model, workflows and server application were required, including the translation of the app into French.

As in Tanzania and Zambia, the result was a dramatic increase in the pace of mapping compared to the traditional system MAST replaced. It took less than two weeks for a dozen data collectors to map nearly 2,700 parcels. Between October 2016 and February 2017, they were able to prepare 2,638 land claims in single commune, compared to 3,706 prepared by the old mapping method in 47 communes from 2013 to 2016.¹¹⁸

The Future of MAST

In early 2017, USAID launched a new program—called Land Technology Solutions—to expand its successful Mobile Applications to Secure Tenure (MAST) initiative, designed to refine MAST and support its expansion into new countries.¹¹⁹

For now, MAST is only used in rural areas. This is due in part to high need in these areas, though MAST and similar crowdsourced mapping programs are also limited by urban accuracy requirements, which cannot be easily met with the type of GPS (single-frequency) currently available in cell phones and affordable external receivers.

Within the next five to ten years this limitation may be removed by the availability of affordable dual-frequency GPS units capable of centimeter precision in urban environments.¹²⁰ In addition to being very precise, dual-frequency GPS is easier to operate in cities, where there is more interference and lower signal availability. This gives us hope that the MAST concept can be extended to the African urban setting, where there is a pressing—and growing—need for it.

Globally, 54% of the population is already urban.¹²¹ In Africa, according to a February 2017 World Bank report, entitled Africa’s Cities: Opening Doors to the World, the urban population is expected to double over the next 25 years.¹²² This growth is making Africa’s cities increasingly critical to their countries’ economic development, but it is at risk of being derailed by unclear property rights. If this growth is to be protected, the report concludes, the first priority is to formalize land markets, clarify property rights, and institute effective urban planning that allows land to be brought together.¹²³

For more on GPS, see our articles on dual-frequency GPS and surveying¹²⁴ and the forces driving the falling price of dual-frequency hardware.¹²⁵

By Christopher Mellon

This post originally appeared in the Future of Property Rights blog here.

July 10, 2018

In 2017 we wrote a pair of blog posts¹²⁶ highlighting the arrival of new satellite technologies that offered to make high-precision location data widely and cheaply accessible for the first time with affordable dual-frequency receivers. Compared to single-frequency devices, dual-frequency receivers are more accurate, better in urban environments, and more resistant to interference, making them a powerful tool for mapping as well as for safety-critical applications like autonomous vehicle navigation.

The increasing availability and affordability of these receivers has two major causes. The first is the increasing number of satellites broadcasting a new, open navigation signal called L5 (or E5, the equivalent for the EU’s Galileo constellation) which can be used alongside the L1 signal. It is supported by all of the major constellations, including GPS, Galileo, BeiDou, QZSS, and IRNSS. Although the individual satellite constellations broadcasting this new signal have not yet been completed, as of 2017 they collectively provide enough coverage to make the L5 signal useful. Only four visible satellites are technically required for a position fix, but eight is preferable for the best service, a level of coverage that has only just become a possibility for large parts of the earth. This has helped to create a ballooning market for accurate location services, most notably for transportation, but also virtual reality and wearable medical devices.¹²⁷

In a previous article we estimated that investment in dual-frequency GNSS receivers for these mass market applications would see prices fall to $50 within five years and that this hardware would eventually appear in smartphones once battery and antenna limitations were addressed.¹²⁸ That prediction was in some ways a conservative one. In September 2017 the chip manufacturer Broadcom announced that it was releasing a dual-frequency GNSS chip for the smartphone market called the BCM47755.¹²⁹ The cost and performance of that chip were unknown, but Broadcom’s announcement that it would appear in a smartphone from a major manufacturer in 2018 signaled that a massive leap in mobile location technology was on the horizon.¹³⁰ But Broadcom did not disclose which manufacturer they were partnering with. In May 2018 the Xiaomi Mi-8 was announced as the first phone to incorporate Broadcom’s new chip.

Mi-8 Cost and Performance

The Mi-8 may have a dual-frequency GNSS chip, but location accuracy is dependent on many factors beyond the use of multiple frequencies, including the quality of the antenna and signal processing software. The company claims that the Mi-8 is capable of 30 centimeter accuracy, which would be a drastic improvement from the five meter achievable with a standard single-frequency chip. In urban settings where more signal paths are obstructed by buildings and there are many reflective surfaces, the accuracy difference will be even more pronounced, as the L5/E5 signal is designed to make it easier to identify and discard reflected signals. Anyone who has ever called an Uber in the downtown area of a major city can appreciate the difference this would make. In addition to the 16x greater accuracy, Broadcom claims the new chip actually improves battery consumption, requiring 50 percent less power than the previous generation of single-frequency chips.¹³¹

As for cost, the new chip makes no discernible contribution to the cost of the phone, which starts at a little over $400, well below the price of flagships from Apple and Samsung.¹³² In 2017 a Broadcom representative told GPS World that OEM manufacturers would probably pay the same amount for the BCM47755 that they did for the older L1-only chips.¹³³

Xiaomi has emphasized the advantages of the Mi-8’s dual-frequency receiver for in-car navigation, conducting a demonstration in which a car with blacked-out windows navigated a closed road course using only the phone GPS.¹³⁴ It is very likely that the first major impact for the consumer will be the ability to support lane-level navigation.

The real-world performance of the Mi-8 is not yet known. Some users have found that the location accuracy is no better, or even worse than that achieved with single-frequency devices in their areas.¹³⁵ This may be due to inadequate signal availability or to software issues. Daily usage and experimentation with different augmentation methods will reveal the true capabilities of the device. And while the Mi-8 does not deliver centimeter-level accuracy like a professional survey receiver, access to raw signal data means that differential techniques like RTK can be developed for Android devices.

Ecosystem

While the first appearance of a dual-frequency chip in a smartphone is a major step forward, the development of a high-precision location data ecosystem also requires software and services. The open-source Android operating system now gives developers access to raw signal data (including pseudoranges, doppler, and carrier phase) from multiple satellite constellations.¹³⁶ Organizations betting on expansion of location services are helping to promote their growth and development. In June 2017 the EU launched a GNSS Raw Measurements Task Force to “boost innovation around this new feature” and “share knowledge and expertise on Android raw measurements and its use, including its potential for high accuracy positioning techniques.”¹³⁷

Impact for Land Rights

The introduction of dual-frequency GNSS in mobile devices has enormous implications for land rights. As access to high-accuracy location data becomes ubiquitous, it will become a powerful tool for anchoring claims of occupancy and land usage.

For example, the Interethnic Association for the Development of the Peruvian Rainforest (AIDESEP) has been using drone imagery to document the encroachment of palm oil, mining, and logging companies on indigenous lands. According to an article in Fast Company, AIDESEP had previously “equipped community leaders with smartphones that allowed them to take GPS-tagged photographs of changes and infractions,” but “found that the evidence they were presenting was always questioned or pushed back on. But with drones, community leaders can present continuous footage that starts at a known location, and tracks over the site of whatever violation they’re trying to document.”¹³⁸ Dual-frequency GNSS data has higher integrity than single-frequency data, and combined with proof of location and image hashing could allow photographic or video evidence from a $400 smartphone to provide the same assurance as video from a $25,000 drone.¹³⁹

In Puerto Rico roughly half of all properties are informal. In the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, many residents of these informal communities were unable to access FEMA aid because they had no legal documentation of their ownership. This became such an obstacle to the relief efforts that FEMA began accepting affidavits as evidence of property ownership in lieu of titles.¹⁴⁰

As mobile accuracy converges towards legal surveying standards there will be greater opportunity for crowd-sourced surveying projects like USAID’s MAST¹⁴¹ to bypass the surveyor bottleneck we have described elsewhere.¹⁴² Crowdsourced data collection will not replace surveying for the time being, but it will be a powerful tool to document the property rights of vulnerable populations.