Recording land tenure rights using GeoODK and Cadasta Platform
Opiyo, Erick Omwandho
Pichel, Frank
Chapman, Kate
Roick, Oliver
Over 70 percent of land in Sub-Sahara Africa is not documented or included in the formal land administration systems, current requirements of land information systems has created a hindrance rather than facilitate security of land tenure. Cadasta Foundation is aiming to build “fit-for-purpose” land tools that focus on making it possible for communities, governments and non-governmental institutions to document land tenure rights, without the rigid requirement imposed by current land information systems, land tenure documenting procedures and physical boundary accuracy. “Fit-for-purpose” terminology was coined at a world bank conference, where stakeholders realized the need to come up with different approach when developing land administration systems. Cadasta platform is an open source project built on top of django. This fits well, on the requirements of a land information system that is flexibility, affordable and attainable for recording land rights. Cadasta platform extensive API and functionality allows it to be connected to GeoODK, which is essentially ODK with added functionality for mapping and spatial features. This makes GeoODK an ideal tool for participatory data collection, something that has been advocated for in “fit-for-purpose” approach to recording land rights information.
 Thanks very much. We'll appreciate everyone's patience as we work through some logistical issues. My name is Frank Pachel with Cadastra Foundation, where we're focused on property rights and how you might document the rights of those people left out of formal systems. So with that, I'm going to dive right in. And I recognize that most of you in the audience probably take property rights for granted. You know that the land you own is something the government will protect, that you can claim your right and be free to trade your property or engage in market activities. But let's take a step back and imagine that we don't all or many of us live in Europe or North America where these functioning land administration systems exist and pretend we're a resident of an informal urban slum. And this isn't an unreal proposition when you consider the fact that by the year 2020 there'll be an estimated, I think, 1.4 billion slum dwellers representing one in seven people on the face of the earth. And for most of these urban slum dwellers, property rights are not something they enjoy. So what would you do if you didn't have property rights? How would that affect your day-to-day life? So I'm just going to mention a couple of the ways this might affect us all. The first and the one that is often, most often mentioned, is the whole idea of access to credit. If you don't have a formal title, deed, lease, rental agreement, how can you leverage this asset that for many people is the most valuable asset they own. So the theory is that with a title you can buy, sell, trade. Now the reality for an urban slum or even a low-value rural property is that banks really aren't interested in collateralizing property worth a couple of thousand dollars. The cost of eviction, the cost of trying to repossess the property doesn't really make it worth it. But that said, it does provide lending institutions the confidence that you do in fact own the property, that they know where to find you in the event you default on the loan, and maybe they'll just hold on to that title or deed so you can't buy or sell or trade the property while you have a mortgage against it. Another thought is your agricultural and your business decisions. So less, of course, less relevant for the urban context, but in a rural context. Are you going to invest in irrigation? Are you going to invest in long-term, higher value crops like hardwoods? Or are you going to focus on short-term gain? And to those small businesses, are they going to invest in improving the property? Probably not. Let's think about home improvement decisions. If you're not confident the property will be yours next week, are you going to spend money on a new roof, improving a chimney, or putting down a concrete floor? Again, probably not. And it's important to realize all three of those things directly contribute to health and well-being. Now the threat of eviction. Again, without that confidence in your right to occupy the property, you're always in fear that the government might come along and evict you, that someone else might come forward with a claim to the property. And that, again, affects your day-to-day life. Are you going to leave the property unoccupied? Probably not. And that means that if you say are a two-breadwinner family, someone has to remain on the property. So one of the kids might not be getting an education because they need to be there to protect the property and potentially move things when the government comes through with evictions. Land conflicts. In emerging economies, it's not at all unusual to find that 50 to 70 percent of court cases are around land conflict. With no registry to refer to, no real property rights records, who usually wins those conflicts, those with the money to really fight them out in the courts, and those with connections? And that's to say nothing of the macroeconomic effects. You'd be hard-pressed to think of a major global conflict that didn't have a land rights component to it. Finally, I'll get to infrastructure upgrades. If you're a slum dweller without confidence that the property is yours, you're in a pretty weak position to advocate for improving the sanitation, the electricity, the water, the access roads. And if you do advocate for them and they put those in, guess what? There's probably more evictions. And government compensation in emerging economies is rare at best. And finally, your identity. If you don't have a formal property that's registered that is in your name, you probably don't have a mailing address. You probably don't have a real sense of ownership, of belonging. So property rights is really a cross-cutting issue. And when you think about it in that context, it's going to affect development writ large. Land really is a multi-dimensional resource. It's not just where you live, but it's also a means of your production, your basis of livelihoods, how you're making your money. It can mean different things to different people. But again, when you think in the development context, how can an agricultural project or an infrastructure upgrading project or a finance project really go forward without looking at the property rights issue? With all of that, you might ask yourself, why haven't there been more land problems to fix this? The World Bank's active, your bilateral and multilateral donors are spending billions each year. Where's it going? And yes, there are some property rights projects. In fact, well over a billion dollars has been spent in the past five or six years, if I remember correctly. But that said, the success and the track record for success is relatively poor. Ask yourself, why? Well, from our perspective at Cadasta, a big part of it is they're going from the traditional top-down approach. There's a lack of land specialists across the globe. If you look at a country like Cote d'Ivoire, I believe it has 25 to 30 registered surveyors, and it takes a registered surveyor to do the cadastral plan that's a requirement for your formal title, and compare that to Austria with 300 licensed surveyors at half the population, one third of the area, and an infrastructure that makes it easy to get around the country. In Cote d'Ivoire, you're going to find the surveyors clustered in three cities and to get anywhere as a two-day drive, or to get to parts of the country. So that's compounded by the fact that the solutions for documenting land information are often based on an urban colonial elite. So it might be a legacy leftover from a colonial period where your requirements for accuracy make sense for that high-value urban area, but do they really make sense for a rural area where the property value is much lower? And when you think about the cost to register property, there's the formal and informal costs, but getting that survey and survey out to your rural property probably doesn't cost that much more or less than it does here in Europe. So you're talking about a cost that's out of the reach for many of your smallholder farmers. And finally, when you think about big land registry cadastral systems that cost millions of dollars to put in, in all honesty, the track record of success for those is pretty poor. They go in, they work for a few years, but then they start running into issues of, ah, the server's down, we need to buy a new server. Well, the government hasn't budgeted for new hardware. You might find that the staff you've trained are now all well-trained IT specialists. Well, they're going to go to the private sector. So who's going to fund training of new staff? Who's going to pay the maintenance of that software, whether it's a proprietary system or, you know, paying for specialists for your open source software? So the end result of this is a situation where a vast majority of the world's population lacks formal property rights. You see numbers ranging from 70 to 90% of the globe is undocumented. Let's just say 70%. It's clear the traditional approaches aren't working. So recognizing that government and the existing land professionals can't keep up with this demand, how might we address it? There's a couple of approaches that we think about at Cadesta. One is let's use appropriate technology and innovative approaches. Let's not rely on the traditional survey methodology. Let's look at using a lower, you know, lower accuracy but lower cost GPS. Let's think about using satellite imagery. Let's think about using the smartphones that send a lot of people's pockets. This might not get you the same level of accuracy that a traditional survey or would, but it's pretty good. And sometimes what's the same perfect as the enemy of good? And when you've got a 70 to 80% of the Earth's surface undocumented, let's just get to good first. We can perfect later. And finally, let's think about flexible software. So software that's able to support unconventional approaches that's accessible, maybe that's cloud based. Let's think about an open source tool. And let's think about open data. So at Cadesta, our focus is really looking at how we can document the rights of those people left out of the formal system and post that data on a secure platform that is accessible and can be managed by those end users. And this really kind of comes back to my experience working with the formal sector and putting in those top down government systems and seeing that they aren't always proving to be sustainable. So let's flip that model on its head and work from the bottom up. So with the Cadesta platform, you know, we looked at a lot of the standards in land administration. There's the very formal land administration domain model. There's a subset the social tenure domain model that's much more relevant for us. But then we also started talking to partners and realizing that a lot of them were collecting property rights data, but with along with huge with other data sets. So they might have been interested in household surveys and slum upgrading. So property rights as a component, but they needed the flexibility to add in other data sets that they're collecting. So that could be a various types of rights, not just your ownership, but your lease holds, your customary, your grazing rights, your hunting rights. And how is that data being documented? It could be interviews, could be videos, pictures, all of this can go up to the platform and adding to that body of evidence regarding your property rights. And again, you know, we spent a lot of time speaking to partners when we were designing the platform. So one of the big things was flexibility and how their data collection is done. But also they kept saying we need satellite imagery, or you know, we're using Google Earth and posting our data up. Is that okay? To which, well, depends on your degree of sensitivity on posting that data to Google. And if you want satellite imagery, they'd say it's so complex, they're asking me questions about ortho rectifications and whether it's ortho rectified and we don't know what to do. And they told us we could access it, but we've got to go to an FTP site to download it and we can't do that from Burkina. And by the way, we don't have a credit card. How are we going to get this imagery? So it really revealed itself to be core for a lot of our partners. So with our platform, we stream imagery using the digital globe API. So partners in the field can use that imagery directly. And for some, that's their first step in documenting property rights. With half meter or one meter, two meter imagery, you're at least able to get general boundaries that again can be improved upon. It's an incremental process. With the cadastral platform, it's also important for people to manage their own data. We don't want to be the ones involved with every implementation. Our users can set their own access rights, who can do what with the system, what data is accessible and viewable by the world at large, what is not, and really manage their own security settings. For us, that was a bit of a challenge because we're very much for open data and land information, but we recognize that for many people, putting this data in the public domain can actually put them at risk. So it's up to users to set the level of openness. And where does cadastra fit in? Really, it's about two things. One, providing the technology to document their rights, but two, providing open data sets where they do exist on land information. And while that in many places might be your title, your deed, your cadastral layer, it could also be things like the concession layer. We did an analysis of concessions in, I want to say it was in the Philippines last year and found that only about 50% could really be defined where the concession actually was. And within those 50%, there were overlaps, there were discrepancies, there were gaps, some concessions were completely in the water, which didn't make sense for the type of concession it was. So if specialists can't decode these concession agreements, what's a rural inhabitance supposed to do when they find out that bulldozers are moving into their property and saying they've got a concession for mining or for palm oil or whatever it might be? So displaying that open data is quite important for us. So we seem to have lost some words there, but in any case, here we are at the cadastra platform. And our focus is really not on the tools to bring in the data, whether that's mobile applications, whether it's using drones, whether it's traditional systems, whether it's paper documents. Our focus is really on working with the partners and their beneficiaries and getting the data to the platform. And part of our thinking behind this was recognizing that they're good tools out there for data collection. We don't want to spend time and money on new technology when they're good solutions out there. I'll skip through this given the time, but one of the first I'll mention is Open Data Kit and GeoOpen Data Kit. Great data collection application has, I think, 100,000 downloads when I checked a couple of months ago. And then GeoODK, which kind of adds a bit more of a spatial component. It already has an open source community around it. It doesn't require us to build one, but it fits our need for that data collection. And you can sync directly your data collected in ODK or GeoODK and post it directly into the platform. Another one we work with is field papers. I don't know if anyone's worked with field papers here. It's kind of common within the OpenStreetMap community, but it's a paper-based approach to documenting rights. You print out a map, you go out in the field, you take notes on top of it, you take a picture. And what's interesting is that QR barcode in the corner of that paper map GeoReferences. So you bring it right back into the platform and you can sketch on top of it. And now you've got some boundaries, really embracing that fit-for-purpose model of using technology that's paper-based, cheap, accessible. And finally, you could use a handheld GPS combined with a paper questionnaire, digitized boundaries using the satellite imagery if you prefer. So over the past couple of months we've had a couple of interesting programs documenting rights in Kosovo using GeoODK and drone imagery. It was really nice looking at two centimeter imagery sitting with the property inhabitants and really being able to pick out corner points and sped up the traditional process of using your survey technology. Working with Nomati, we've collaborated with a couple of groups in Kenya. It's given us some different use cases in terms of customary rights, past oralist groups, and a range of data collection, whether sketching on imagery using field papers or using GeoODK. Over the coming months we'll be building out our partner pipeline, improving the platform. The next big one is a QGIS plugin and finally adding custom base maps, data imports, and improving our documentation. So we can really more directly interface with those other applications out there for data collection. Thank you. Thank you very much. Are there any questions? Questions? Who's the first one? Nobody? Okay. What is a QGIS plugin? What will it do that you are talking about? So one of the main things is our outputs. So producing community maps and then being able to manipulate them, just given a higher degree of a more robust tool set within QGIS. So being able to take the data that's in the platform directly into your QGIS working environment. Thank you. Documenting the land rights is just the first step. How do you do the secure man of the land rights? Have you at all looked at the blockchain technology in that context? Sure. We spent quite a bit of time looking at blockchain actually. And while I come down on the side of thinking it's probably appropriate and a more secure or a more advanced land information system where that incremental greater degree of security really matters. In places where documenting rights in the first instance is the biggest priority, it's less of importance to us. That said, I could see where hashing basic aspects of data, of when it's recorded might make sense. So at this point, we aren't integrating with blockchain, but it's something we're certainly considering for the future. No further questions? Then thank you very much for the presentation. We are just in time. Perfect.
 Thanks very much. We'll appreciate everyone's patience as we work through some logistical  issues. My name is Frank Pachel with Cadastra Foundation, where we're focused on property  rights and how you might document the rights of those people left out of formal systems.  So with that, I'm going to dive right in. And I recognize that most of you in the audience  probably take property rights for granted. You know that the land you own is something  the government will protect, that you can claim your right and be free to trade your  property or engage in market activities. But let's take a step back and imagine that  we don't all or many of us live in Europe or North America where these functioning land  administration systems exist and pretend we're a resident of an informal urban slum. And  this isn't an unreal proposition when you consider the fact that by the year 2020 there'll be  an estimated, I think, 1.4 billion slum dwellers representing one in seven people on the face  of the earth. And for most of these urban slum dwellers, property rights are not something  they enjoy. So what would you do if you didn't have property rights? How would that affect  your day-to-day life? So I'm just going to mention a couple of the  ways this might affect us all. The first and the one that is often, most often mentioned,  is the whole idea of access to credit. If you don't have a formal title, deed, lease,  rental agreement, how can you leverage this asset that for many people is the most valuable  asset they own. So the theory is that with a title you can buy, sell, trade. Now the  reality for an urban slum or even a low-value rural property is that banks really aren't  interested in collateralizing property worth a couple of thousand dollars. The cost of  eviction, the cost of trying to repossess the property doesn't really make it worth  it. But that said, it does provide lending institutions the confidence that you do in  fact own the property, that they know where to find you in the event you default on the  loan, and maybe they'll just hold on to that title or deed so you can't buy or sell or  trade the property while you have a mortgage against it. Another thought is your agricultural  and your business decisions. So less, of course, less relevant for the urban context,  but in a rural context. Are you going to invest in irrigation? Are you going to invest in  long-term, higher value crops like hardwoods? Or are you going to focus on short-term gain?  And to those small businesses, are they going to invest in improving the property? Probably  not. Let's think about home improvement decisions. If you're not confident the property will  be yours next week, are you going to spend money on a new roof, improving a chimney,  or putting down a concrete floor? Again, probably not. And it's important to realize all three  of those things directly contribute to health and well-being. Now the threat of eviction.  Again, without that confidence in your right to occupy the property, you're always in fear  that the government might come along and evict you, that someone else might come forward  with a claim to the property. And that, again, affects your day-to-day life. Are you going  to leave the property unoccupied? Probably not. And that means that if you say are a  two-breadwinner family, someone has to remain on the property. So one of the kids might  not be getting an education because they need to be there to protect the property and potentially  move things when the government comes through with evictions. Land conflicts. In emerging  economies, it's not at all unusual to find that 50 to 70 percent of court cases are around  land conflict. With no registry to refer to, no real property rights records, who usually  wins those conflicts, those with the money to really fight them out in the courts, and  those with connections? And that's to say nothing of the macroeconomic effects. You'd  be hard-pressed to think of a major global conflict that didn't have a land rights component  to it. Finally, I'll get to infrastructure upgrades. If you're a slum dweller without  confidence that the property is yours, you're in a pretty weak position to advocate for  improving the sanitation, the electricity, the water, the access roads. And if you do  advocate for them and they put those in, guess what? There's probably more evictions. And  government compensation in emerging economies is rare at best. And finally, your identity.  If you don't have a formal property that's registered that is in your name, you probably  don't have a mailing address. You probably don't have a real sense of ownership, of  belonging. So property rights is really a cross-cutting issue. And when you think about  it in that context, it's going to affect development writ large. Land really is a multi-dimensional  resource. It's not just where you live, but it's also a means of your production, your  basis of livelihoods, how you're making your money. It can mean different things to different  people. But again, when you think in the development context, how can an agricultural project or  an infrastructure upgrading project or a finance project really go forward without looking  at the property rights issue? With all of that, you might ask yourself, why haven't  there been more land problems to fix this? The World Bank's active, your bilateral and  multilateral donors are spending billions each year. Where's it going? And yes, there are  some property rights projects. In fact, well over a billion dollars has been spent in the  past five or six years, if I remember correctly. But that said, the success and the track record  for success is relatively poor. Ask yourself, why? Well, from our perspective at Cadasta,  a big part of it is they're going from the traditional top-down approach. There's a  lack of land specialists across the globe. If you look at a country like Cote d'Ivoire,  I believe it has 25 to 30 registered surveyors, and it takes a registered surveyor to do the  cadastral plan that's a requirement for your formal title, and compare that to Austria  with 300 licensed surveyors at half the population, one third of the area, and an infrastructure  that makes it easy to get around the country. In Cote d'Ivoire, you're going to find the  surveyors clustered in three cities and to get anywhere as a two-day drive, or to get  to parts of the country. So that's compounded by the fact that the solutions for documenting  land information are often based on an urban colonial elite. So it might be a legacy leftover  from a colonial period where your requirements for accuracy make sense for that high-value  urban area, but do they really make sense for a rural area where the property value  is much lower? And when you think about the cost to register property, there's the formal  and informal costs, but getting that survey and survey out to your rural property probably  doesn't cost that much more or less than it does here in Europe. So you're talking about  a cost that's out of the reach for many of your smallholder farmers. And finally, when  you think about big land registry cadastral systems that cost millions of dollars to put  in, in all honesty, the track record of success for those is pretty poor. They go in, they  work for a few years, but then they start running into issues of, ah, the server's down, we  need to buy a new server. Well, the government hasn't budgeted for new hardware. You might  find that the staff you've trained are now all well-trained IT specialists. Well, they're  going to go to the private sector. So who's going to fund training of new staff? Who's  going to pay the maintenance of that software, whether it's a proprietary system or, you  know, paying for specialists for your open source software? So the end result of this  is a situation where a vast majority of the world's population lacks formal property rights.  You see numbers ranging from 70 to 90% of the globe is undocumented. Let's just say  70%. It's clear the traditional approaches aren't working. So recognizing that government  and the existing land professionals can't keep up with this demand, how might we address  it? There's a couple of approaches that we think about at Cadesta. One is let's use appropriate  technology and innovative approaches. Let's not rely on the traditional survey methodology.  Let's look at using a lower, you know, lower accuracy but lower cost GPS. Let's think about  using satellite imagery. Let's think about using the smartphones that send a lot of  people's pockets. This might not get you the same level of accuracy that a traditional  survey or would, but it's pretty good. And sometimes what's the same perfect as the enemy  of good? And when you've got a 70 to 80% of the Earth's surface undocumented, let's just  get to good first. We can perfect later. And finally, let's think about flexible software.  So software that's able to support unconventional approaches that's accessible, maybe that's  cloud based. Let's think about an open source tool. And let's think about open data. So  at Cadesta, our focus is really looking at how we can document the rights of those people  left out of the formal system and post that data on a secure platform that is accessible  and can be managed by those end users. And this really kind of comes back to my experience  working with the formal sector and putting in those top down government systems and seeing  that they aren't always proving to be sustainable. So let's flip that model on its head and work  from the bottom up. So with the Cadesta platform, you know, we looked at a lot of the standards  in land administration. There's the very formal land administration domain model. There's  a subset the social tenure domain model that's much more relevant for us. But then we also  started talking to partners and realizing that a lot of them were collecting property  rights data, but with along with huge with other data sets. So they might have been interested  in household surveys and slum upgrading. So property rights as a component, but they needed  the flexibility to add in other data sets that they're collecting. So that could be  a various types of rights, not just your ownership, but your lease holds, your customary, your  grazing rights, your hunting rights. And how is that data being documented? It could be  interviews, could be videos, pictures, all of this can go up to the platform and adding  to that body of evidence regarding your property rights. And again, you know, we spent a lot  of time speaking to partners when we were designing the platform. So one of the big  things was flexibility and how their data collection is done. But also they kept saying  we need satellite imagery, or you know, we're using Google Earth and posting our data up.  Is that okay? To which, well, depends on your degree of sensitivity on posting that data  to Google. And if you want satellite imagery, they'd say it's so complex, they're asking  me questions about ortho rectifications and whether it's ortho rectified and we don't  know what to do. And they told us we could access it, but we've got to go to an FTP site  to download it and we can't do that from Burkina. And by the way, we don't have a credit card.  How are we going to get this imagery? So it really revealed itself to be core for a lot  of our partners. So with our platform, we stream imagery using the digital globe API.  So partners in the field can use that imagery directly. And for some, that's their first  step in documenting property rights. With half meter or one meter, two meter imagery,  you're at least able to get general boundaries that again can be improved upon. It's an incremental  process. With the cadastral platform, it's also important for people to manage their  own data. We don't want to be the ones involved with every implementation. Our users can set  their own access rights, who can do what with the system, what data is accessible and viewable  by the world at large, what is not, and really manage their own security settings. For us,  that was a bit of a challenge because we're very much for open data and land information,  but we recognize that for many people, putting this data in the public domain can actually  put them at risk. So it's up to users to set the level of openness. And where does cadastra  fit in? Really, it's about two things. One, providing the technology to document their  rights, but two, providing open data sets where they do exist on land information. And while  that in many places might be your title, your deed, your cadastral layer, it could also  be things like the concession layer. We did an analysis of concessions in, I want to say  it was in the Philippines last year and found that only about 50% could really be defined  where the concession actually was. And within those 50%, there were overlaps, there were  discrepancies, there were gaps, some concessions were completely in the water, which didn't  make sense for the type of concession it was. So if specialists can't decode these concession  agreements, what's a rural inhabitance supposed to do when they find out that bulldozers are  moving into their property and saying they've got a concession for mining or for palm oil  or whatever it might be? So displaying that open data is quite important for us. So we  seem to have lost some words there, but in any case, here we are at the cadastra platform.  And our focus is really not on the tools to bring in the data, whether that's mobile applications,  whether it's using drones, whether it's traditional systems, whether it's paper documents. Our  focus is really on working with the partners and their beneficiaries and getting the data  to the platform. And part of our thinking behind this was recognizing that they're  good tools out there for data collection. We don't want to spend time and money on new  technology when they're good solutions out there. I'll skip through this given the time,  but one of the first I'll mention is Open Data Kit and GeoOpen Data Kit. Great data  collection application has, I think, 100,000 downloads when I checked a couple of months  ago. And then GeoODK, which kind of adds a bit more of a spatial component. It already  has an open source community around it. It doesn't require us to build one, but it fits  our need for that data collection. And you can sync directly your data collected in  ODK or GeoODK and post it directly into the platform. Another one we work with is field  papers. I don't know if anyone's worked with field papers here. It's kind of common within  the OpenStreetMap community, but it's a paper-based approach to documenting rights. You print out  a map, you go out in the field, you take notes on top of it, you take a picture. And what's  interesting is that QR barcode in the corner of that paper map GeoReferences. So you bring  it right back into the platform and you can sketch on top of it. And now you've got some  boundaries, really embracing that fit-for-purpose model of using technology that's paper-based,  cheap, accessible. And finally, you could use a handheld GPS combined with a paper questionnaire,  digitized boundaries using the satellite imagery if you prefer. So over the past couple of  months we've had a couple of interesting programs documenting rights in Kosovo using GeoODK  and drone imagery. It was really nice looking at two centimeter imagery sitting with the  property inhabitants and really being able to pick out corner points and sped up the  traditional process of using your survey technology.  Working with Nomati, we've collaborated with a couple of groups in Kenya. It's given us  some different use cases in terms of customary rights, past oralist groups, and a range of  data collection, whether sketching on imagery using field papers or using GeoODK.  Over the coming months we'll be building out our partner pipeline, improving the platform.  The next big one is a QGIS plugin and finally adding custom base maps, data imports, and  improving our documentation. So we can really more directly interface with those other applications  out there for data collection.  Thank you.  Thank you very much. Are there any questions? Questions? Who's the first one? Nobody? Okay.  What is a QGIS plugin? What will it do that you are talking about?  So one of the main things is our outputs. So producing community maps and then being  able to manipulate them, just given a higher degree of a more robust tool set within QGIS.  So being able to take the data that's in the platform directly into your QGIS working environment.  Thank you. Documenting the land rights is just the first step. How do you do the secure  man of the land rights? Have you at all looked at the blockchain technology in that context?  Sure. We spent quite a bit of time looking at blockchain actually. And while I come down  on the side of thinking it's probably appropriate and a more secure or a more advanced land  information system where that incremental greater degree of security really matters.  In places where documenting rights in the first instance is the biggest priority, it's  less of importance to us. That said, I could see where hashing basic aspects of data, of  when it's recorded might make sense. So at this point, we aren't integrating with blockchain,  but it's something we're certainly considering for the future.  No further questions? Then thank you very much for the presentation. We are just in  time. Perfect.
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Thanks very much. We'll appreciate everyone's patience as we work through some logistical issues. My name is Frank Pachel with Cadastra Foundation, where we're focused on property rights and how you might document the rights of those people left out of formal systems. So with that, I'm going to dive right in. And I recognize that most of you in the audience probably take property rights for granted. You know that the land you own is something the government will protect, that you can claim your right and be free to trade your property or engage in market activities. But let's take a step back and imagine that we don't all or many of us live in Europe or North America where these functioning land administration systems exist and pretend we're a resident of an informal urban slum. And this isn't an unreal proposition when you consider the fact that by the year 2020 there'll be an estimated, I think, 1.4 billion slum dwellers representing one in seven people on the face of the earth. And for most of these urban slum dwellers, property rights are not something they enjoy. So what would you do if you didn't have property rights? How would that affect your day-to-day life? So I'm just going to mention a couple of the ways this might affect us all. The first and the one that is often, most often mentioned, is the whole idea of access to credit. If you don't have a formal title, deed, lease, rental agreement, how can you leverage this asset that for many people is the most valuable asset they own. So the theory is that with a title you can buy, sell, trade. Now the reality for an urban slum or even a low-value rural property is that banks really aren't interested in collateralizing property worth a couple of thousand dollars. The cost of eviction, the cost of trying to repossess the property doesn't really make it worth it. But that said, it does provide lending institutions the confidence that you do in fact own the property, that they know where to find you in the event you default on the loan, and maybe they'll just hold on to that title or deed so you can't buy or sell or trade the property while you have a mortgage against it. Another thought is your agricultural and your business decisions. So less, of course, less relevant for the urban context, but in a rural context. Are you going to invest in irrigation? Are you going to invest in long-term, higher value crops like hardwoods? Or are you going to focus on short-term gain? And to those small businesses, are they going to invest in improving the property? Probably not. Let's think about home improvement decisions. If you're not confident the property will be yours next week, are you going to spend money on a new roof, improving a chimney, or putting down a concrete floor? Again, probably not. And it's important to realize all three of those things directly contribute to health and well-being. Now the threat of eviction. Again, without that confidence in your right to occupy the property, you're always in fear that the government might come along and evict you, that someone else might come forward with a claim to the property. And that, again, affects your day-to-day life. Are you going to leave the property unoccupied? Probably not. And that means that if you say are a two-breadwinner family, someone has to remain on the property. So one of the kids might not be getting an education because they need to be there to protect the property and potentially move things when the government comes through with evictions. Land conflicts. In emerging economies, it's not at all unusual to find that 50 to 70 percent of court cases are around land conflict. With no registry to refer to, no real property rights records, who usually wins those conflicts, those with the money to really fight them out in the courts, and those with connections? And that's to say nothing of the macroeconomic effects. You'd be hard-pressed to think of a major global conflict that didn't have a land rights component to it. Finally, I'll get to infrastructure upgrades. If you're a slum dweller without confidence that the property is yours, you're in a pretty weak position to advocate for improving the sanitation, the electricity, the water, the access roads. And if you do advocate for them and they put those in, guess what? There's probably more evictions. And government compensation in emerging economies is rare at best. And finally, your identity. If you don't have a formal property that's registered that is in your name, you probably don't have a mailing address. You probably don't have a real sense of ownership, of belonging. So property rights is really a cross-cutting issue. And when you think about it in that context, it's going to affect development writ large. Land really is a multi-dimensional resource. It's not just where you live, but it's also a means of your production, your basis of livelihoods, how you're making your money. It can mean different things to different people. But again, when you think in the development context, how can an agricultural project or an infrastructure upgrading project or a finance project really go forward without looking at the property rights issue? With all of that, you might ask yourself, why haven't there been more land problems to fix this? The World Bank's active, your bilateral and multilateral donors are spending billions each year. Where's it going? And yes, there are some property rights projects. In fact, well over a billion dollars has been spent in the past five or six years, if I remember correctly. But that said, the success and the track record for success is relatively poor. Ask yourself, why? Well, from our perspective at Cadasta, a big part of it is they're going from the traditional top-down approach. There's a lack of land specialists across the globe. If you look at a country like Cote d'Ivoire, I believe it has 25 to 30 registered surveyors, and it takes a registered surveyor to do the cadastral plan that's a requirement for your formal title, and compare that to Austria with 300 licensed surveyors at half the population, one third of the area, and an infrastructure that makes it easy to get around the country. In Cote d'Ivoire, you're going to find the surveyors clustered in three cities and to get anywhere as a two-day drive, or to get to parts of the country. So that's compounded by the fact that the solutions for documenting land information are often based on an urban colonial elite. So it might be a legacy leftover from a colonial period where your requirements for accuracy make sense for that high-value urban area, but do they really make sense for a rural area where the property value is much lower? And when you think about the cost to register property, there's the formal and informal costs, but getting that survey and survey out to your rural property probably doesn't cost that much more or less than it does here in Europe. So you're talking about a cost that's out of the reach for many of your smallholder farmers. And finally, when you think about big land registry cadastral systems that cost millions of dollars to put in, in all honesty, the track record of success for those is pretty poor. They go in, they work for a few years, but then they start running into issues of, ah, the server's down, we need to buy a new server. Well, the government hasn't budgeted for new hardware. You might find that the staff you've trained are now all well-trained IT specialists. Well, they're going to go to the private sector. So who's going to fund training of new staff? Who's going to pay the maintenance of that software, whether it's a proprietary system or, you know, paying for specialists for your open source software? So the end result of this is a situation where a vast majority of the world's population lacks formal property rights. You see numbers ranging from 70 to 90% of the globe is undocumented. Let's just say 70%. It's clear the traditional approaches aren't working. So recognizing that government and the existing land professionals can't keep up with this demand, how might we address it? There's a couple of approaches that we think about at Cadesta. One is let's use appropriate technology and innovative approaches. Let's not rely on the traditional survey methodology. Let's look at using a lower, you know, lower accuracy but lower cost GPS. Let's think about using satellite imagery. Let's think about using the smartphones that send a lot of people's pockets. This might not get you the same level of accuracy that a traditional survey or would, but it's pretty good. And sometimes what's the same perfect as the enemy of good? And when you've got a 70 to 80% of the Earth's surface undocumented, let's just get to good first. We can perfect later. And finally, let's think about flexible software. So software that's able to support unconventional approaches that's accessible, maybe that's cloud based. Let's think about an open source tool. And let's think about open data. So at Cadesta, our focus is really looking at how we can document the rights of those people left out of the formal system and post that data on a secure platform that is accessible and can be managed by those end users. And this really kind of comes back to my experience working with the formal sector and putting in those top down government systems and seeing that they aren't always proving to be sustainable. So let's flip that model on its head and work from the bottom up. So with the Cadesta platform, you know, we looked at a lot of the standards in land administration. There's the very formal land administration domain model. There's a subset the social tenure domain model that's much more relevant for us. But then we also started talking to partners and realizing that a lot of them were collecting property rights data, but with along with huge with other data sets. So they might have been interested in household surveys and slum upgrading. So property rights as a component, but they needed the flexibility to add in other data sets that they're collecting. So that could be a various types of rights, not just your ownership, but your lease holds, your customary, your grazing rights, your hunting rights. And how is that data being documented? It could be interviews, could be videos, pictures, all of this can go up to the platform and adding to that body of evidence regarding your property rights. And again, you know, we spent a lot of time speaking to partners when we were designing the platform. So one of the big things was flexibility and how their data collection is done. But also they kept saying we need satellite imagery, or you know, we're using Google Earth and posting our data up. Is that okay? To which, well, depends on your degree of sensitivity on posting that data to Google. And if you want satellite imagery, they'd say it's so complex, they're asking me questions about ortho rectifications and whether it's ortho rectified and we don't know what to do. And they told us we could access it, but we've got to go to an FTP site to download it and we can't do that from Burkina. And by the way, we don't have a credit card. How are we going to get this imagery? So it really revealed itself to be core for a lot of our partners. So with our platform, we stream imagery using the digital globe API. So partners in the field can use that imagery directly. And for some, that's their first step in documenting property rights. With half meter or one meter, two meter imagery, you're at least able to get general boundaries that again can be improved upon. It's an incremental process. With the cadastral platform, it's also important for people to manage their own data. We don't want to be the ones involved with every implementation. Our users can set their own access rights, who can do what with the system, what data is accessible and viewable by the world at large, what is not, and really manage their own security settings. For us, that was a bit of a challenge because we're very much for open data and land information, but we recognize that for many people, putting this data in the public domain can actually put them at risk. So it's up to users to set the level of openness. And where does cadastra fit in? Really, it's about two things. One, providing the technology to document their rights, but two, providing open data sets where they do exist on land information. And while that in many places might be your title, your deed, your cadastral layer, it could also be things like the concession layer. We did an analysis of concessions in, I want to say it was in the Philippines last year and found that only about 50% could really be defined where the concession actually was. And within those 50%, there were overlaps, there were discrepancies, there were gaps, some concessions were completely in the water, which didn't make sense for the type of concession it was. So if specialists can't decode these concession agreements, what's a rural inhabitance supposed to do when they find out that bulldozers are moving into their property and saying they've got a concession for mining or for palm oil or whatever it might be? So displaying that open data is quite important for us. So we seem to have lost some words there, but in any case, here we are at the cadastra platform. And our focus is really not on the tools to bring in the data, whether that's mobile applications, whether it's using drones, whether it's traditional systems, whether it's paper documents. Our focus is really on working with the partners and their beneficiaries and getting the data to the platform. And part of our thinking behind this was recognizing that they're good tools out there for data collection. We don't want to spend time and money on new technology when they're good solutions out there. I'll skip through this given the time, but one of the first I'll mention is Open Data Kit and GeoOpen Data Kit. Great data collection application has, I think, 100,000 downloads when I checked a couple of months ago. And then GeoODK, which kind of adds a bit more of a spatial component. It already has an open source community around it. It doesn't require us to build one, but it fits our need for that data collection. And you can sync directly your data collected in ODK or GeoODK and post it directly into the platform. Another one we work with is field papers. I don't know if anyone's worked with field papers here. It's kind of common within the OpenStreetMap community, but it's a paper-based approach to documenting rights. You print out a map, you go out in the field, you take notes on top of it, you take a picture. And what's interesting is that QR barcode in the corner of that paper map GeoReferences. So you bring it right back into the platform and you can sketch on top of it. And now you've got some boundaries, really embracing that fit-for-purpose model of using technology that's paper-based, cheap, accessible. And finally, you could use a handheld GPS combined with a paper questionnaire, digitized boundaries using the satellite imagery if you prefer. So over the past couple of months we've had a couple of interesting programs documenting rights in Kosovo using GeoODK and drone imagery. It was really nice looking at two centimeter imagery sitting with the property inhabitants and really being able to pick out corner points and sped up the traditional process of using your survey technology. Working with Nomati, we've collaborated with a couple of groups in Kenya. It's given us some different use cases in terms of customary rights, past oralist groups, and a range of data collection, whether sketching on imagery using field papers or using GeoODK. Over the coming months we'll be building out our partner pipeline, improving the platform. The next big one is a QGIS plugin and finally adding custom base maps, data imports, and improving our documentation. So we can really more directly interface with those other applications out there for data collection. Thank you. Thank you very much. Are there any questions? Questions? Who's the first one? Nobody? Okay. What is a QGIS plugin? What will it do that you are talking about? So one of the main things is our outputs. So producing community maps and then being able to manipulate them, just given a higher degree of a more robust tool set within QGIS. So being able to take the data that's in the platform directly into your QGIS working environment. Thank you. Documenting the land rights is just the first step. How do you do the secure man of the land rights? Have you at all looked at the blockchain technology in that context? Sure. We spent quite a bit of time looking at blockchain actually. And while I come down on the side of thinking it's probably appropriate and a more secure or a more advanced land information system where that incremental greater degree of security really matters. In places where documenting rights in the first instance is the biggest priority, it's less of importance to us. That said, I could see where hashing basic aspects of data, of when it's recorded might make sense. So at this point, we aren't integrating with blockchain, but it's something we're certainly considering for the future. No further questions? Then thank you very much for the presentation. We are just in time. Perfect.
land administration systems exist and pretend getting an education because they need to be 50 to 70 percent of court cases are around land a land rights component to it. Finally, I'll get making your money. It can mean different things a finance project really go forward without has been spent in the past five or six years, if requirement for your formal title, and compare requirements for accuracy make sense for that land professionals can't keep up with this the big things was flexibility and how their data accessible and viewable by the world at large, what is not, and really manage their own security things. One, providing the technology to document platform. And our focus is really not on the good tools out there for data collection. We technology when they're good solutions out there. GeoODK, which kind of adds a bit more of a spatial component. It already has an open source build one, but it fits our need for that data paper-based approach to documenting rights. You take notes on top of it, you take a picture. And boundaries, really embracing that fit-for-purpose GeoODK. Over the coming months we'll be building land information system where that incremental