Community Cadastres: How OSM Can Give People Land Rights

At least 70% of residents in Dar es Salaam live in informal settlements with no access to their land rights. With the rapid urbanization going on in the city, it shows that this problem will get worse in the years ahead. The scale of the problem is huge (over 1 billion people do not have land rights), not only in Tanzania but also in the world at large.

The cost of surveying plots and providing title deeds is prohibitive using conventional methods, but using community mapping, OSM, cheap dual-frequency sensors, drones, or a simple phone, it is possible. Our solution is simple: community cadastres. Working with small communities (100-200 people) and using low-cost, high-accuracy, dual-frequency RTKs, we can create incredibly precise maps that lead to title deeds.

I will share my views on how using these technologies that are not used at large, together with OSM and open-source tools such as QGIS can be used to make the community cadastres part of the map that leads to land rights.