Sub-Saharan Africa has an immense challenge to rapidly and cheaply map millions of unrecognized land rights in the region. Land tenure recording helps to deliver tenure security, dispute reduction, investment opportunities, and good governance. Existing recording and mapping approaches did not succeed to meet the promising expectations: disputes abound, investment is impeded, and the community’s poorest lose out. In order to cope with these challenges a research project called ‘its4land’ is carried out. Its4land is a European Commission Horizon 2020 project aiming to develop an innovative suite of land tenure recording tools for three East African countries (Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda). These land tenure tools are inspired by geo-information technologies, including smart sketchmaps, UAV’s, automated feature extraction and geocloud services. For each African country two specific case locations are selected. The six use cases of its4land are the peri-urban areas of Bahir Dar city (Ethiopia), Robit Bata rural Kebele (Ethiopia), Kisumu County (Kenya), Kajiado County (Kenya), Musanze District (Musanze City) (Rwanda) and Musanze District (Rwanda).

This user needs study is part of its4land project and focuses exclusively on capturing the end-user and market opportunities regarding land tenure recordation tools in Ethiopia, Kenya and Rwanda, with respect to the four geospatial technologies identified.

Hence, for each East African country, and accompanying 
use case areas, a refined audit of necessary stakeholders to engage with will be conducted. This includes identifying and classifying actors from research, commercial, investor, government, and NGO sectors, at multiple scales. The identified categories are used for designing the subsequent data collection instruments, whilst the actors identified become participants in the data collection activities. Based on the stakeholder audit and classification, a range of data collection instruments is developed. The most appropriate tools are designed for each actor group such as questionnaires, semi-structured interviews, group discussion sessions, and observation activities.

Afterwards, a multi-stakeholder and multi-sectorial analysis is applied, based on the actor-network theory (Latour, 2005) and multi-actor multi-criteria analysis (Macharis, 2005). This way, the diverse nature of the actors of interest with regards to interest and potential impact on the project is taken into account; different data capture instruments are utilized for different interest groups. Moreover, the actor-network approach has the strength that the analysed network does not merely consider people, but refers to appropriate objects and organizations.

Since the six selected use case areas provides a few vignettes of common land tenure challenges across Sub-Saharan Africa, it can provide a wealth of lessons to other contexts in Sub-Saharan Africa, and perhaps beyond. Moreover, it can provide insights into the current status of land tenure recording and ICT capacity in the three target countries.