Over 70% of the global population has little or no secure property rights, and where property
rights do exist, the rights are often out of date and inaccurate.
Formal property rights can only be supplied by recognized government authorities within
nation states. However, many governments are the major cause of restricted supply due
to outdated land and property rights policies, inefficient and corrupt bureaucracies, lack of
customer service, and perverse incentives to serve only the elite.
There is significant demand for property rights, in particular from the poor and increasingly
from investors. For example, a study in Ghana in 2007 found that over 90% of respondents
thought their land rights needed to be strengthened, with 47% wanting to enter into a land
transaction within the next 12 months. Foreign investors are increasingly interested in
agricultural areas to produce commodities for the international market, particularly related to
food and extractives.
As land becomes increasingly a target of global finance, there is a need for better
transparency in land rights data in order to ensure stakeholder accountability and protection
of the local communities. New opportunities for more customer serviced oriented models
are arising, particularly through Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs). However, in countries
where there is no current transparency on land rights, new open land rights initiatives, some
global, are emerging to fill this vacuum.
The interactive session will be structured around a series of Fireside Chats where
leaders of new open land rights initiatives will briefly present their solutions to land rights
transparency. The audience will be able to challenge the presenters, highlight best practice,
help shape the initiatives, identify key problems in achieving the goals, suggest partners
and form new networks.
Some of the key issues will centre on:
• Managing privacy;
• Scalability to the global level;
• Capacity building to capture millions of land rights;
• Working with governments to formalise land rights;
• Mobilising the geospatial open source community to build Apps;
• Information required to secure tenure;
• Authenticity of crowdsourced land rights;
• Land will just be grabbed in the gaps where land rights are not defined;
• Identifying and minimizing miss use.
Hashtag: #OKFestLand
This year, Omidyar Network are sponsoring this session and we’re grateful to them for preparing and hosting this conversation. For more details about programme sponsors see our Sponsors page.
