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Rural communities in much of the world are under-represented in the conceptualisation and realisation of land tenure security through statutory mechanisms. A starting point to mitigate this situation is the documentation of the lands and the land tenure relations of rural and informal (peri)-urban communities. During the “Its4land” project (its4land.com) we created tools to facilitate the documentation of land rights claims in a variety of scenarios and use cases. One among these tools, SmartSkeMa (smartskema.eu), allows communities to create maps and document social relations among members of the communities in a participatory way through hand draw sketches and handwritten annotations.
Building on the series of new laws recognising and elevating customary land laws across Africa and other regions in the Global South, one envisages a system of Community Land Registers established on a decentralized peer-2-peer customary land information system through which communities administrate tenures on land within their jurisdictions. SmartSkeMa is poised to fit well in such an information systems ecosystem. As elders of one community in Kenya brought to our attention when we presented SmartSkeMa, a community owned and managed land register would allow the community to sustainably manage and protect their tenure on land.
