Translator: Johannes Duschner Reviewer: Ellen Maloney
Probably most of you rent or own a property to live in
and that you certainly have neighbours.
Most of you know that if you entered your neighbour’s property
without permission,
they could actually get you arrested for trespassing.
But that is enforceable here in Germany
because all properties are registered with the state
and therefore they are protected by law.
In many countries across the world,
by contrast, up to 70% of the land may be unregistered.
But even for people in some of these countries,
where they have a registered land title,
such land titles may not be relevant to how they live.
Consider, for example a Maasai family.
They have 800 cattle, 500 goats and so on,
donkeys and other animals.
They depend on the land for all their basic needs,
for the water, for their food, for the food for the animals,
and even for medicines.
For them, receiving an individual land title
may actually lead to losing access to vital resources.
An individual land title may actually leave them worse off.
So as Cari mentioned, I worked for a project.
It is called “its4land.”
In this project
we are creating innovative tools for land tenure registration.
Our goal is to reduce the high percentage of unregistered land,
try to bring it to zero,
using new tools that can allow us to rapidly map property.
The project involves eight partners,
but they are spread across six countries.
I work for the Institute for Geoinformatics, here in Muenster.
So when we were invited to join the project, to start the project,
I was really excited
because the target countries are Kenya, Rwanda and Ethiopia,
which are all in East Africa,
and that’s not so far away from my own home country of Malawi.
We embarked on this journey, myself as part of this team,
to create a small piece of software
that allows communities, at a local scale, to document their land
using hand-drawn maps.
For example, this one here.
Our software should be able to read and process the hand-drawn sketches,
understand what is drawn in them,
and then organize them,
so they can be used with other data about land.
This was our goal
and with that in mind we set to work.
We created some preliminary designs and built a prototype.
We even tested our workflows on a site here in Germany.
But fast forward a few months:
We arrived in the Muslim Maasai County of southern Kenya called Kajiado.
Almost as soon as we arrived
all of our plans which we have made, what we have planned to the minute,
started to fall apart.
So all our assumptions were actually basically wrong.
It happens when we arrived there,
there was a drought.
The people needed more time to go and find water, find food for the animals.
In fact on the first day that we were there
we actually caught up with the people at a local water hole.
That was the only place you can meet people at the time of day.
So we jumped straight into work, we were standing under a tree,
researchers and the people from the community,
and my colleague, Serene, from the University of Leuven
started with her part of the interview.
She had prepared an unstructured interview.
She started asking questions,
but by the time, she went from the first to the second to the third question,
I started getting nervous.
Because I was standing next to her,
but the thing is I had a ten-page questionnaire in my hand,
and I have prepared everything to the minute.
I thought to myself how I am going to perform a very structured interview
in this very dynamic scenario.
Before I finished thinking, already it was my turn to ask questions.
She went, “It’s your turn!” I think oh my god.
Anyway, I put out my questionnaire. Here is my first question.
I read the first question.
The interpreter standing next to me, he translates it to the Maasai language.
Then there was a couple of seconds silence.
Then after the silence, everybody bursts into laughter.
Okay, what funny thing did I say?
I was taken aback for a moment because I knew my question was plain.
There were about 15 to 20 men standing around me,
and there were about five others who had just walked 30 kilometres
with their animals from Tanzania, so it is across the border,
just to graze the animals in the area.
What do I do?
I just looked back down on my questionnaire
and I read the second question; said forget the first.
But by the time I raised my head again
I realized that it wasn’t always the same faces around.
It was like people are standing there, and they’d move to talk to someone else,
and then they come back
and maybe look at the animals a little bit.
I thought this could mean a few things,
but either, this excercise is completely boring for these guys,
or they are extremely busy.
I went with the second, of course, because they had more immediate concerns.
We found them in their place of work,
which that was.
So I decided: screw this.
I put my questionnaire back in my pocket
and just started having conversations with them.
So we were just standing and having little chats.
Through that we learned quite a lot,
for example, we learned that the Maasai never really traditionally owned land,
something we had a clue about,
but not in the modern sense of owning land, right?
So this was always something that is imposed on them
and it goes back to the colonial era.
Most of the things that they told us
were wrapped in little stories.
It wasn’t like plain facts. It was story after story.
For example, there was one young man who came up to us and told us a story
that demonstrates a certain loose relationship
of the Maasai with their land.
He had uncovered an anomaly,
he had uncovered something wrong
in the boundary of a big piece of land
that belongs to one family.
When I say family, of course, I don’t mean husband, wife, and children.
I mean like 10 or more households of brothers, cousins, and so on,
living together on a piece of land and sharing all their resources, right?
What had happened is
they have sort of other neighbouring parcels of land, right?
The people in the families in those neighbouring parcels
had actually subdivided their land
and then they had sold parts of those pieces to other people.
In the process somehow the boundaries have been moved,
so in favor of the new plots.
So their was a big chunk of land that was lost to this family
that was living together.
The problem, of course, is that
the discovery that was good that they found out
was actually 12 years too late.
Because in Kenya you can only challenge
the issuance of land titles within a period of 12 years.
And these changes had been registered with the state more than 20 years before.
How could this happen?
How did they not discover this?
It so happens that as they live together, they knew about the boundaries,
but they never really considered them as a barrier to movement,
as a restriction, as if you can’t go there.
When they graze their animals, or when they go to collect firewood,
or do other activities on the land, they just crisscrossed on there.
It didn’t matter whose parcel that really was.
And so sadly, of course, when changes are happening
in that adjacent parcels,
they never really bothered to check what is going on with the boundaries
and with the actual information that is registered.
So anyway, we went on with different conversations.
Later on we asked the people to draw us some maps
to illustrate the things that they were telling us,
the stories that they were telling us.
Here is an example:
This is a Maasai homestead.
A Maasai family lives in a circular arrangement of huts,
which is called an enkang.
Usually in the middle they’ll have a circular region,
an enclosure or several enclosures,
where they keep their domestic animals at night.
This is for protection from wild animals.
The traditional Maasai hut in their language is called an inkaji,
or in plural it is called inkajijik.
It looks like this from the outside.
The huts usually belong to the wives.
So there will be one man for the enkang and there are several wives,
and each wife will have her own little hut for her family.
Every wife also has an entrance,
so a gate entering into the enkang.
And she is responsible for that gate.
She is responsible for opening it in the morning
and then closing it in the night.
These gates are guarded by a big branch of a tree,
which is called an oltim.
Once the oltim is placed inside of this gate
then no one can enter it, especially the men.
The men cannot walk over this oltim
because in their culture it is considered taboo.
And there are also subtle rules about which gates can be used for what purpose.
For example, you have a gate which is for goats only,
and one of the other entrances would be for people,
and maybe another one would be for like cattle.
The point I want to make here is that
the Maasai homestead has a really complex spacial and social structure,
and this structure is very rich with meaning.
Unfortunately, in many modern or current information systems
for registering land, this rich meaning is lost.
The focus is more on parcels,
the way you do it here in Germany,
boundaries, and coordinates.
When we asked them the first time to draw this maps for us, we asked them,
those were the stupid questions in the first interview,
it was like could you draw a map of your land?
And the guys were like: What the hell are you talking about?
After we came back from the trip,
I also asked myself the same question.
What is the purpose of that drawings that we are looking for?
Obviously, we have to change our strategy.
We spent about four month here and then went right back.
This time we had organized special workshops;
we actually organized things ahead of time.
We had workshops for men, workshops for women,
and during the discussions people talked about
what I thought were important things for them;
for example, how do we preserve our water resources,
or where are the wild animals usually found.
What are the locations of important species of trees,
or other kinds of vegetation?
Something we learned during the time, during the discussion, was that
the elders seem to have a certain special skill
to read the landscape.
For example, they will look, they observe the vegetation
and then they go like let’s drill for water here.
Of course, the younger men don’t quite understand it
I guess it only comes with experience.
But I thought that this was a deep knowledge
and we wanted to capture that knowledge.
We wanted to get it in our maps.
So we also asked them to draw some sketch maps for us.
For example, this is one map.
This was drawn by a group of women.
You see here some circles.
Those represent the homesteads.
You also see there are some mountains.
The map is quite detailed, probably not very visible from here;
but where do we get the water,
where are the wild animals,
and all sorts of features;
where is the main river in our region.
And in the corners
there are little triangles which represent the boundary of their ranch.
We are able to capture very rich information
which you do not find in official records together with the representation
of the official information about the boundaries of their property.
We can put this boundaries in relation to the features
that are important for them in their lives.
We started off, we wanted to create a small tool that digitizes maps,
maps of land, land parcels.
But in the process we learned
that it is not just about a piece of ground.
It is about relationships between people and their land,
which are often not as simple or not compatible with the way
we look at land as the property you hold, an individual title and it is mine.
And in the process also we learned that for our technology to be relevant
we have to answer questions that matter to the community
That is where we are at this journey
and its a journey really to bring the land information and the power
of documenting land to the people.
What we have been able to do so far,
is with everything we learned, with all the concepts we’ve gathered,
we have a software tool, right now, or a prototype,
which is able to extract meaningful digital objects
from this hand-drawn maps.
It looks like a bit of gibberish;
but those are the mountains,
the different homesteads and so on.
With this rich information we can then integrate it
with existing maps, to create new maps, new richer maps,
and new richer interactions with the community generated data.
I must show this last picture
because it is sort of very special for me.
At the end of the last workshop, sort of flipping of roles, the women called me
outside saying: “Hey, come!” and I walked out and said: “What’s up?”
So: “Stand here.”` They presented me with a gift.
It was a hand-beaded Maasai bracelet.
One of the women said: “I made this.
I thought it would be a nice gift for you.”
That was special.
For me it marked the end of the beginning of this relationship.
which I hope it would be a lasting relationship
with these very, very amazing people
who shared their time and knowledge with us in Kajiado County
to which I am looking forward to go back.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Probably most of you rent or own a property to live in
and that you certainly have neighbours.
Most of you know that if you entered your neighbour’s property
without permission,
they could actually get you arrested for trespassing.
But that is enforceable here in Germany
because all properties are registered with the state
and therefore they are protected by law.
In many countries across the world,
by contrast, up to 70% of the land may be unregistered.
But even for people in some of these countries,
where they have a registered land title,
such land titles may not be relevant to how they live.
Consider, for example a Maasai family.
They have 800 cattle, 500 goats and so on,
donkeys and other animals.
They depend on the land for all their basic needs,
for the water, for their food, for the food for the animals,
and even for medicines.
For them, receiving an individual land title
may actually lead to losing access to vital resources.
An individual land title may actually leave them worse off.
So as Cari mentioned, I worked for a project.
It is called “its4land.”
In this project
we are creating innovative tools for land tenure registration.
Our goal is to reduce the high percentage of unregistered land,
try to bring it to zero,
using new tools that can allow us to rapidly map property.
The project involves eight partners,
but they are spread across six countries.
I work for the Institute for Geoinformatics, here in Muenster.
So when we were invited to join the project, to start the project,
I was really excited
because the target countries are Kenya, Rwanda and Ethiopia,
which are all in East Africa,
and that’s not so far away from my own home country of Malawi.
We embarked on this journey, myself as part of this team,
to create a small piece of software
that allows communities, at a local scale, to document their land
using hand-drawn maps.
For example, this one here.
Our software should be able to read and process the hand-drawn sketches,
understand what is drawn in them,
and then organize them,
so they can be used with other data about land.
This was our goal
and with that in mind we set to work.
We created some preliminary designs and built a prototype.
We even tested our workflows on a site here in Germany.
But fast forward a few months:
We arrived in the Muslim Maasai County of southern Kenya called Kajiado.
Almost as soon as we arrived
all of our plans which we have made, what we have planned to the minute,
started to fall apart.
So all our assumptions were actually basically wrong.
It happens when we arrived there,
there was a drought.
The people needed more time to go and find water, find food for the animals.
In fact on the first day that we were there
we actually caught up with the people at a local water hole.
That was the only place you can meet people at the time of day.
So we jumped straight into work, we were standing under a tree,
researchers and the people from the community,
and my colleague, Serene, from the University of Leuven
started with her part of the interview.
She had prepared an unstructured interview.
She started asking questions,
but by the time, she went from the first to the second to the third question,
I started getting nervous.
Because I was standing next to her,
but the thing is I had a ten-page questionnaire in my hand,
and I have prepared everything to the minute.
I thought to myself how I am going to perform a very structured interview
in this very dynamic scenario.
Before I finished thinking, already it was my turn to ask questions.
She went, “It’s your turn!” I think oh my god.
Anyway, I put out my questionnaire. Here is my first question.
I read the first question.
The interpreter standing next to me, he translates it to the Maasai language.
Then there was a couple of seconds silence.
Then after the silence, everybody bursts into laughter.
Okay, what funny thing did I say?
I was taken aback for a moment because I knew my question was plain.
There were about 15 to 20 men standing around me,
and there were about five others who had just walked 30 kilometres
with their animals from Tanzania, so it is across the border,
just to graze the animals in the area.
What do I do?
I just looked back down on my questionnaire
and I read the second question; said forget the first.
But by the time I raised my head again
I realized that it wasn’t always the same faces around.
It was like people are standing there, and they’d move to talk to someone else,
and then they come back
and maybe look at the animals a little bit.
I thought this could mean a few things,
but either, this excercise is completely boring for these guys,
or they are extremely busy.
I went with the second, of course, because they had more immediate concerns.
We found them in their place of work,
which that was.
So I decided: screw this.
I put my questionnaire back in my pocket
and just started having conversations with them.
So we were just standing and having little chats.
Through that we learned quite a lot,
for example, we learned that the Maasai never really traditionally owned land,
something we had a clue about,
but not in the modern sense of owning land, right?
So this was always something that is imposed on them
and it goes back to the colonial era.
Most of the things that they told us
were wrapped in little stories.
It wasn’t like plain facts. It was story after story.
For example, there was one young man who came up to us and told us a story
that demonstrates a certain loose relationship
of the Maasai with their land.
He had uncovered an anomaly,
he had uncovered something wrong
in the boundary of a big piece of land
that belongs to one family.
When I say family, of course, I don’t mean husband, wife, and children.
I mean like 10 or more households of brothers, cousins, and so on,
living together on a piece of land and sharing all their resources, right?
What had happened is
they have sort of other neighbouring parcels of land, right?
The people in the families in those neighbouring parcels
had actually subdivided their land
and then they had sold parts of those pieces to other people.
In the process somehow the boundaries have been moved,
so in favor of the new plots.
So their was a big chunk of land that was lost to this family
that was living together.
The problem, of course, is that
the discovery that was good that they found out
was actually 12 years too late.
Because in Kenya you can only challenge
the issuance of land titles within a period of 12 years.
And these changes had been registered with the state more than 20 years before.
How could this happen?
How did they not discover this?
It so happens that as they live together, they knew about the boundaries,
but they never really considered them as a barrier to movement,
as a restriction, as if you can’t go there.
When they graze their animals, or when they go to collect firewood,
or do other activities on the land, they just crisscrossed on there.
It didn’t matter whose parcel that really was.
And so sadly, of course, when changes are happening
in that adjacent parcels,
they never really bothered to check what is going on with the boundaries
and with the actual information that is registered.
So anyway, we went on with different conversations.
Later on we asked the people to draw us some maps
to illustrate the things that they were telling us,
the stories that they were telling us.
Here is an example:
This is a Maasai homestead.
A Maasai family lives in a circular arrangement of huts,
which is called an enkang.
Usually in the middle they’ll have a circular region,
an enclosure or several enclosures,
where they keep their domestic animals at night.
This is for protection from wild animals.
The traditional Maasai hut in their language is called an inkaji,
or in plural it is called inkajijik.
It looks like this from the outside.
The huts usually belong to the wives.
So there will be one man for the enkang and there are several wives,
and each wife will have her own little hut for her family.
Every wife also has an entrance,
so a gate entering into the enkang.
And she is responsible for that gate.
She is responsible for opening it in the morning
and then closing it in the night.
These gates are guarded by a big branch of a tree,
which is called an oltim.
Once the oltim is placed inside of this gate
then no one can enter it, especially the men.
The men cannot walk over this oltim
because in their culture it is considered taboo.
And there are also subtle rules about which gates can be used for what purpose.
For example, you have a gate which is for goats only,
and one of the other entrances would be for people,
and maybe another one would be for like cattle.
The point I want to make here is that
the Maasai homestead has a really complex spacial and social structure,
and this structure is very rich with meaning.
Unfortunately, in many modern or current information systems
for registering land, this rich meaning is lost.
The focus is more on parcels,
the way you do it here in Germany,
boundaries, and coordinates.
When we asked them the first time to draw this maps for us, we asked them,
those were the stupid questions in the first interview,
it was like could you draw a map of your land?
And the guys were like: What the hell are you talking about?
After we came back from the trip,
I also asked myself the same question.
What is the purpose of that drawings that we are looking for?
Obviously, we have to change our strategy.
We spent about four month here and then went right back.
This time we had organized special workshops;
we actually organized things ahead of time.
We had workshops for men, workshops for women,
and during the discussions people talked about
what I thought were important things for them;
for example, how do we preserve our water resources,
or where are the wild animals usually found.
What are the locations of important species of trees,
or other kinds of vegetation?
Something we learned during the time, during the discussion, was that
the elders seem to have a certain special skill
to read the landscape.
For example, they will look, they observe the vegetation
and then they go like let’s drill for water here.
Of course, the younger men don’t quite understand it
I guess it only comes with experience.
But I thought that this was a deep knowledge
and we wanted to capture that knowledge.
We wanted to get it in our maps.
So we also asked them to draw some sketch maps for us.
For example, this is one map.
This was drawn by a group of women.
You see here some circles.
Those represent the homesteads.
You also see there are some mountains.
The map is quite detailed, probably not very visible from here;
but where do we get the water,
where are the wild animals,
and all sorts of features;
where is the main river in our region.
And in the corners
there are little triangles which represent the boundary of their ranch.
We are able to capture very rich information
which you do not find in official records together with the representation
of the official information about the boundaries of their property.
We can put this boundaries in relation to the features
that are important for them in their lives.
We started off, we wanted to create a small tool that digitizes maps,
maps of land, land parcels.
But in the process we learned
that it is not just about a piece of ground.
It is about relationships between people and their land,
which are often not as simple or not compatible with the way
we look at land as the property you hold, an individual title and it is mine.
And in the process also we learned that for our technology to be relevant
we have to answer questions that matter to the community
That is where we are at this journey
and its a journey really to bring the land information and the power
of documenting land to the people.
What we have been able to do so far,
is with everything we learned, with all the concepts we’ve gathered,
we have a software tool, right now, or a prototype,
which is able to extract meaningful digital objects
from this hand-drawn maps.
It looks like a bit of gibberish;
but those are the mountains,
the different homesteads and so on.
With this rich information we can then integrate it
with existing maps, to create new maps, new richer maps,
and new richer interactions with the community generated data.
I must show this last picture
because it is sort of very special for me.
At the end of the last workshop, sort of flipping of roles, the women called me
outside saying: “Hey, come!” and I walked out and said: “What’s up?”
So: “Stand here.”` They presented me with a gift.
It was a hand-beaded Maasai bracelet.
One of the women said: “I made this.
I thought it would be a nice gift for you.”
That was special.
For me it marked the end of the beginning of this relationship.
which I hope it would be a lasting relationship
with these very, very amazing people
who shared their time and knowledge with us in Kajiado County
to which I am looking forward to go back.
Thank you.
(Applause)
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