Maps First: Africa’s Agricultural Ambitions Start with Land
By Christopher Burke Senior Advisor, WMC Africa
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The race to transform agriculture is accelerating across Africa. From Côte d’Ivoire’s cocoa sector reforms to Uganda’s coffee roadmap and Tanzania’s Southern Agricultural Growth Corridor, governments, development partners, and investors are positioning to pour billions into large-scale agricultural ventures. As planning accelerates, accurate, accessible, and up-to-date land mapping is often overlooked.
Remote sensing, drone-generated orthophotos, and parcel-level cadastral data are no longer optional. These tools are now the first mile of agricultural development. In the absence of reliable geospatial information on land use, ownership, soil quality, hydrology, and historical crop patterns, forecasting yields, modeling operational costs, and planning infrastructure become speculative. Few can afford speculation in the rapidly growing data-driven agri-investment environment.
Côte d’Ivoire, the world’s largest cocoa producer, has begun digitizing its rural land registry through the Rural Land Information System (SIFOR) reinforced by the Rural Land Tenure Management Strengthening Program (PRESFOR). These programs use high-resolution satellite base maps, drone surveys, and field verification to produce parcel-level maps that meet EU traceability requirements. From 31 December 2025, cocoa importers into the EU must provide geolocation data for every plot under the European Union’s Deforestation Regulation (EUDR). Without mapped farms, Côte d’Ivoire risks exclusion from key markets. Mapping is now part of global agricultural compliance.
Uganda’s coffee industry supports around 1.8 million smallholder farmers and accounts for approximately 16 percent of the country’s total exports. The World Bank-supported Uganda National Land Information System (UgNLIS) has digitized titles in urban centers but covers a small portion of the country’s coffee crops–mostly grown on unregistered land under customary tenure.
The lack of formal titles limits access to credit, insurance, and climate-smart certification. Multiple efforts to register customary land are underway across Uganda, including participatory mapping initiatives by institutions such as the Cadasta Foundation, utilizing a customized version of Esri and UN Habitat/Global Land Tool Network (GLTN) using the Social Tenure Domain Model (STDM). Curiously, the country still lacks a cohesive national strategy to link land tenure, yield modeling, and agro-ecological data.
Tanzania’s Southern Agricultural Growth Corridor (SAGCOT) spans roughly one-third of the country’s arable land. It aims to catalyze commercial farming, water infrastructure, and investment partnerships across 7 million hectares. Success hinges on accurate land information. Despite investments in satellite-derived land use layers, parcel-level data remains fragmented, inaccessible, or unverified. This limits effective targeting of resources, weakens investor confidence, and hinders community consultation.
The risks are manifold. In CapEx and OpEx modeling for capital investments, resources can be misallocated or underperform in the absence of detailed digital elevation models (DEMs), soil drainage profiles, and proximity analysis for access roads and irrigation infrastructure. Earth observation technologies such as Sentinel-1 SAR, ASTER GDEM, and UAV-based photogrammetry and LiDAR technology offer the required resolution but need to be deployed alongside participatory validation and integrated with national systems.
Spectral indices such as the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) and platforms such as the Africa Soil Information Service (AfSIS) and the Global Yield Gap Atlas provide essential inputs for yield forecasting, but only when spatially aligned with microclimate and terrain data. Without these inputs, predictions for productivity, water demand, and fertilizer use remain unreliable. Agro-ecological zoning depends on multi-layered raster datasets calibrated with field data–not assumptions.
Land accessibility is another challenge. Planning agricultural investments becomes a legal and political minefield in the absence of overlays showing customary tenure zones, village boundaries, protected areas, and livestock corridors. Participatory GIS tools such as QField, GeoODK, and Mapillary are being used by development partners and communities to geotag landmarks, boundaries, and infrastructure to produce crowd-sourced base layers compatible with formal systems. Mapping is not just a technical requirement but a foundation for ESG commitments tied to transparency, accountability, and environmental sustainability.
The growing pressure to meet ESG and climate finance standards is raising the bar. Investors now expect spatially explicit documentation of environmental and social risks comprising buffer zones, biodiversity corridors, displacement areas, and tenure security footprints. Compliance with IFC Performance Standards, the OECD Due Diligence Guidance, and national environmental regulations hinges on the quality and accuracy of geospatial data. These layers need to be accessible in formats such as ESRI geodatabases or GeoJSON and deployable via platforms including Google Earth Engine or ArcGIS Online.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is supercharging the speed of classification and pattern recognition in satellite imagery. Machine learning algorithms can now segment crop types, estimate biomass, and track land conversion with minimal human input. In Ethiopia, the Agricultural Transformation Agency uses such models to identify suitable zones for wheat expansion based on rainfall, soil chemistry, and terrain. AI is not infallible. In one East African pilot, nearly 20 percent of AI-generated farm polygons were later found to be inaccurate due to outdated base layers and lack of field validation. The lesson is clear: technology is only as reliable as the ground-truthing behind it.
Governments and their partners should explore ways to move from siloed mapping efforts to integrated land information systems that link cadastres, soil data, infrastructure layers, and tenure records. The Land Administration Information System (LAIS) in Rwanda, developed by Kadaster International, along with the UgNLIS in Uganda and Côte d’Ivoire’s SIFOR–both developed by the French companies IGN FI and GEOFIT–all present promising templates. A regional commitment to interoperability, open data standards, and local capacity building remains lacking.
There is no shortage of ambition or innovation in African agriculture. But to deliver results, it must be grounded—literally, in mapped, validated, and shared geospatial foundations. Maps are not outputs, but critical inputs necessary before the irrigation pump, the tractor, or the financing. Maps are where the transformation begins.
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Senior Advisor, WMC Africa
Christopher Burke formerly served as Senior Land Tenure Officer and VGGT Coordinator with the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (UN FAO). He is currently an advisor at WMC Africa, a communications and advisory agency located in Kampala, Uganda. With almost 30 years of experience, Christopher has worked extensively on social, political, and economic development issues focused on governance, agriculture, environment, communications, peace-building, and international relations in Asia and Africa.
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