Most lands in Africa are claimed and managed by indigenous peoples and local communities. But it is disheartening that most African governments do not seem to recognize the rights of these customary land owners. This will give room for the proliferation of poverty, rights abuses, land grabs and land disputes. Securing land rights has been a priority of the international development sector for decades, Nigeria not being an exception. However, the current solutions to delivering land administration services have very limited global outreach; 75 percent of the world’s population do not have access to formal systems to register and safeguard their land rights. The majority of these are the poor and the most vulnerable in society. This paper suggests the adoption of various techniques and technology such as remote sensing, GIS, plane tabling, taping etc where applicable and the use scalable and cloud-free high resolution imageries for field verification of land rights with the participatory efforts of community members and land professionals to resolve the conflicts about land holdings. The integration of the cloud sourced data and harmonization of data acquired in the field is a resultant total coverage which is a fit-for-purpose approach envisaged by Federation of International Geomatician (FIG). Whether or not this suggestion is best to alleviate land holding challenges is beyond the purview of this work because technological advancement in the future may later render it obsolete.

Keywords: FIG; Fit for purpose; Geomatics; Land Information Management; Land owners; Land grabbing; Land rights; Land tenure; Satellite image; Surveying