Ghana’s land administration system will soon see deployment of drones to properly establish location and ownership.

The initiative seeks to address persistent land disputes, often characterized by violent confrontation and also speed up land rights formalization.

The project is being undertaken by Micro Aerial Projects LLC, a US-based geospatial service provider.

President, Walter Volkmann has said the field repairable drones will take aerial shots of land location, surveying, and mapping as well as close-range remote sensing.

They will provide the ideal platform for live, rapid and real time monitoring of on-site inspections and data acquisition.

The drone work has independent platform known as V-Map System.

It determines precise GPS solution for drone path, camera exposure and conventional ground surveys.

Successful piloting has already been carried out in certain parts of the country.

Researchers from Building and Road Research Institute, planners, surveyors and academia have undergone training on the deployment.

President of Licensed Surveyors Association of Ghana, Kwame Tenadu Snr said the Land Bill before parliament will bring some relief to Ghanaians.

He was however worried about the level of bureaucracy, there are too many bureaucracies. One of the objectives of the land administration project was to remove too many laws which were overlapping and laborious.

“To bring all of them together, again, and to have the same almost volume I think we should look at it again to make it very short, very easy and have more technology,” he said.

Another member of the association, Dr Yaw Opoku Gyamfi, is hopeful the technology would improve the Otumfuo Lease Documentation Project, launched in 2012.

“We’ve seen there are some areas which have not been able to achieve land delivery, so we’re using this project to find solutions to the Otumfuo lease project,” he assured.

The project is funded by Omidyar Network, a non-governmental organization that supports land rights in developing countries.