One Map Technical Assistance Project Wraps Up

The year has gone quickly for the LEI team working on the One Map Technical Assistance project in Indonesia. The primary objective of this technical assistance was to assist with the project preparation of the One Map Project – a project to support the implementation and acceleration of Indonesia’s One Map Policy. Working alongside the two implementing agencies – the National Land Agency (BPN) and the Geospatial Information Agency (BIG) – as well as the World Bank, the LEI team prepared a series of background and project preparation reports detailing the project design of the One Map Project. These are now ready for review and appraisal by the Government of Indonesia and the World Bank, and the project wrapped up at the beginning of February.

The outputs of the One Map Project support the “sustainable landscapes” programme within Indonesia (a response to the recent disastrous peat and forest fires in Kalimantan and Sumatra) as well as supporting the implementation of the Government’s Agrarian Reform (that includes the certification of 50 million parcels over the next 5 years) and the national One Map Policy. Participatory mapping is a significant component of the One Map Project design and the LEI team visited many of the targeted provinces in Kalimantan and Sumatra and held workshops in Jakarta to develop fit-for-purpose participatory mapping for these contexts.

Identifying and achieving fit-for-purpose participatory mapping is easier said than done in a country as big and diverse as Indonesia. A key challenge of the project design was how the country can best transition from paper based to digital capture and processing of collected ownership details, supporting documents and mapping. This needs to occur both in urban areas as well as rural, where power and internet are at best weak and unreliable. Easy to use, cost effective technology is needed to address resource and capacity needs, whilst delivering appropriate spatial accuracy.

Participatory mapping processes also need to fit within the existing legal framework, mobilising private sector survey and mapping companies and ensuring there is sufficient human and technology capacity within the National Land Agency to deal with the volume of land certificates that are expected to be prepared as well as the land use, forest and village boundary geospatial data that will be generated from the One Map Project.

LEI is proud to have been involved in the design of the One Map Project and will watch its progress over the next 5 years with great interest.