 My name is Yulia Penfill. I'm the director of the Future of Property Rights Program at New America. Our program looks to bridge the gap between technologists and policy makers working in the land and property rights space. And as part of this initiative, we developed in partnership with Esri a series of six primers that explain in really easy accessible terms six new and emerging technologies in the land and property rights space. And part of the reason we did that is that there is not currently a good amount of easily accessible digestible material on these new technologies that policymakers, funders, implementers, NGOs can just kind of pick up and quickly orient themselves as to whether a technology is useful, whether it solves the problem that they're trying to solve certain pitfalls that they may want to think about. And as a result, we see one of two things happening. Either we see actors in the land space sort of jumping on new technologies and treating them almost as a panacea and hoping and assuming that a new technology will solve a range of problems that that technology isn't actually equipped to solve. So we've seen this really in the blockchain example where early on after blockchain was introduced, we saw many government policymakers jump on the technology and try to implement it to solve things like digitizing records, which is not a problem that blockchain can help with. So after that boom, we saw kind of a bust and a wave of cynicism of policymakers kind of discarding the technology and saying, well, this is useless. This doesn't solve any of my problems. Well, in fact, the issue was that the technology was being applied to problems that it couldn't solve. But on the flip side, blockchain can solve things like increasing the tamper proof nature of a land registry or improving data security. And then on the other side, because of a lack of accessible information on technologies, we just see a lack of uptake. Policymakers, funders, it's not part of their kind of core job description to continuously be getting up to speed on things like machine learning and self sovereign identity. So if they don't have easy tools that can help them at least get a basic 101 understanding, then they risk not being up to speed on these new technologies and kind of missing the opportunity to incorporate them into their work. So for those two reasons, we thought that an easy digestible primer series would be a useful addition to the field. And we teamed up with Asri to produce these six primers. So the webinar with Land Portal was a great opportunity to introduce these primers to a large audience and also use that as a jumping off point to talk about land transparency and corruption in the land and property rights space and how new technologies might help us tackle this problem. So we see technology as a potential leveler. The main purpose I feel of technology in the land sector is to make it easier, faster and cheaper for people to map document and defend their rights. And I think what that translates to is that land administration and the act of improving tenure security is no longer only the domain of the government and of professional classes like surveyors. It means that people in communities can take matters into their own hands and using widely available technologies can actually help map their own land and property, document it and build a record that helps them defend it. So it's an equalizer between the poor and the marginalized and those in power. Several years ago I managed a pilot called MAST, the mobile application to secure tenure, which was one of the first times that simple mobile mapping tools on Android phones were given over to communities and community members themselves were trained to map their land and to gather the biographical and other information that would be needed to register that land. We worked with several villages in rural parts of Tanzania to pilot MAST and in those villages indeed the community members were able to map and document their own land and those records were used by the district government to issue CCROs so official certificates of customary land occupancy to those communities and that was the first time that those communities were able to access land records in any form. That program has since been scaled up by USAID through the LTA program which one of our webinar panelists, Mustafa Issa, is involved in and helping to run and that program through a similar methodology working directly with the communities has already documented and issued more than 70,000 CCROs. So that's an example of technology really helping marginalized communities get a bit of a more equal foothold when it comes to land and property. But also technology is a really important tool when it comes to transparency at the most basic level new technologies can actually literally put people on the map for the first time. So we've seen how machine learning and AI assisted mapping is showing slums in India mapping those slums and actually showing thousands and tens of thousands of people where the government doesn't have official record of them existing. So you know talk about transparency you're literally for the first time seeing entire communities on the map. Similarly we I've worked in the past with a great organization called the Amazon Conservation Team that works with indigenous peoples in Colombia and other parts of the Amazon to help them protect their lands and a big part of protecting their lands is mapping the land and applying for official recognition of that land as a indigenous territory. In Colombia a big problem related to the mapping and documentation of land is that some of the land is very difficult to access if you want to survey by foot because it's either mountainous or it's jungle territory. Some of the land is still occupied by rebels and FARC related groups and is too dangerous to walk on foot. So that group introduced drone mapping into the equation and suddenly you were able to map that land with a drone and see what was happening on the ground in that land in a way that you just couldn't do by foot and was too expensive to do through purchasing for example you know aircraft imagery. So that's an example of transparency really being aided by technology.