Using Crowdsourcing to Examine Land Acquisitions in Ethiopia

Land grabbing is a global phenomenon that has radically increased since 2005. Global and national estimates are highly uncertain due to the rapid pace of acquisition and lack of transparency. Here we demonstrate that through the use of the Geo-Wiki crowdsourcing tool and volunteers, we can estimate areas of settlement and cultivation that are part of large-scale land transactions for known areas where land acquisitions have taken place as well as for Ethiopia as a whole.