Cost-effectiveness of a Satellite-based Approach to Maintaining a Property Database

Maintaining up-to-date and accurate information about all assets and services owned and operated by organisations is essential for good governance. Often insufficient attention or resources are provided to ensure this occurs and in rapidly changing environments, such as exist in the developing world, where increasing urbanisation is a major factor, information about land and property is all too often inaccurate, considerably out of date and not maintained in any meaningful way. The change detection project in Dakar, which uses the analysis of Very High Resolution satellite imagery to identify urban change, provides a means to help keep the database of land and property up-to-date at reasonable cost. However it is only of benefit if, upon the completion of a Cost-Effectiveness Analysis (CEA), the method adopted is also demonstrably shown to be carried out at a lower cost than the alternative approaches, such as a field- only based approach.