GeoRAD Solutions Is Using AI to Fix Nigeria’s Land Record Problem, Starting From One Frustrating Project

In 2018, Abah Edebo James was leading a 36-person team tasked with digitizing over one million survey plan records for the Lagos Enhanced GIS Project. The work was supposed to take months. It quickly became clear it would take well over a year.

Watching skilled professionals spend hours manually vectorizing survey plans one by one, James looked for software that could automate the process. He found nothing. That gap became GeoRAD Solutions.

The Ogun State startup is building digital infrastructure for Nigeria’s land economy, starting with MapLy, an AI-powered platform that transforms paper-based land records into trusted digital data. By combining artificial intelligence, geospatial science, and automation, MapLy helps governments and organizations process and manage land records faster, with greater accuracy and data integrity than manual workflows allow.

The impact of the platform is already measurable. During an ongoing government pilot, MapLy reduced survey plan processing time from 10 to 15 minutes per plan using existing manual methods to just 2 to 3 minutes per plan, a reduction of over 70 percent. In batch processing mode, average processing time drops further to around 45 seconds per survey plan, enabling agencies to digitize significantly larger volumes of records without sacrificing consistency or accuracy.

Beyond digitization, GeoRAD Solutions is also developing PlotSight, a land intelligence and verification platform designed to let professionals, businesses, financial institutions, and citizens instantly verify land information and assess risk before transactions take place. The two products together address both the supply side of the problem, getting records into trusted digital form, and the demand side, making that information instantly usable for decisions that matter.

The work is gaining recognition at serious levels. MapLy has been peer-reviewed and presented at the Annual General Meeting of the Nigerian Institution of Surveyors and accepted for poster presentation at the International Federation of Surveyors Working World Congress. GeoRAD Solutions is also an official member of the global Esri Partner Network and was selected into iHatch Cohort 5, the national innovation programme backed by ONDI, NITDA, the Federal Ministry of Communications, Innovation and Digital Economy, and JICA.

The problem James is solving is not a niche one. Land fraud, slow title processing, and inaccessible records hold back investment, delay development, and leave citizens unable to properly protect their most valuable asset. When land records become trusted and instantly accessible, the downstream effects touch banking, construction, urban planning, and economic development at scale.

GeoRAD Solutions is starting with land. But the vision is broader: building trusted geospatial infrastructure for emerging markets by transforming fragmented spatial records into intelligent digital systems that strengthen institutions and accelerate how societies plan, build, and grow.