TITLE:
Good Governance, Efficiency and the Provision of Planned Land for Orderly Development in African Cities: The Case of the 20,000 Planned Land Plots Project in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania
AUTHORS:
Joseph Mukasa Lusugga Kironde
KEYWORDS:
Planned Development, Cost Recovery, Good Governance, Exclusion
JOURNAL NAME:
Current Urban Studies,
Vol.3 No.4,
December
9,
2015
ABSTRACT: In many African cities, governments have been unable to provide sufficient appropriately located
and priced planned and serviced urban land to meet demand. As a result, informal settlements are
growing faster than the rest of the city. Efforts to deal with this situation are hampered by several
factors including lack of resources to acquire and service land to forestall haphazard development.
In 2003, the Ministry of Lands, using borrowed funds from the Treasury, undertook an ambitious
land servicing project in Dar es Salaam. The aims were to: alleviate the shortage of surveyed and
serviced urban plots; tackle the rapid increase of informal settlements; control land speculation;
address corruption; complement the national drive to reduce poverty; develop satellite towns;
and implement the ruling Party’s manifesto on liveable human settlements. This paper evaluates
this undertaking from a good governance point of view. The Project was efficiently implemented.
Over 40,000 plots were produced and sold; the invested billions of shillings were recouped several
times over; and replication was enabled. However, it increased poverty among those whose land
was acquired; and fuelled the growth of informal settlements. With less than 17% of the plots categorized
as low cost, the Project was not pro-poor. Outcomes included the realization that land
had value that could be unlocked with servicing. This has spawned several projects involving servicing
land for sale, undertaken by other authorities and the private sector. This, however, is excluding
low income households. The Project’s achievements were realized at the expense of good
land governance exemplified by: lack of coordination among key players; shortfalls in transparency,
public participation, institutional decentralisation and inclusiveness; and neglect of environmental
fallouts. Low income households were in practice excluded from this and subsequent
money-driven land delivery schemes, a trend that needs to be reversed to avoid social polarization.