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

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.