Practices in Institutionalizing GIS for Revenue Mobilization: The Case of Secondary Cities in Tanzania

Abstract

Increasingly Geographical Information System (GIS) has been seen as an important infrastructure component for revenue enhancement and urban development management as used for property identification, verification, taxation and spatial development governance. The paper is an attempt to learn from the experiences of developing GIS in Tanzania, which has also taken place in many other Sub-Saharan countries, for the purpose of boosting revenue collection and enhance land governance functions. The paper was developed through the review of the policy and program evaluation documents, discussions in the respective cities, authors’ support to established alternative GIS architecture in some cities and evaluations of the same at later stages. Some of the major findings from the study were that although a lot of donor and government resources had been invested in the hardware and short terms training as well as consultants on GIS, there were no comprehensive programmes that ensured coherent capacities and targets on the GIS development. As a result, the GIS has never been fully institutionalized in the business processes of the municipal authorities. Relevantly, system architectures were non-conformable with the legal mandates of some crucial spatial data custodians in cities. Failure to spread GIS and to have proper system architecture is also attributed by a single focus nature of the systems developed, either property tax or revenue or land use planning while ignoring other needs and stakeholders who would contribute in sustaining the systems.