Good Practices and Innovations in Public Governance 2003-2011

2010 Category 2: Tanzania
Africa
Tanzania
2010 Category 2 — 2nd Place Winner
Property and Business Formalisation Programme
(MKURABITA)
President’s Office—State House
Description
This is a community-empowering initiative to legalize property ownership in the informal
sector to facilitate the participation of the marginalized majority in the national
economy.
Summary
MKURABITA is the Kiswahili acronym for the Property and Business Formalisation
Programme, a government initiative designed to provide the legal and institutional
framework to make property and business rights accessible to all members of the
public at very affordable rates. Ultimately the programme aims to empower property
and business owners in the informal sector to gain entry into the formal market economy.
It is expected that they will use their formalized assets to access financial capital
to facilitate their participation in the national economy. Key benefits from this
initiative include a capacity development process at the village and national levels
that has created a cadre of surveyors, land administrators, hand-held GPS users, experts
in geographic information systems (GIS) and land adjudicators.
The Problem
The initiative was designed to address the extensive extralegal (informal) sector in
the country, which is a result of historical events. During the colonial era, laws and
rules allowed few people—mostly foreigners—to control formal trade and land,
leaving natives to fend for themselves in the informal sector. This situation led to the
existence of a dual system of property and business ownership whereby the poor
majorities in Tanzania own and exchange assets outside the legal framework and cannot
use their holdings to create sufficient wealth for social and economic advancement.
This dual system persisted even after the post-independence attempts to unify
business and property systems under public ownership through the Arusha Declaration
of 1967.
Following the Arusha Declaration, the Government of Tanzania implemented a series
of macroeconomic and legal reforms that led to impressive improvement in the country’s
macroeconomic performance. However, in 2003–2004, it became obvious to the
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