Good Practices and Innovations in Public Governance 2003-2011

2008 Category 1
working with the village land-use planning committees and establishing GIS laboratories
in districts. These efforts are leading to a more effective and responsive public
administrative in Tanzania.
Phase 4 of MKURABITA will focus on capital formation and good governance. The
activities in this phase will involve formulating and implementing recommendations for
connecting the newly formalized properties to national, regional and international capital
markets and allowing property to be leveraged to create capital and generate more wealth.
Replicability and Sustainability
By empowering local authorities and helping build their capacity to formalize landholdings
and businesses, MKURABITA is moving Tanzania toward sustainable delivery
of secured property rights. Specific achievements include:
• Efficient formalization of village land. Before implementation of the initiative,
all land formalization matters were handled by the Centre by the Ministry of
Lands, Housing and Human Settlement Development. Now that the process
has been decentralized, the time spent formalizing village land has been significantly
reduced—from six months to two months.
• Enhanced professionalism through the creation of a database of experts. The
capacity-building process carried out from the national to village level has created
a sustainable database of professionals in the management of property rights
delivery and secured rights in the country. The process created surveyors, land
administrators, hand-held GPS users, GIS experts, land adjudicators, etc.
• Creation of a sustainable land management process within District Councils.
Trained ward teams can be used to facilitate land formalization in neighbouring
wards and villages. In this way, the formalization process will be smoothly
and speedily carried out all over the country. The villagers’ ownership of the
process assures further continuation and sustainability.
• Cost savings. Before the implementation of MKURABITA, the cost of formalizing
land in one village was approximately 35 million Tanzanian shillings
(US$23,171. After the initiative was introduced, the cost went down to approximately
15 million Tanzanian shillings (US$9930).
• Availability and accessibility of land management information in the District
Councils. The creation of GIS laboratories at the district level has ensured that
information related to property management issues in a given district is available
and easily accessible.
Lessons Learned
The MKURABITA initiative is a good example of the public being the providers of
a service—in this case, property formalization—and, at the same time, the beneficia-
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