TITLE:
Practices in Institutionalizing GIS for Revenue Mobilization: The Case of Secondary Cities in Tanzania
AUTHORS:
Ally Namangaya
KEYWORDS:
Geographical Information System (GIS), Revenue Collection, Property Taxes, Tanzania
JOURNAL NAME:
Current Urban Studies,
Vol.6 No.4,
December
27,
2018
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.