Today the Coalition launches Harnessing Urbanisation for Development: Roadmap for Tanzania’s Urban Development Policy in collaboration with the Ministry of Finance and Planning for the Government of Tanzania and the Economic and Social Research Foundation. The report was launched in Dodoma, Tanzania, at an event attended by senior government officials from the Ministries of Finance and Planning; Land, Housing and Human Settlement Development; and the President’s Office for Regional Administration and Local Government.

The Roadmap is a product of the Tanzania Urbanisation Laboratory (TULab), which convened a cadre of Tanzanian urbanists from government, SOEs, academia, civil society, and business in a two-year coproduction process. The process relied on an innovation competition, interviews, and four intensely deliberated background papers documenting challenges and opportunities for Tanzanian cities. The roadmap will act as an aid in the creation of an urban development policy, highlighting the new institutions and policy innovations that will be necessary if the growth of Tanzania’s urban spaces is to drive national development and ensure climate safety. These innovations and institutions include:

• consolidating land classification systems to demarcate distinctions between residential, industrial, commercial, and conservation land in cities;
• radically accelerating the upgrading of tenure security through land surveying and titling that draws on new technology and partnerships with civil society;
• significantly increasing the proportion of national budget transferred to urban local government authorities, as well as improving reliability in the timing of these transfers, to enable local planning and the application of fiscal strategy at the city scale;
• restoring ministerial governance of state owned enterprises (SOE), as SOE investment is crucial to urban development, and has a lasting impact on urban spatial form and the trajectory of economic growth in Tanzanian cities;
• increasing electricity supply five-fold between 2017 and 2025 whilst embedding low-carbon electrification as an imperative in order to ensure that urbanisation becomes an engine of growth and sustainable development;
• creating new capacity within government to better understand and partner with the informal sector; and
• tailoring the upcoming industrial strategy in Five Year Development Plan III (2021/22–2025/26) to link up Tanzania’s manufacturing sector with the steady growth in demand for goods, services, and clean technologies from cities in the region.

View the report