land and connectivity - ACRC

Between law and praxis: Navigating land governance in Kampala’s informal settlements

Hannah — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 07:00:00 +0000

By Muhamed Lunyago, CLASK action research project co-lead

Buying a piece of land – locally referred to as a “plot”, though not in the formal sense of a plot – in Kampala’s informal settlements is a complex experience.

From the outset, the buyer is cautious about the different dynamics surrounding urban land transfers and the local politics involved. Before they can hand over their money, they will be advised to first see the chairperson of Local Council I (hereafter LCI – LCs is a broader structure from district to village, but LCI is the village-based administrative unit).

In Kisenyi, just like in many other Ugandan informal settlements, LCI chairpersons verify ownership of the land during transaction and draft, sign and stamp land agreements. They also act as witnesses to land transactions and, in case of a post-transfer dispute, as conflict mediators and court witnesses. The role they play and their power in local land governance has been reinforced by some Ugandan utility service providers.

A power paradox

Our action research in Kisenyi revealed that utility service providers frequently require letters of introduction from LCI leaders or LCI stamps on land agreements before water, electricity or other utility services are approved.

Yet the critical role LCIs play was found to be paradoxical, as LCI chairpersons and committees have no explicit legal mandate over land administration in Uganda. Despite the fact that Uganda’s legal, administrative and policy frameworks assign land administration to mandated institutions under the Ministry of Lands, Housing and Urban Development (MLHUD), everyday forms of land governance happen within local communities, under the stewardship of LCI leaders.

As such, LCIs, especially chairpersons, have become hugely influential in land transfers in informal settlements. But with no legal mandate, a key question is how Uganda’s village-based leaders became such influential local land governance actors? The reality – which forms part of a broader critique of colonial and postcolonial governance – is that institutions are not constituted solely by formal rules, but also through everyday practices, relationships and established forms of trust. This is especially the case in contexts marked by historical vulnerability.

Local land governance frameworks…

We understand that Uganda runs what has been described (if not romanticised) as Africa’s most decentralised local governance system. Since the 1990s, when it was formalised through the Local Government Act of 1997, local councils have so far formed the core of this governance framework (from the city to the village level). Notably, the LCI Executive Committee is legally recognised as the lowest level of administration in both rural and urban areas, with statutory responsibilities including maintaining local security, mobilising communities to participate in government programmes, resolving local disputes and performing other administrative functions.

But regarding land matters, LCI committees have no legal mandate, as authority over land administration is vested in a separate institutional framework. As mentioned earlier, the MLHUD is at the apex of this framework, overseeing land governance through institutions such as the Ministerial Zonal Offices, District Land Boards, District Land Officers, Area Land Committees and Land Recorders. Principally, the responsibility for land administration rests firmly with these mandated land institutions.

…and local realities

This legal recognition, however, tells only part of the story – particularly when it comes to contexts like informal settlements, where small-scale yet everyday land transfers are predominant. While legislation has established a formal system of land administration through mandated institutions and legal procedures, communities have concomitantly developed an informal system of land governance that operates alongside it.

As Kampala’s urban Gen-Z say, “ku ground biralamu” (“the reality is different on the ground”). Residents often rely on “trusted” local actors to facilitate land transfers, verify ownership claims and resolve disputes. It is within this somewhat parallel system that LCIs have become essential.

With informal settlements rarely conforming to formal land administration workings, most land is undocumented and state institutions lack sufficient knowledge to verify competing claims. This can especially be seen in Kampala, with the layered nature of rights and claims on Mailo land. (The majority of land in Kisenyi is under Mailo land tenure, protecting the interests of both title owners and lawful occupants/tenants.) These and other reasons have left a land governance lacuna that needed to be filled.

Fulfilling community needs

With time, communities found resolve in LCI leaders. Their success in these spaces comes from their intimate knowledge of local communities – a currency that mandated state institutions can barely afford. As some LCI chairpersons have ruled their villages since Resistance Councils (RCs) were established, their historical memory of land occupancy, inheritance arrangements, existing encumbrances on land, rightful ownership and other matters is unmatched.

By implication, their legitimacy is derived from their social proximity, historical knowledge, accumulated trust and embeddedness in society. As our research in Kisenyi shows, LCIs routinely find themselves writing and signing land agreements, witnessing land transfers, verifying identities of land sellers and buyers, mediating conflicts and offering custody to copies (sometimes originals) of land-related records.

Over time, these roles have become institutionalised through everyday practices, positioning LCIs as the first point of contact in land matters at the local level for a whopping majority of informal urbanites. Of course, in doing so, they have also become local gatekeepers of land transfers and related matters, with their lack of legal mandate arguably creating vulnerabilities and opening room for abuse.

Emerging lessons from Kisenyi

From the experience of Kisenyi, four (of the many) lessons are worth stressing:

1. Institutional authority is not always entirely synonymous with juridical authority. It is often relational, since it is produced and reproduced through recurring interactions, trust and communal recognition. The power of LCI leaders on land matters in Kisenyi is, for instance, reproduced through everyday practices of land transfers.

2. Informality in land transfers should be seen as internal to the state, not external. LCIs are legally established government structures performing somewhat illegal/unofficial roles. As such, they are “caught in the middle” of operating as state structures and performing informal community practices. In essence, state authority is seen to be contested and negotiated in informal settlements.

3. Effective, inclusive and people-centred governance should not be dictated by statutory authority and institutional configurations. Rather, it should also be shaped by socially embedded knowledge and practices.

4. Legal and policy regimes alone cannot sustain land governance in contexts characterised by informality, fragility and historical vulnerability.

Reconciling land system vulnerabilities

In closing, we should not forget the warning from eminent political theorist, Mahmood Mamdani, in his newest book that the entire Ugandan political system has become fragile and vulnerable, with corruption becoming structural. This means that the vulnerability of LCIs is not an isolated occurrence but a systemic problem.

Challenges that may come with recognition of LCIs in land administration, and whether they should participate in local land governance, are very legitimate concerns. Far more important, however, is how the Ugandan state should respond to this entrenched reality. A few options emerged during our action research, including:

> Formal acknowledgment and regulation of the functions that LCIs already perform;

> Capacitating LCIs through trainings, recognising and streamlining their roles, defining their surcharges;

> Creation of stronger institutional linkages between LCIs and mandated structures.

We will explore these options and their limitations in more detail in future blog posts from the CLASK team.

It will be interesting to explore how the state goes about reconciling these everyday practices with socially acceptable, equitable and inclusive aspects of the law – given that the ongoing review of the Uganda National Land Policy pointed to the contradictory yet relevant role of LCIs.

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Unpacking the complexity of informal urban land governance in Kisenyi informal settlement, Kampala

Hannah — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 07:00:00 +0000

By Muhamed Lunyago, CLASK action research project co-lead, and Joseph Mukasa, CLASK project administrator

During ACRC’s foundation phase, the Kampala land and connectivity domain research revealed how relevant and critical local councils (LCs) are in land transfers, especially in informal settlements. This is because they were drawing land agreements, witnessing and validating land ownership transfers/transactions, and participating in different forms and aspects of land transfers.

The team observed that the active participation of LCs in land transfers was producing and/or fuelling conflicts – exacerbating tensions between landlords and tenants, land buyers and tenants, and land buyers and land sellers.

To deepen our understanding of this challenge, we are conducting action research in Kisenyi informal settlement in Kampala, through a project titled “Capacitating local councils for secure land transfers in Kisenyi informal settlements, Kampala City (CLASK)”. We prioritised the issue of LC involvement in land transfers in the first phase of the action research.

Rooftops of Kisenyi informal settlement, Kampala. Credit: Slum Dwellers International / Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

Contextualising the CLASK study

Land transfer in this context does not refer to the formal transfer of registered land, but to any form of land transaction – whether by gifting, buying or selling of registered or unregistered land – as long as the LCs are involved. This conceptualisation differs from the state conception of transfer, which focuses on the registered land.

By engaging different stakeholders – including LC leaders, local communities, government institutions, land brokers, representatives from traditional institutions, lawyers and some NGOs – the research aimed to establish what the LCs do, how they do it and what challenges they face. All this was done to unpack the complex nature of informal urban land governance, access, broader relations, contestations and conflicts in informal settlements, through the lens of Kisenyi.

Through interrogating this complex urban development challenge, the CLASK project team prioritised co-designing a solution to this intractable challenge. The team collected data through desk reviews, focus group discussions, interviews, field workshops and site visits. To understand the kind of land agreements that the LCs were writing and/or witnessing, we analysed different sample land agreements written by LC leaders and lawyers, using a comparative approach.

An action research meeting. Credit: Muhamed Lunyago

Is inclusion too evasive?

The challenge of including vulnerable groups was raised as a critical concern in transfer processes. Currently, the LC committee has representatives for women, people with disabilities and youth. However, in most cases during land transfers, special representatives are not invited.

In instances where they are called on, this is often done at a late stage, making it difficult for them to attend meetings or appear during land transfers. Study participants indicated this is done deliberately to exclude them – while giving the impression that there were attempts to include them – and happens even in instances where vulnerable people are directly involved in the transaction as buyers or sellers. This cast a lot of doubt on the whole issue of inclusion on LC committees – akin to rubber-stamping.

Presentation on points to consider in an agreement. Credit: Muhamed Lunyago

Next steps towards co-creating solutions

Findings from the initial CLASK research reiterate the contribution of LCs in bridging communities’ access to land transactions and governance. They also point to legal limitations, capacity gaps and questions around integrity, due diligence, inclusion and competing interests as critical impediments.

Building on this preliminary work, the CLASK team is working with communities and stakeholders in the land sector to co-create potential solutions that address some of these gaps and push for secure land transfer services.

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Nouvelle étude : Mieux comprendre les dynamiques urbaines et l’arrangement politique de Bukavu

Hannah — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 07:00:00 +0000

Ville d’environ 1,3 million d’habitants située à l’est de la République démocratique du Congo (RDC), Bukavu est confrontée à des défis importants et complexes liés à la gouvernance, à la décentralisation, à l’urbanisation et à la gestion des ressources. La croissance rapide de la population, qui devrait doubler d’ici 2030 et tripler d’ici 2050, ne fait qu’exacerber les problèmes rencontrés par les habitants de la ville, en particulier ceux qui vivent dans des bidonvilles.

Dans un nouveau rapport de l’ACRC, Emery Mushagalusa Mudinga, Aymar Nyenyezi Bisoka et Philippe Mulumeoderhwa Kaganda examinent comment la politique et les systèmes urbains influencent et sont influencés par les défis du développement urbain à Bukavu dans divers domaines.

Menées entre 2022 et 2023, la recherche et l’analyse ne couvrent pas les faits nouveaux à Bukavu depuis que la ville est tombée sous le contrôle des rebelles de l’Alliance Fleuve Congo/Mouvement du 23 Mars (AFC/M23) en février 2025. Cette nouvelle évolution du contexte politique pourrait faire l’objet d’études futures.

L’héritage de la colonisation et des conflits

Divisée en trois subdivisions administratives, appelées communes, et en 20 quartiers, Bukavu était un modèle de ségrégation urbaine dans les années 1950 à la suite de la colonisation belge et comportait des zones séparées pour les résidents blancs et noirs. Lorsqu’en 1960 la RDC accéda à son indépendance, l’évolution de la composition raciale de la ville fut accompagnée d’une détérioration urbaine progressive, accélérée par un afflux de réfugiés du génocide rwandais en 1994.

L’insécurité rurale associée aux opportunités économiques liées aux ressources minières a alimenté la croissance démographique, la construction de bidonvilles et la détérioration des conditions de vie dans la ville. Hormis le centre-ville, tous les quartiers de Bukavu et les zones environnantes abritent des populations à faibles revenus et défavorisées.

Comprendre la politique locale et nationale

Sur le plan politique, malgré la stabilité nationale depuis 2006, la gouvernance locale à Bukavu avant février 2025 reste marquée par le clientélisme et l’inefficacité. La décentralisation a été mise en œuvre en 2016 afin de fournir aux provinces les ressources nécessaires à une gestion efficace, mais ces efforts ont été entravés par les faibles taux de mise en œuvre des budgets provinciaux et les disparités au niveau de la répartition des ressources. Malgré la mise en œuvre de certaines initiatives visant à améliorer les conditions de vie et à légitimer l’État après 2019, les problèmes de gouvernance, de corruption et de gestion des ressources publiques persistent.

En tant que chef-lieu de la province du Sud Kivu, Bukavu a joué un rôle essentiel au niveau de l’arrangement politique national en raison de son rôle de centre de mobilisation politique. La dynamique du pouvoir dans la ville était marquée par des divisions ethniques, politiques, géographiques et professionnelles ; les élites locales étant en mesure d’influencer les négociations politiques au niveau central.

Relever des défis systémiques complexes

Bukavu est structurée en trois zones (le centre-ville, les quartiers populaires et les bidonvilles) et son urbanisation a largement dépassé les prévisions du plan de développement de 1957. Cette situation a entraîné une surpopulation et une utilisation inefficace des sols, avec un système de transport entravé par le mauvais état des routes et des infrastructures d’eau et d’énergie inadaptées à la population croissante de la ville. Les problèmes de violence urbaine et autres problèmes de sécurité touchent principalement les habitants des zones les moins développées. L’insécurité alimentaire est également élevée, plus de deux ménages sur cinq n’ayant pas accès à une alimentation saine.

L’incapacité des autorités municipales à gérer les systèmes de la ville a conduit de nombreux acteurs non étatiques, y compris des ONG, des leaders locaux et le secteur privé, à jouer un rôle croissant dans la fourniture des services essentiels, tels que l’eau, l’hygiène et l’assainissement, la sécurité et les transports. Cependant, cette multiplicité d’acteurs a également été source de confusion et de concurrence, sans pour autant améliorer le fonctionnement de ces services.

Nos études sur le développement urbain menées à Bukavu ont permis de dégager les principales conclusions suivantes :

La terre et la connectivité

La croissance démographique, largement alimentée par l’exode rural, a entraîné une augmentation de la demande de logements et de parcelles. La ville étant confinée dans une zone de seulement 60 km2, cela a conduit à la fragmentation des parcelles dans le centre et à la périphérie de la ville ainsi qu’à l’occupation par les habitants des zones rurales de terrains impropres à la construction. Les autorités ont créé de nouveaux quartiers pour tenter d’y remédier, mais sans développer ensuite les infrastructures adéquates, donnant ainsi lieu à un paysage urbain désordonné.

L’étude identifie huit défis majeurs dans ce domaine : la promiscuité de l’habitat dans les quartiers populaires ; la vulnérabilité des ménages à faible revenu face à la surenchère des prix de la terre et du loyer ; l’installation de plus de 60 % de la population sur des sites impropres à la construction (exposés aux risques d’affaissement, d’érosion et d’inondations) ; l’insécurité foncière ; les conflits liés à l’accaparement de la terre ; la mauvaise gestion préjudiciable des revenus fonciers ; l’obstruction ou l’inexistence de routes dans certains quartiers ; et l’enclavement de la ville, causée par un mauvais état des routes.

La sécurité et la sûreté

De nombreux facteurs ont contribué à l’insécurité de Bukavu au cours des dernières décennies, dont l’afflux de réfugiés à la suite du génocide de 1994 au Rwanda, la surpopulation résultant de l’exode rural, la persistance de groupes armés, l’émergence des groupes de sécurité locaux informels, l’insuffisance des salaires et les taux de chômage élevés, pour n’en citer que quelques-uns. La capacité et les moyens limités des forces de sécurité officielles, ainsi que les problèmes liés à l’utilisation des terres (comme les constructions anarchiques et la dégradation des infrastructures) ont également contribué à cette insécurité omniprésente.

Les quartiers situés dans les zones surpeuplées et sous-développées de Bukavu se sont révélés les plus touchés, l’insécurité y prenant généralement la forme d’une criminalité urbaine. Les lieux publics, y compris les marchés et les grandes places publiques, sont également des lieux d’insécurité permanente ou sporadique dans la ville. Si des associations locales de sécurité ont vu le jour dans certaines régions pour contribuer à résoudre ces problèmes, leur succès dépend de leur légitimité, de la couverture d’une zone géographique restreinte, du soutien matériel et financier des habitants et de l’efficacité de leurs dirigeants.

La santé, le bien-être et la nutrition

La détérioration continue des chaînes d’approvisionnement alimentaire a rendu difficile l’accès des habitants de Bukavu à une alimentation saine, en particulier pour les groupes vulnérables. Pas moins de 43 % des ménages de la ville étaient en situation d’insécurité alimentaire, principalement dans la commune d’Ibanda, où de nombreuses familles vivent dans la pauvreté et n’ont pas les moyens de se procurer une nourriture suffisante et saine. L’accès à l’eau potable fait également cruellement défaut.

Le coût élevé et l’accès limité à des produits alimentaires sains et de qualité ont entraîné une augmentation de la consommation d’aliments hautement transformés. Riches en graisses et en sucre, ces aliments transformés augmentent la prévalence des maladies non transmissibles, telles que l’obésité, le diabète et l’hypertension. La malnutrition des enfants, des femmes enceintes et des mères allaitantes constitue également un grave problème de santé publique.

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New research: Understanding Bukavu’s urban dynamics and political settlement

Hannah — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 07:00:00 +0000

Home to around 1.3 million people, Bukavu in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) faces significant and complex challenges related to governance, decentralisation, urbanisation and resource management. With the population expected to double by 2030 and triple by 2050, this rapid growth is only set to exacerbate the issues encountered by city residents – especially those living in informal settlements.

A new ACRC report by Emery Mushagalusa Mudinga, Aymar Nyenyezi Bisoka and Philippe Mulumeoderhwa Kaganda analyses how politics and urban systems shape – and are shaped by – these urban development challenges in Bukavu, across a range of domains.

Conducted between 2022-2023, the research and analysis do not cover developments in Bukavu since the city fell under the control of rebels from the Alliance Fleuve Congo/Mouvement du 23 Mars (AFC/M23) in February 2025. This new development in the political context may be the subject of future studies.

Legacies of colonisation and conflict

Divided into three administrative subdivisions, known as “communes”, and 20 neighbourhoods, Bukavu was a model of urban segregation in the 1950s, as a result of Belgian colonisation, with separate areas for white and black residents. When DRC declared independence in 1960, the city underwent a transformation of its racial composition and a gradual urban deterioration – accelerated by an influx of refugees from the Rwandan genocide in 1994.

A combination of rural insecurity and economic opportunities – linked to mineral resources – has fuelled population growth, informal construction and worsening living conditions in the city. Apart from the city centre, all of Bukavu’s neighbourhoods and surrounding areas are home to low-income and disadvantaged populations.

Understanding city and national politics

Politically, despite national stability since 2006, local governance in Bukavu prior to February 2025 remained marked by clientelism and inefficiency. Decentralisation was implemented in 2016 to provide provinces with resources for effective management, but low implementation rates of provincial budgets and resource distribution disparities hampered these efforts. Although some initiatives aimed at improving living conditions and legitimising the state were rolled out after 2019, challenges around governance, corruption and public resource management persisted.

As the capital of South Kivu province, Bukavu was critical to the national political settlement because of its role as a centre of political mobilisation. City power dynamics were marked by ethnic, political, geographic and professional divisions, with local elites able to influence political negotiations at a central level.

Navigating complex systemic challenges

Divided into three zones – the city centre, working-class neighbourhoods and informal settlements – Bukavu’s level of urbanisation has far exceeded forecasts of the 1957 development plan. This led to overpopulation and inefficient land use, with a transport system hampered by poor road conditions, and water and energy infrastructure inadequate to serve the city’s growing population. Issues of urban violence and other security problems were found to mainly affect residents living in less developed areas, while food insecurity is also high, with more than two in five households lacking access to healthy food.

The inability of municipal authorities to manage the city’s systems led to multiple non-state actors – including NGOs, local leaders and the private sector – playing an increasing role in the provision of essential services such as water, hygiene and sanitation, security and transport. Yet this multiplicity of actors created confusion and competition, without improving functionality.

Key insights from the urban development domain studies undertaken in Bukavu include:

Land and connectivity

Population growth, largely fuelled by rural migration, led to increased demand for housing and land. With the city confined to an area of just 60km2, this led to the fragmentation of plots in the city centre and outskirts, and rural residents occupying land unsuitable for building. The authorities subdivided new neighbourhoods to try to deal with this, but without subsequent adequate infrastructure development, resulting in a disordered urban landscape.

The research identifies eight key challenges within this domain: overcrowded housing in working-class neighbourhoods; vulnerability of low-income households to rising land prices and rents; more than 60% residents living on sites unsuitable for construction (exposed to risks of subsidence, erosion and flooding); land tenure insecurity; conflicts linked to land grabbing; damaging mismanagement of land revenues; obstruction or absence of roads in certain neighbourhoods; and the city’s isolation, resulting from poor road maintenance.

Safety and security

Many factors contributed to the insecurity experienced by Bukavu over the last few decades, including the influx of refugees following the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, overpopulation as a result of rural migration, the persistence of armed groups, the emergence of informal local security groups, inadequate salaries and high unemployment rates, to name a few. The limited capacity and capabilities within official security forces, along with issues related to land use – such as uncontrolled construction and deteriorating infrastructure – also contributed to this pervasive insecurity.

Neighbourhoods in overpopulated and underdeveloped areas of Bukavu were found to be most affected, where insecurity generally took the form of urban crime. Public places, including markets and large public squares, were also sites of permanent or sporadic insecurity in the city. While local security associations emerged in some areas to help address these issues, their success depended on them having legitimacy, covering a small geographic area, receiving material and financial support from residents, and having effective leadership.

Health, wellbeing and nutrition

Ongoing weakening of food supply chains made it difficult for Bukavu’s residents to access healthy food, especially for vulnerable groups. As many as 43% of households in the city were food insecure, mainly in the commune of Ibanda, where many families live in poverty and cannot afford sufficient, healthy food. There was also a severe lack of access to safe drinking water.

The high cost of and limited access to quality, healthy food items, along with a lack of time to prepare nutritious meals, led to increased consumption of highly processed foods. Rich in fats and sugars, these processed foods increase the prevalence of non-communicable diseases, such as obesity, diabetes and hypertension. Malnutrition among children and pregnant and breastfeeding women was also a serious public health problem.

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Read the research brief

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What drives land value change in African cities? Unlocking value and the prospects for progressive reform

Hannah — Thu, 28 Aug 2025 07:00:00 +0000

By Tom Goodfellow, University of Sheffield, co-lead of ACRC’s land and connectivity domain research

The urgency of developing more effective mechanisms to capture rising land values for urban infrastructure and services is now widely acknowledged. It is also accepted that this is highly challenging; as well as facing numerous bureaucratic obstacles, urban land management is entwined with processes of political and economic bargaining, and there are often intense efforts by non-state actors (including brokers) to capture large portions of land value for themselves.

A recent ACRC workshop in Accra on property taxation, linked to earlier work in the land and connectivity domain, highlighted the ongoing importance of effective valuation. Valuation itself faces numerous technical and political challenges: accurately recording land and property values can be expensive, technically complex and subject to all kinds of interference. In many countries, taxing urban land is so fraught that only the buildings on it are valued, leaving a substantial part of property wealth untouched.

In order to unlock land values as a tool of redistribution, it is important to understand what actually shapes them, and which factors stimulate land value change. Why do some areas of a city – or some specific plots of land – become so much more valuable than others? This matters, because the legitimacy of land value capture is rooted in certain assumptions about how value is created. These assumptions have proved to be questionable in many African cities.

Our collective work in the land and connectivity domain report highlighted some of the actual drivers of land value change in the cities we examined: Accra, Bukavu, Harare, Kampala, Maiduguri and Mogadishu. Here, I build on this to consider how these findings challenge some of the dominant notions on which ideas of value capture are based.

“Paradigmatic ideas” about land value change

Answers to the question of what shapes land values might seem obvious, and there are plenty of proposed mechanisms posited in the disciplines of economics and planning, based largely on the experiences of advanced industrial economies. In the language of ACRC’s conceptual framework, a set of “paradigmatic ideas” dominates assumptions about land value change and feeds into policy discourses, both internationally and at more local levels.

These paradigmatic ideas depend heavily on a distinction between private property as the main site of value, and public infrastructure and public regulation as primary drivers of that value.

The received wisdom is that (private) land value increases are largely driven by three factors:

1. Increased economic activity or prosperity in an area, which inflates demand for the land

2. Public infrastructure investments that make the land more desirable

3. Changes to planning permission/regulations that again increase its desirability and therefore value

The logic, then, is that for factors 2 and 3, the uplift in value is caused by the state – by public infrastructure and regulation – and therefore it can legitimately be recaptured by the state for redistribution.

Unsettling the received wisdom

But what if much of the infrastructure provided to service urban land in an urban area is not public, but rather provided by private (and often informal) providers? What if regulations about what can and can’t be built in an area are determined less by the state than by other kinds of authority? And, moreover, what if the land in question is not straightforwardly “private”, such that any official owner being taxed also has to contend with paying a range of other levies related to more collective territorial claims on the land?

Our research revealed such dynamics in a number of cities. It suggests that the paradigmatic ideas do not represent the whole story about drivers of value change, and that context-specific institutions and practices are central. Attention to contextual “price signals” has often been present in land rent theory and the “hedonic modelling” used by real estate researchers and analysts – yet this often gets lost in contemporary value capture discourses, and such models also miss some of the most important factors in the cities we studied.

Aerial view over Maiduguri, Nigera. Photo credit: IRC

The real drivers of land value change: Findings from the land and connectivity domain

Our studies unsettle this assumption that urban property is primarily private and infrastructure is primarily public. This is particularly true if we consider property development in peripheral or suburban areas, which is taking place across many African cities.

Let’s first consider the idea of private property. In a city such as Accra or Lagos, individual property rights and heightened land commodification are very real, but co-exist and overlap with “customary” forms of tenure. Thus, while sales to individuals are common, various other actors continue to make claims to benefit from the land’s use, often based on longstanding collective ancestral rights. A share of any increase in the value of this land is therefore seen as rightfully belonging not just to the official owner but also a range of (often quite diffuse) actors. In Accra, for example, various categories of “land guards”, with varying degrees of popular and historical legitimacy, claim fees and levies for different stages in the development of property on land.

When land retains these social and collective attributes, focusing just on the property relation – for example, through taxing the owner – without attention to these other dynamics, it can result in feelings of “over taxation” and illegitimacy.

When it comes to the question of infrastructure provision and regulation, the picture from our cities also diverges substantially from the paradigmatic ideas. While major public infrastructure such as roads does often substantially bolster land value, in other cases the opposite occurs. In examples from Maiduguri and Kampala, certain road investments appeared to dampen or even reverse local rises in land value, due to having adverse impacts on personal security (such as if the road becomes associated with a rise in violent criminal activity, for instance), local population mobility, or the functioning of other infrastructure.

Moreover, the kinds of infrastructure that did significantly increase land values was often privately rather than publicly provided. In Mogadishu, for example, certain new suburbs were served with privately provided roads as well as private services such as schools, hospitals and green areas, all of which boosted land values. In peripheral areas of other cities, including Harare and Accra, the role of private actors in providing infrastructure – and sometimes also planning and regulatory services of various kinds – tells a broadly similar story.

Implications for urban reform

These findings must give us pause when thinking about appropriate routes for capturing land values. The idea of public interventions to boost (and recoup) privately held value makes less sense when, in practice, private interventions have been generating much of the value. Meanwhile, taxing land value is not straightforward in cases where it has not simply accrued to an identifiable private actor.

This is not to say that efforts towards property taxation and other forms of value capture should not be pursued. Indeed, they remain urgent. But as well as building government capacity to register values and collect taxes, there need to be ongoing efforts to build understanding on the moral and political principles underpinning property taxation, and public dialogue acknowledging the challenges people face paying tax alongside levies to non-state actors. These efforts need to be accompanied by incremental improvements to public infrastructure provision.

As so much of ACRC’s work had demonstrated, successful urban reform is rooted in trust, collective mobilisation and the building of reform coalitions. This is as true of property taxation as any other urban domain, and the better we understand the nature and drivers of the value to be taxed, the more likely that a collective agenda to redistribute this wealth will materialise.

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Urban economics in action: Addressing African cities’ challenges

Hannah — Mon, 23 Jun 2025 07:00:00 +0000

Earlier this month, our CEO Professor Diana Mitlin participated at the 9th Urbanization and Development Conference, organised by the World Bank and the International Growth Centre in Cape Town.

As a former economist, Diana has long been keen to bring economists into conversation with other development practitioners and researchers.

Reflecting on the varied discussions at the conference, Diana said:

“In many African cities, we are witnessing remarkable urban innovation. This is often driven by local governments working alongside organised communities, businesses and researchers. It is crucial that we recognise and nurture this organic growth.

There is immense value in integrating economics into urban studies; this interdisciplinary approach offers profound insights into the dynamics of urban development.

Conversely, it is equally important for economists to engage directly with urban realities, moving beyond abstract data to understand the complex, interwoven relationships that define our cities.”

You can watch Diana’s contributions to the conference below, where she presented “Understanding the contribution of housing to economic development”, pushing back again the idea of “consumption cities” and “sterile agglomeration”. Instead, she highlighted the economic potential of working with small-scale businesses located within informal settlements to generate growth from below.

Diana also acted as a discussant in a policy-focused session on solutions for prosperous African cities, emphasising the importance of understanding the realities of people within cities and the dominance of informal settlements, and also the role of urban reform coalitions.

Read our research on:

> Structural transformation

> Land and connectivity

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Systems change for water and sanitation in informal settlements: The Mukuru Special Planning Area

Christopher Jordan — Wed, 04 Jun 2025 13:39:21 +0000

By Patrick Njoroge and Evans Otibine

The Mukuru Special Planning Area in Nairobi is home to a population of about 400,000. Approximately 100,560 households occupy 689 acres of land. The informal settlement is situated between the Nairobi Industrial Area and Mombasa Road, comprising of Mukuru Kwa Njenga, Mukuru Kwa Reuben and Viwandani.

The three settlements primarily consist of temporary structures made of corrugated iron, with many families residing in 9m² single-room dwellings. Most of these units are arranged within plots that contain ten rooms organised around a small internal courtyard. Approximately 94% of the residents in these three informal settlements are tenants who pay rent to the owners of the structures, who do not own the land on which they have built.

Water and sanitation challenges

Informal suppliers dominate water and sanitation services in this settlement. Water is distributed by vendors through kiosks or delivered door-to-door using handcarts. The informal, illegal and often chaotic system of piping – commonly referred to as “spaghetti connections” – is characterised by makeshift infrastructure typically laid above ground, making it highly susceptible to damage. Contaminated black water from overflowing pit latrines and drains frequently seeps into these fragile pipes, resulting in polluted water being used for cooking and drinking in households. Spaghetti connections are established by informal providers, who tap into the municipal supply and channel water to neighbourhood taps, where residents are charged exorbitant prices for 20-litre containers. Despite the poor quality and unreliable access, residents face a “poverty penalty”, paying 400-800% more per cubic metre for unsafe water than the official county rates.

Sanitation is mostly characterised by pit latrines that fill up quickly and are manually emptied, with the raw faecal waste dumped into the Ngong River. Residents are charged high fees for accessing the few pay-per-use toilets that exist, while water, which is unreliable and of low quality, costs about ten times the formal rate. The need to establish sustainable service delivery mechanisms to improve water and sanitation is therefore evident.

The Mukuru Special Planning Area

To enable the establishment of sustainable service delivery mechanisms, in 2017, the Nairobi City County Government declared Mukuru Kwa Njenga, Kwa Reuben and Viwandani to be a Special Planning Area. This designation initiated the development and implementation of a Mukuru Integrated Development Plan (MIDP).

Community asks:

Following designation of Mukuru as an SPA, water and sanitation plans were developed after extensive consultation with the residents, and three requests were made:

That water and waterborne sanitation services from Nairobi City water utility company are provided to the residents.
That families have access to toilets at the plot level, rather than relying on community toilets.
That prepaid water dispensers (PPDs) are provided, each one to serve 150 households.

Implementation of Mukuru Integrated Plan:

During the preliminary design phase of Mukuru’s water supply and sanitation systems, the technical team evaluated various options for sanitation and water supply. After extensive analysis, simplified sewer systems (SSS) and PPDs were selected as the best solutions. Simplified sewers enable the construction of a sewerage network using smaller-diameter pipes laid at a shallower depth and on a flatter gradient than conventional sewers. This enables more flexible designs, leading to minimal displacement compared to conventional systems. Specifically, simplified sewers also have the following advantages:

Lower capital and operational costs compared to conventional sewers.
Can be extended as the community grows.
Grey water, such as water used for washing clothes, can be managed concurrently.
Do not require onsite primary treatment units.

Simplified sewer systems were implemented in Mukuru Kwa Ruben, supported by the national government’s installation of trunk and main sewers. However, the government did not construct lateral sewers, which are necessary for last-mile connections. As a result, civil society organisations (CSOs) stepped in to invest in the construction of these lateral sewers, enabling residents to build plot-level toilets and connect to the sewer network.

To ease water provision, pre-paid water dispensers were adopted, allowing consumers to purchase water using prepaid tokens, thus eliminating the need for billing. Tokens are registered using a person’s national identification card at Nairobi Water offices. Currently, water is charged at one shilling per 20-litre jerrycan, compared to the previous rate of KES 5–20.

To address financial barriers, Akiba Mashinani Trust (AMT), in partnership with FSD-Kenya, established a sanitation revolving fund to support structure owners who lacked the means to construct toilets and pay Nairobi Water connection fees. So far, the fund has helped 127 structure owners build toilets and cover water connection costs, with an average loan per owner of approximately KES 20,000. Additionally, AMT and other CSOs, such as Water Sanitation for the Urban Poor (WSUP), have constructed approximately 3km of lateral sewers, connecting 1,248 plots and benefiting around 12,500 families.

Despite this progress, approximately 80% of residents still do not have plot-level toilets connected to the sewer system. Therefore, significant support is required for the construction of roughly 30km of lateral sewers and the installation of about 500 PPDs in Mukuru.

Partnership between AMT and the African Cities Research Consortium

AMT has partnered with ACRC to document the methodologies, systems and practices employed in expanding water and sanitation services in Mukuru Kwa Reuben through the Special Planning Area, while comprehensively assessing the outcomes of these interventions.

The partnership also seeks to identify and address critical financing gaps, infrastructure deficiencies, community organisation challenges, technical limitations and policy barriers that hinder the effectiveness of ongoing efforts. In parallel, the project will operationalise collaborative frameworks between AMT, Nairobi City County Government (NCCG), Nairobi Water and Sewerage Company (NCWSC), WSUP, the Nairobi Rivers Commission and other stakeholders, with a focus on strengthening and expanding these partnerships.

A key component of the initiative includes extending water and sanitation infrastructure to reach 8,000 households in Mukuru Viwandani. To ensure sustainability, the project will establish robust systems and governance structures to facilitate effective oversight and coordinated management of services, in collaboration with state actors.

Ultimately, the insights gained will contribute to enhancing the existing policy framework for delivering water and sanitation services in informal settlements, through refined methodological approaches.

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Moving Accra’s property tax debate forward

Christopher Jordan — Thu, 29 May 2025 10:43:15 +0000

By Erika Garcia Fermin

Funding the urgent development needs of a city like Accra requires additional sources of domestically generated revenues. Property taxation could prove to be an important source of financing to pay for the infrastructure and public service investments the city requires, but implementing new taxes is always politically contentious and a technical challenge.

To address these challenges, the ACRC team in Accra, led by People’s Dialogue, recently hosted an international Urban Property Tax Workshop. Over three days, participants from ACRC cities, Ghanaian local and traditional authorities, civil society organisations, academia, professional bodies and the media came together to examine the design and administration of property taxation. The workshop explored both successful and unsuccessful approaches, and how reform efforts have enabled local governments to unlock the potential of property tax as a vital tool for domestic resource mobilisation.

The event provided a collaborative space for shared learning, aimed at generating insights to drive systemic change. Discussions covered both technical and political dimensions of tax systems, highlighting the complexity of, and opportunities for, effective property tax reform.

Reform challenges and governance insights

The workshop began with calls for collaboration and mutual learning. Remarks delivered by Madam Jemima Lomotey, Head of the Planning Department, speaking on behalf of the Greater Accra Regional Minister, highlighted the importance of collective action in tackling governance challenges, while Harriet Arjumang of Send Ghana and, Executive Director of Local Governance Network (LoGNet) emphasised the need for property tax reform to reflect Ghana’s specific fiscal and administrative context.

Irene Vance reaffirmed ACRC commitment to fostering inclusive, dialogue-driven spaces to support meaningful reform. Contributions from Paramount Chief of the Abola Traditional Area in Accra, Nii Ahene Nunoo II reinforced the importance of decentralisation and the transparent, accountable use of revenues to build public trust.

The session began with presentations by Samuel B Biitir, ACRC’s land and connectivity domain research lead in Accra, and Wilson Prichard, Associate Professor at the University of Toronto, Chair of the Local Government Revenue Initiative (LoGRI), and Research Fellow at the International Centre for Tax and Development (ICTD), both highlighting persistent barriers to effective property tax reform in developing countries.

Biitir focused on Ghana, outlining long-standing issues such as outdated valuations, weak collection systems, and low public trust. These, he argued, are “wicked problems” rooted not in technical gaps but in the political economy of municipal finance.

Prichard reinforced this view with a broader perspective, noting that despite property tax’s theoretical advantages, efficiency, equity, and service linkage, it remains underused. He attributed this to colonial-era systems and the political sensitivity of taxation, especially when seen as unfair.

Hon. Ahmed Ibrahim, Minister for Local Government, Chieftaincy, and Religious Affairs, acknowledged systemic barriers to property tax reform in Ghana, including unclear mandates, capacity gaps, and political resistance, but reaffirmed government resolve, stating:

“The most scarce commodity in all this has been political will. And this morning, as I stand here, I can say: we have it.”

The three speakers converged on key themes: the enduring impact of historical legacies, entrenched institutional and political constraints, and the imperative for reform strategies that are both technically sound and politically feasible.

Xaver Schenker, Technical Advisor for Local Government Revenue Mobilisation, addressed the administrative side of reform, stressing the need to align IT systems with real administrative practices, advocating a holistic approach and stronger coordination across government and external actors.

James Dzansi, Senior Country Economist at the International Growth Centre, explored the potential and risks of digital technologies in property tax administration. While highlighting their transformative power, he warned of the need for real-time monitoring and safeguards to prevent unintended consequences.

Later in the day, the third session continued with a focus on the governance dimensions of property tax.

Colette Nyirakamana, Research Lead at LoGRI, and Camille Barras, Policy Lead at LoGRI, emphasised that effective property tax administration relies on collaboration but is consistently hindered by limited data sharing, institutional silos, weak legal frameworks, and centralised control – challenges illustrated through cases from Kenya, Côte d’Ivoire, Senegal and Benin.

Fariya Mohiuddin, Interim Deputy Director – External Affairs at Tax Justice UK, followed with a discussion on making transparency and accountability meaningful in tax policy, urging governments to make information accessible, relevant, and citizen-focused through local languages, mobile platforms, and practical formats.

Frank Ohemeng, Associate Professor at Concordia University, concluded with a presentation on the intergovernmental relationships that shape property tax in Ghana. Echoing the phrase “a vision without implementation is hallucination,” he added that the source of the vision is just as important – someone must craft it before it can be realised. He highlighted power imbalances and the need to understand the institutional context that shapes local government authority.

Digitalisation and political dimensions

The second day began with a focus on the role of digitalisation in strengthening property tax systems, featuring impactful case studies that illustrated how digital tools are transforming administration.

Bilal Choho, PhD student at the Paris School of Economics, shared insights from Dakar’s property tax reform, where outdated rolls and vague addresses had long hindered progress. He outlined a reform launched in 2017 through collaboration between researchers and tax authorities, which introduced digital tools and a large-scale property census. As a result, tax agents in Dakar now use modern IT systems with accurate, parcel-level data.

Krishnakumar Thiagarajan, Vice President, Partnerships and Delivery at eGOV Foundation, introduced the DIGIT Property Tax System, an open-source platform that digitises the entire tax cycle using tools like GIS mapping and automated calculations. Already adopted in several Indian states, he explained how the system enhances accuracy, transparency, and citizen trust, while remaining flexible enough to adapt to local laws.

Momodou Lamin Badjie, Deputy Director of Services and Head of GIS at Kanifing Municipal Council, The Gambia, shared strategies for boosting local revenue, highlighting the use of Google Plus Codes – an open-source addressing system that enables property identification in areas without formal street names. This innovation has supported the creation of tax compliance maps now used to enhance billing and track payments.

Evan Trowbridge, Technical Lead at the LoGRI, presented Sierra Leone’s digital property tax reform, launched in Freetown in 2019 and now expanded to two additional cities. He explained that the reform aimed to build citizen trust through transparency and a locally tailored IT system. Digital tools – such as GIS for property mapping, CAMA for valuation, and platforms for billing, mobile payments, and staff oversight – have improved efficiency, data management, and inter-agency coordination. While still evolving, he noted, the system has been in use for five years and supports a sustainable tax cycle, from property discovery to billing, collection, and updates

These case studies underscored the power of inclusive, trust-based reform facilitated by digital tools. However, challenges such as poor internet connectivity, incomplete data, and resistance from revenue collectors were also noted.

In the afternoon, attention shifted to the political dimensions of property tax reform.

Wilson Prichard presented a thought-provoking analysis on why property tax remains one of the most underperforming revenue sources in lower-income countries. He challenged participants to reflect on political resistance to reform as a central barrier, questioning why it is so entrenched, why public support is weak, and what can be done to overcome these challenges.

Vanessa van den Boogaard, Research Fellow at the ICTD, provided an in-depth analysis of property tax reform in Sierra Leone, examining how elite resistance and citizen mistrust hinder progress and stressing the need to build broad-based coalitions. Her presentation also highlighted the complex role of traditional authorities, who can act as either enablers or spoilers of change.

Implementation, governance and the path forward

The final day focused on the broader governance context and implementation realities in Ghana.

Richard Agyepong, Senior Lecturer at the University of Education Winneba, highlighted key barriers, such as central government control over a local tax, the high cost of valuations, and deep-rooted public mistrust. A core message was that reform requires a shift in mindset and administrative culture across all government levels, not just systems.

The Land Valuation Division (LVD) presented on reforming property tax through effective rating valuation, reaffirming its legal mandate and showcasing the digital infrastructure and technical expertise available to support Metropolitan, Municipal and District Authorities (MMDAs). Their message was clear: better data and well-defined processes are essential for building public trust and improving compliance.

Experiences from the ground provided practical lessons:

The Kumasi Metropolitan Assembly (KMA) shared reflections from their reform journey. Key lessons included making capital projects visible to communities to build trust, enforcing digital payment systems via national directives, and investing in media and outreach to drive digital adoption.

The Cape Coast Metropolitan Assembly shared the experience of the TREE Project, demonstrating how digital tools can transform administration. She also reiterated ongoing challenges like poor internet connectivity in rural areas, incomplete property data, and resistance from revenue collectors. However, an optimistic outlook suggested that with the right infrastructure, training, and public engagement, MMDAs can achieve financial autonomy and sustainable local development.

Moving the debate forward

In conclusion, the Urban Property Tax Workshop provided a rich and practical dialogue, bringing together national and international experts, local government leaders, and practitioners. It offered a compelling exploration of both the technical innovations and political challenges that are shaping the future of urban property taxation.

The discussions underscored that successful reform requires not only effective systems and data but also strategic navigation of political resistance, building public trust through transparency and visible service delivery, adapting technology to local contexts, and fostering collaboration across institutions and levels of government. We hope that local and national government, supported by researchers and civil society can maintain the momentum to create a fair, equitable and effective system of property tax in Accra.

Read the workshop report

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How could urban property tax reform improve infrastructure and services in African cities?

Hannah — Tue, 13 May 2025 07:00:00 +0000

As urbanisation accelerates across Africa, cities are under growing pressure to deliver essential infrastructure and public services – such as water, sanitation, drainage and electricity. Yet this expanding responsibility is unfolding in a context where sustainable funding and reliable financing mechanisms remain limited or entirely absent, leaving many local governments struggling to meet rising demands.

How can cities manage their expanding expenditure responsibilities, particularly in the face of persistent funding shortfalls?

One potential solution lies in property taxation – a levy applied to the ownership, transfer or occupation of land and physical property. When effectively designed and administered, property taxes enable local governments to mobilise substantial revenues, which can be reinvested in essential services and infrastructure that make cities more liveable, inclusive and sustainable. More broadly, property tax revenues can support the structural transformation that has enabled cities in other parts of the world to emerge as powerful engines of economic growth and development.

Despite its potential, property taxation remains a marginal source of public revenue across much of Africa. It contributes an average of just 0.38% of GDP – far behind the 0.6% seen in other developing and transition economies, and a fraction of the nearly 2% collected in OECD countries. While some of the challenges are technical – such as outdated land cadastres, limited valuation capacity or weak administrative systems – the most persistent obstacles are political. Reforms often require confronting vested interests, navigating local resistance and building trust in the use of public funds.

As part of ACRC’s work within the land and connectivity domain, we are organising a workshop focused on effective property tax reform. Running from 19 to 21 May 2025 in Accra, Ghana, the workshop will examine what works – and what doesn’t – when it comes to the design and administration of property taxation.

Paying particular attention to the policy and implementation reforms that have enabled local governments elsewhere to unlock the potential of property taxes, the event aims to support African cities in expanding municipal revenues and strengthening infrastructure and service delivery.

Chaired by Samuel B Biitir – ACRC’s land and connectivity domain research lead in Accra – this workshop will bring together leading academics, researchers and policymakers with extensive experience in driving effective reforms across all stages of property tax system design and implementation. Drawing on their insights and practical experience, the sessions will explore a range of critical themes and questions, including:

What are the key challenges undermining property tax performance, and how can reforms be tailored to suit the specific contexts, capacities and needs of lower-income countries?
What lessons can be drawn from innovations across the tax cycle, including valuation, billing, collection and enforcement?
What forms of political and administrative resistance typically emerge in property tax reform, and what practical strategies can governments adopt to address these challenges and enhance public acceptability?
How can digitalisation improve efficiency, transparency and compliance in property tax administration?
What strategies can help build political support for property taxation and enable reform momentum?

The three-day workshop will feature seven panel sessions and guided discussions aimed at fostering active engagement and knowledge exchange. The first two days will include presentations by experts, offering conceptual insights and case studies on property tax reform in African cities. The final day will focus on the Ghanaian context, using local experiences to draw lessons and outline strategic directions for national reform, concluding with reflections on broader implications and future research priorities.

Updates from the urban property tax workshop will be shared on ACRC’s LinkedIn page and blog, so stay tuned for recaps and key insights from the discussions.

View the workshop programme

Transcript

The full podcast transcript is available below.

Read now

Chris Jordan So welcome to the African Cities podcast. My name is Chris Jordan. I’m the communications manager for ACRC. And today I’m joined by Dr Samuel Biitir. Samuel is a lecturer at the Department of Land Management at SD Dombo University of Business and Integrated Development Studies. And he’s somebody who’s been very closely involved with the African Cities research right from the start. In Accra, he led a work around land and connectivity. And is currently following that up initially with a workshop around property taxation in Accra. And before that workshop happens, we wanted to invite him onto the podcast to have a chat about all the issues surrounding it. Samuel, welcome to the podcast.

Samuel Biitir Thank you very much, Chris.

Chris Jordan Great. First question from me is could you just give us the broad context? Why does Accra need a property tax and the revenues that would come from that?

Samuel Biitir Yes, thank you once again. Accra is a growing city. There is this phenomen of urbanisation and a lot of people are moving and the city is sprawling and this creates both challenges and opportunities. From the opportunities, there’s creation of employment, people moving to find job opportunities. But challenges with this include deficit in infrastructure provision. And this includes basic services, such as access roads, connecter roads, sanitation, waste management and, generally, basic services are not being provided to meet the needs of the growing population. And as a city, the challenge has always been, where you find the money to provide all these basic services. And thankfully enough, there are so many revenue tools that have been made available to both the national government and local government. From the national government level, they go through taxations of landed property, which we generally refer as property taxation in general. That would include stamp duty, capital gains tax and other land transaction instruments. At a local level, there are also instruments that are given to local governments. In this case, we normally would call in the Metropolitan, Municipal and District Assemblies. And they have the opportunity of mobilising these resources to be able to provide these basic services. So I think this is where we are in Accra. Definitely we need some kind of locally or, if you like, internally generated revenues to be able to support national government activities in providing the trunk infrastructure. So basically, property taxation would be used to support basic infrastructure like connector roads, access roads, sanitation, waste collection, at mostly the local government level.

Chris Jordan I know from the Accra city report that you were part of, there’s no shortage of challenges and needs across the growing city. But this is also critical across many African cities, right? ACRC has also published research recently, looking at municipal financing. And I think across every single city that we looked at, there was a great need to increase more local city funding. So yeah, I think your workshop on property tax has come at a timely time, both Accra and hopefully maybe the rest of the region too.

Samuel Biitir Sure.

Chris Jordan So could you just outline what the current situation regarding property tax is in both Accra and Ghana more broadly?

Samuel Biitir Yes, so the current situation of property taxation in Accra, basically has to do with the local governments. The local governments have been mandated to mobilise internally generated revenues, of which property tax is a critical component. So as we speak currently, the local authorities are unable to mobilise adequate revenue from property access. Basically out of some reasons I call, there are often common reasons across cities, especially in Africa, first has to do with the evaluation of those properties. So mostly the assemblies do not have up-to-date valuation rules, where they can base on it to ask the properties. So our data evaluation rule is number one. Number two has to also do with the challenge of collection. After you have the valuation rule you must label the rates, but how do you collect it? So what has been happening in some of the local governments have had some instances where they partner with private IT companies that develop some kind of software, and they are able to collect digitally. But in very few instances. Others depend on manual collection, where people have to move from house to house to be able to mobilise property taxation. So this makes it very difficult to actually mobilise property taxation. Apart from this, we also have administrative challenges in terms of capacity to be able to mobilisea propety taxation. That said, we also have this other challenge of, when you have mobilised these property taxes, revenues, what do you use it for? So the other aspect of it has to do with citizens. You find that some citizens complain we’ve been paying property taxes for a number of years, but we really don’t see any services that have been implemented by the local assembly, so they also would resist that kind of tax when they don’t see the benefits pf paying their rates. So these are broadly the general challenges that are facing this local government in Accra and then across African cities as well.

Chris Jordan Yeah, I know one of the things that the Accra report really brings out is this quite complicated and often fractious relationship between national governments and the local governments that are running Accra. How does this work across property tax?

Samuel Biitir Yes, indeed, it’s a challenge. It’s a challenge for property tax mobilisation, as we speak. Previously, local governments were given that mandate. In fact, they still have the mandate to collect property taxation. But in the last few years, the government came out with a certain policy that sought to centralise a collection of property rates from local assemblies. So they entrusted the collection to the Ghana Revenue Authority. And the Ghana Revenue Authority is supposed to collect from all the local government authorities and then later on they can disburse it back to them. So that became a challenge. So you have a national level developing a centralised system that all local government authorities are supposed to log onto it, and then the collection is given to the Ghana Revenue Authority. So you have local governments just sitting there, and then the Revenue Authority doing the collection. The research that has been done so far, we see that this does not appear to be a very effective way of doing it. In fact, some assemblies opted out. Even though it was a government direction, but some assemblies opted out that they would not because the law strictly mandates local authorities to collect. So you would find that the central control, trying to control the local authorities in terms of the collection is challenging. Some local authorities are resisting, but of course if you are the chief executive of the local government, and you are appointed by the president, you find it difficult to challenge such a policy. So as we speak, we are still in that challenge. It’s not well sorted out and I don’t know whether the new government wants to toe that line, but this is what is happening now – so this decentralised collection by the Ghana Revenue Authority.

Chris Jordan Is that sense of blockage true right across Ghana? Are there any other cities that have managed to make this system work? Or is Accra typical?

Samuel Biitir I think it’s across all the cities, across all the local government assemblies, but Accra seems to be unique in the sense of the volume of properties that you find and then the number of local assemblies that are there. I’m also aware that in the Ashanti region, one of the municipalities or metropolitan areas refused to log onto the central collection system. So you have at one end, people are dissatisfied, they are not able to register their protest because simply you are appointed by the president and the chief executive and you cannot be seen to be opposing your policy of government. But that was the last government between 2020 to 2024. This new government has not yet taken a stand on whether to continue with this central collection but whatever it is, we hope that through this workshop, issues will come up for discussion and we will see the best way forward to handle the central local system of collecting property rates.

Chris Jordan So it sounds like that the workshop is well-timed both for Accra and potentially other cities in Ghana too. So what else are you trying to do with this workshop? Why is it useful to have this gathering now?

Samuel Biitir Yes, so with this workshop, what we intend to do, generally, the problems of property taxation cut across most cities in Africa. And the problems are common as I mentioned earlier, valuation rules, not up to date, collection is a problem and a risk. Although I’ve also seen that, from the literature we read and from the case study we have also said it, you would find that there’s some good cases in some cities in Africa that they have experimented and it appears to be working. For example, Sierra Leone, Freetown, we have some examples there. Then in Senegal, Benin and the rest, we’ve seen that the cities are implementing some workable solutions. So with this workshop, we intend to learn from these case studies, what is it that they are doing differently than what we have done? What lessons can we learn from those case studies? And how would those lessons help us to forge a certain reform that would meet our context-specific needs. So that is one area. Then we have also seen that there’s this innovation in using digital tools to do both the valuation up to the collection point. And many cities are using this to change this, the narrative. We have seen in cities where they have used digital tools to map out the properties, identify the properties and then also include in the digital tools the payment structure. And then, how you even make payments online. So all these are innovations that are coming up and we hope that with this workshop, we have carefully selected the presenters from all the divides from the government’s perspective of property taxation, then we have looked at the administrative issues, which digitisation is part of it. And then we have also looked at transparency and accountability. So these presenters, our hope is that they would share these case studies from other African cities and other international experiences. And then this would form the basis. The other aspect is that the Ministry of Local Governance and Religious and Chieftaincy Affairs is also key stakeholder in this workshop and they’ll be coming, they’ll be duly represented. And they will listen to all these presentations. And then after that, we would probably chart a new path.

Chris Jordan Sounds good. I know you’ve got high hopes for the workshop. I know it’s been super popular in terms of people applying to get in there. So yeah, I hope it goes really well and we can hear from you afterwards. I’d just be really interested to dig in a little bit more about how your original work for African Cities around the broader land and connectivity issues in Accra has led you to this stage and what that’s revealed. I know security of land tenure seemed to come up as a real issue and obviously there is around 38% of residents in Accra are based in informal settlements. So how does this sort of security and the high number of informal settlements – does this pose a challenge for effective property taxation?

Samuel Biitir Yes, so my work on the land and connectivity at the foundation stage. Basically, we dealt with, I think, three areas. We were looking at land value capture, we were looking at property taxation, we were looking at connectivity. And in connectivity, we meant both road connectivity and digital connectivity. But the digital connectivity seems to have played much role in what we did. And what we found out, essentially, the land tenure issues are actually a challenge in the city. We found out that there are many areas people are resorting to their own way of protecting their land rights through what we call land guards. And the land guards would actually protect somebody’s property, sometimes positively and sometimes negatively. Negatively – in the sense that in that attempt to protect the land, dispute would arise and then sometimes it ends up in fatality. So that was another area that we found. And the phenomenon of landguardism was a big challenge in the city because of tenure issues. And basically because landowners are trying to cash out on the urbanisation issue. So they sell the land to one person, and then another place, another time, the same piece of plot is sold to another person. So you can have one plot sold to more than one person. And then that creates a lot of challenges. So that was the area of the land tenure, things that came up. And then we also looked at land values because we’re interested in the land value capture, in the sense that rising urbanisation and increased infrastructure often have a bearing on how land values go. So we sort of found out why, what actually causes land values to increase, in the case of Accra? What we found out was that actually, road infrastructure seems to play a role, and that is what the conventional literature will tell you. But we found other factors that seemed to play more roles in land value increments, and one of them was the fact that there is speculation infrastructure investment alone can push up land values. So that was one of the findings, so we noticed that in areas that were certain pronouncements that the government intends to build this kind of infrastructure, already land values should push up because of the mere announcement of this. What also came up was also that in the land transaction process, we have land agents, estate agents and brokers. And sometimes the part that they have, they are privilege to certain information. They can, in a way, influence the pricing. So they were also a factor pushing up land values in that area. So these were the things we found out that, out of the conventional literature, it doesn’t actually mention this, but this came up in the process. Then when it came to land and property taxation, what’s interesting, as I mentioned earlier on, the central local government political tension became a critical issue in terms of mobilising it. And the case was … there was one donor-supported programme that was supposed to change the face of property taxation. But some way, somehow, along the line, they had to pull out because of this government’s rule of centralising the collection. So that project came to a stall, and then that created a problem with property remobilisation. And then as I mentioned earlier, there are also areas that are fast developing, but those areas are underserved with basic infrastructure. So you have this group without access, the area is expanding, but there’s no road network. Individuals will have to provide their own access to their places. So this became another challenge that affected property remobilisation. The digital connectivity realised that many of the land sector institutions had deployed some kind of digital tools to do property registration, to build the database. But most of these were just initiatives that started but never got fully implemented and partly also due to the politics of it. So this government started setting projects, and the [inaudible] office, it’s not able to complete and our government [inaudible]. So that kind of disjointed and discontinuous investment also affected most of the city’s resources.

Chris Jordan Interesting. At the moment, the proposals around property taxation – what would they mean for people living in informal settlements, who are often existing on on very low precarious incomes, is it something that they would be expected to pay?

Samuel Biitir Ideally, the law says that any property – in fact, our laws specify the kind of properties that are supposed to pay, and here we are referring to only building and improvements. So if your structure can be classified as a building improvement, ideally you are supposed to pay property tax. But we are also much aware about informality in the city. Like the fact that certain people just put up kiosks and other structures. Of course, they will not be able to pay property tax. And once [inaudible] secures on it, though the details of it will be captured but said people are not likely to be properly taxed. So what would happen is that people living in informal areas – and I think we have to be specific here, if we’re talking of informality, at it at its full definition than the whole city of Accra would be informal. But we’re looking at informality here to just apply to those who are living in informal settlements, settlements that are not recognised by the law and precisely the Agbogbloshie and the other squatter settlements. Otherwise, all the other parts of the city will be eligible to pay property tax.

Chris Jordan And you talked, before you mentioned the mapping efforts that need to go on to identify all the properties. Does that have implications for people’s land tenure as well? Is this something that could be worked hand in hand to boost land tenure security?

Samuel Biitir I feel for the purposes of property taxation, there are good reasons why the land is not taxed, it’s only the property. And when we go back into the history and the literature says that because of the complexity of our land tenure system, our forefathers decided that it would be wise to tax only the improvement. So the land aspect is actually not taxed, it’s just the improvement that is manmade. So because the land is not taxed, we may not encounter most of the challenges in the land tenure’s [inaudible]. It’s just a property. So once a property has an owner, so it is the owner that pays the property rates. So we have not actually delved so much into the land tenure issues because of the legal definition of who is supposed to pay the tax and then the tax base, which is basically on improvement.

Chris Jordan Okay. Yeah. I guess, regardless of that, all new taxes are always politically contentious and they always regularly receive pushback from various factions in society. Do you think this is something that Accra can navigate?

Samuel Biitir Chris, you are right. Nobody wants to pay taxes. Everybody if you have your own way, you would want to evade. Yes and then there are issues from the policy level to those who are paying. And it’s always a challenge when you are introducing or trying to enforce something that is not working. We are aware of those challenges. But what we believe is that this workshop would actually be an eye-opener sharing these case studies from other countries who have similar contexts, if you like, with us and then such case studies that seem to be working. So the lessons we will learn from the case studies and the presenters that are willing to share their expertise with us would go a long way to help us. At the end of the day, we cannot do it by ourselves. There’s a need for some kind of collaboration from the government level to the implementers and then to experts and academics like some of us. So we are looking at a scenario where we create a win-win situation where we fund coalitions and collaborations. From civil society to the government. And then we hope that when the city authorities and governments already they know the implications of this, that we can mobilise a lot of revenue. And when they see that, we’re able to let them know these challenges can be handled. Once it’s handled in other countries, it can also be handled in Ghana here. I think they’ll be more willing to open up a dialogue between the academia, the civil society, and then the politicians as well for us to engage. At the end of the day, I believe that we would all see that it is useful to do some kind of a fund so that property taxation can actually give us the desired revenue that we all are looking for. So it’s not going to be easy, but I believe in the long run we would understand the need to work together.

Chris Jordan Yeah, and I guess, as you’ve mentioned briefly before, a key part of this is building trust between local authorities and residents, so people see what increased revenues are actually spent on, that they can be confident that money is going back into water, sanitation, roads, the basic services that people need and rely on. So do you think that that will happen, has the potential to happen?

Samuel Biitir Yes, so I think yes, it’s possible and it’s likely to happen. Citizens’ resistance is always as a result of visibility. They are not able to see what the taxes are used for. And so with this workshop we hope that the discussions that would come up would help us to carry everybody on board. One, from the local government level, there will be a discussion on how do we use this revenue that is mobilised, to the extent that people can see visibly that this is what you are using the money for. If people are able to pinpoint, okay, this year we paid so much in property taxation, and then we can pinpoint that out of what we pay, this is what was down with it, this is what was done with it. It doesn’t mean that assemblies are not actually using it, but they probably don’t let people know. So accountability process, stakeholder engagement, carry people along, let them know that after you have mobilised this much, probably in your community we didn’t do this much but other communities benefited. So it’s about engagement and carrying people along. So with this workshop, all these issues will come up. I think there’s a presentation on transparency building trust and the rest. And we have invited a number of assemblies to be part and learning this would also help them improve on their communication on how taxes are being used. And once they’re able to step that one our citizens will be happy and then would have some confidence in assemblies that they are able to use their taxes for what they intend to use it for.

Chris Jordan Thanks. And I just finally maybe wanted to come to some of the new ideas and innovations that you’ve mentioned. Quite a lot of those focus around digital tools or digital techniques. I just wondered if you could say a little bit more about some of those and from a citizens’ side of things, is there a danger that too much of a focus on digital will exclude some people and increase digital divides within society, or do you think there are ways around that?

Samuel Biitir Yes, of course, with every innovation that is coming, there will be some fallouts. And we are aware of it. I think one of the presenters is looking at the promise and the perils of technology in property rating. Of course, trying to capture everything digitally in a country where that’s you really do not have a good street-aggressing system would leave some people out. But whatever innovation you bring, it has to be proven based on ground data. So, digitalisation will have to go with ground troops in to verify what is there. And then whatever is there, then you can levy it. So those challenges would come, but at the same time, this presentation would throw more lights on how others have done it. And then how they managed to navigate their fallout and how they got to where they are. So the innovations are there. But one thing that is important is that these innovations must be tied with a political strategy. There has to be political buy-ins. If there’s a political buy-in, then it’s more likely to succeed. So that is what we are looking out for, that innovations are there, but let’s align those innovations with political-strategic buy-ins so that we can succeed.

Chris Jordan Yeah. And you’ve mentioned this is potentially an opportune time with the new government and a new policy regime coming in. From a personal perspective, where would you hope that Accra might be in say 12 months’ time?

Samuel Biitir Ah right. Personally, I think we have come in at the right time. And I believe this government, the government means business. I think in the budget there is a mention of property taxation and the government seems to be serious with it. So this workshop would further show more light on the good aspect of it and what can be done to make it work. It is my hope that the government would see the good side of this and then as we engage with them, they will be more positive. And they’re willing to collaborate and then partner with assemblies and then academia and experts in the field. So my hope is in the next 12 months we might see some kind of slight changes being introduced depending on government’s willingness to let the process go. We might not see so much being done. But there will be some steps that would carry that would finally be the game changer in property taxation in Accra and the cities of Ghana in general.

Chris Jordan Well, it’ll be really interesting to see what pans out. And Samuel, thank you very much for joining us today. We hope that the workshop goes really well, that it’s a really fruitful conversation. And we’re really interested to find out what happens next, what ideas get taken on, how the politics, from the senior level to the informal settlements, how that all shakes down. And we will be following this story closely, so thank you very much.

Samuel Biitir You’re welcome. I’m grateful for the opportunity.

Outro You have been listening to the African Cities podcast. Remember to subscribe for more urban development insights and interviews from the African Cities Research Consortium.

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New research: Productive partnerships and citizen agency key to urban reform in Kampala

Hannah — Thu, 13 Feb 2025 04:00:00 +0000

A new report by Paul Isolo Mukwaya, Judith Mbabazi and Henrik Ernstson draws on ACRC’s holistic conceptual framework components – politics, systems and domains – to analyse urban development in Kampala.

Kampala is Uganda’s capital city, serving as its major administrative and commercial centre. One of Africa’s fastest-expanding cities, it is growing at an annual rate of 5.6%. Originally planned for 300,000 people at the time of its declaration as the capital city of Uganda, it has expanded rapidly over the past 60 years, with a daytime population of over 4.5 million. Yet its urban planning functions and infrastructure are struggling to keep pace with the acute needs of this growing population.

This new report explores how national and city-level politics, urban systems and particular configurations of actors, agencies, ideas and practices have shaped development across various domains. It looks at the urban development domains of informal settlements; youth and capability development; land and connectivity; and health, wellbeing and nutrition.

Through holistic analysis of various studies conducted by researchers in the city, the authors identify the most pressing development problems facing Kampala – and its disadvantaged communities in particular. They also highlight the challenges that are likely to be encountered in efforts to solve these issues in an equitable and (environmentally and fiscally) sustainable way.

Interest politics and institutional dysfunctionality

The report highlights Kampala’s highly politicised culture. Political authority in the city has become highly fragmented, with a myriad of power centres emerging. A series of experiments, including decentralisation and recentralisation of city governance, have not delivered the required service delivery outcomes for Kampala.

A longstanding commitment to privatisation and market-driven responses has weakened the capacity of both central and city governments to govern and coordinate critical systems and services effectively. Institutional dysfunctionality means that private formal and informal actors fill the many gaps in centralised systems, resulting in complex formal–informal modes of delivery that rarely offer reliable, accessible and affordable services. Water supply, waste management, sanitation, public safety, housing, energy and even circulation of traffic are systemic challenges. Urban life typically survives in the alternatives, with marginalised groups particularly affected by Kampala’s urban development problems. Overall, system shortcomings and improvisations have resulted in informal neighbourhoods, inaccessible settlements, inefficient transport systems, ineffective electricity distribution systems, insecurity and injustice.

Priority reforms and citizen agency

The report identifies the priority reforms that Kampala urgently requires. These include informal settlement upgrading; proper land registration; waste management; apprenticeship, skills development and vocational training for youth groups; and public health campaigns on healthy diets. State capabilities to address urban development challenges are needed in areas including financing, human resource capacity improvements, and the capacity to forge productive partnerships and new ways of working with relevant non-state actors and to undertake basic regulatory functions.

To address these issues, the authors identify a need to explore how local communities can participate effectively in city governance affairs – and how economists, political scientists, urban researchers and individuals or groups can give urban reform policy advice, without being construed as government critics or members of the opposition.

They point to the huge potential for citizen agency across the city. Residents are demanding urban reform around key service delivery challenges – using platforms such as neighbourhood watch systems, (in)formal financing systems, digital warrior and hashtag activism. These have increasingly been supported by community and civil society, which, with support, have the potential to offer a stronger voice and more effective source of service provision for Kampala’s most marginalised residents.

Read the full report

Read the research brief

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land and connectivity - ACRC

Between law and praxis: Navigating land governance in Kampala’s informal settlements

A power paradox

Local land governance frameworks…

…and local realities

Fulfilling community needs

Emerging lessons from Kisenyi

Reconciling land system vulnerabilities

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Unpacking the complexity of informal urban land governance in Kisenyi informal settlement, Kampala

Contextualising the CLASK study

LCs at the epicentre of land transactions

Extra-legal realities

Capacity and knowledge gaps – the missing link to secure land transactions

Loopholes and lapses in land transactions

LC–lawyer rivalry

Is inclusion too evasive?

Next steps towards co-creating solutions

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Nouvelle étude : Mieux comprendre les dynamiques urbaines et l’arrangement politique de Bukavu

L’héritage de la colonisation et des conflits

Comprendre la politique locale et nationale

Relever des défis systémiques complexes

La terre et la connectivité

La sécurité et la sûreté

La santé, le bien-être et la nutrition

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New research: Understanding Bukavu’s urban dynamics and political settlement

Legacies of colonisation and conflict

Understanding city and national politics

Navigating complex systemic challenges

Land and connectivity

Safety and security

Health, wellbeing and nutrition

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What drives land value change in African cities? Unlocking value and the prospects for progressive reform

“Paradigmatic ideas” about land value change

Unsettling the received wisdom

The real drivers of land value change: Findings from the land and connectivity domain

Implications for urban reform

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Urban economics in action: Addressing African cities’ challenges

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Systems change for water and sanitation in informal settlements: The Mukuru Special Planning Area

Water and sanitation challenges

The Mukuru Special Planning Area

Partnership between AMT and the African Cities Research Consortium

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Moving Accra’s property tax debate forward

Reform challenges and governance insights

Digitalisation and political dimensions

Implementation, governance and the path forward

Moving the debate forward

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How could urban property tax reform improve infrastructure and services in African cities?

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New research: Productive partnerships and citizen agency key to urban reform in Kampala

Interest politics and institutional dysfunctionality

Priority reforms and citizen agency

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