Practices in Institutionalizing GIS for Revenue Mobilization: The Case of Secondary Cities in Tanzania

Increasingly Geographical Information System (GIS) has been seen as an important infrastructure component for revenue enhancement and urban development management as used for property identification, verification, taxation and spatial development governance. The paper is an attempt to learn from the experiences of developing GIS in Tanzania, which has also taken place in many other Sub-Saharan countries, for the purpose of boosting revenue collection and enhance land governance functions. The paper was developed through the review of the policy and program evaluation documents, discussions in the respective cities, authors’ support to established al-ternative GIS architecture in some cities and evaluations of the same at later stages. Some of the major findings from the study were that although a lot of donor and government resources had been invested in the hardware and short terms training as well as consultants on GIS, there were no comprehen-sive programmes that ensured coherent capacities and targets on the GIS development. As a result, the GIS has never been fully institutionalized in the business processes of the municipal authorities. Relevantly, system architec-tures were non-conformable with the legal mandates of some crucial spatial data custodians in cities. Failure to spread GIS and to have proper system architecture is also attributed by a single focus nature of the systems developed, either property tax or revenue or land use planning while ignoring other needs and stakeholders who would contribute in sustaining the systems.


Introduction
Tanzania, like many other Sub-Saharan countries, for over three decades, has been attempting to establish GIS databases to boost revenue collection for the better financing of urban infrastructure and governance functions. However, the road in this development process has been bumpy and the success level is debatable. This paper is an attempt to trace the GIS databases development for municipal financing in Tanzania in order to inform on what the major challenges have been and how world-wide experiences could shed light on the possible strategies for improving the outcomes of GIS databases establishments.
Despite the significant economic growth, Africa as a developing region, still experiences massive urban poverty and other social problems that hinder the investment into infrastructure, keeping the region burdened with high service deficits and shortages in access to technologies (UN-Habitat, 2014;Oyedele, 2012). For instance, in Tanzania, Mainland Poverty Assessment (2015) showed that almost four out of ten people live in below international poverty line of two United States dollars a day. Although the importance of investing in urban infrastructure to stimulate economic growth is widely acknowledged (Ingram & Brandt, 2013;Ingram & Flint, 2011), the question that remains is: how to obtain these resources and from where? Consequently, it becomes necessary to discuss the strategies that can effectively mobilize better municipal finances. Authors such as Connolly et al. (2003) and Peterson (2008) discuss how land asset management, constitutes a broad arena for municipal policies to finance urban areas, and how locational based taxes have been used widely as a source of land value capture and mobilization of resources to finance infrastructure provisions in urban areas. For instance, a widely known tax is the property tax, which is charged on a property, which can be land or a physical building (De Cesare, 2002;Smolka & Iracheta, 1999). Property tax charged on land and not a building is called the land rent. Connolly and Bell (2011) consider property taxes as the most important source of local revenues, which is seen to be fair, efficient, simple to administer and promotes accountability by linking taxes paid with services provided. It is this hope of simplicity that had attracted many governments in developing countries to try to strategies on how to efficiently collect this type of tax.
One way that has been used by many countries to try to increase efficiency in the land-based taxing system is the development of computerized spatial data systems or commonly called Geographical Information System (GIS) for the particular urban area. Many countries including Denmark, Brazil and Australia that have successfully established spatial data systems had their entrance point on property identification for property tax collections (Enemark et al., 2005).
This brings foundation and justification for the investment required to produce the data, hardware and technical staff required for the computerized spatial data system. Tracing further the development of computerized spatial data system in many countries it becomes evident that those who continued to use their computerized spatial data systems only for revenue goals soon had their systems collapsed or made irrelevant, but those who expanded the role of their GIS into other portfolios especially on process aspects such as land and spatial development governance and overall service provisions managed to sustain their system for a longer time (Davis & Fonseca, 2006;Rajabifard et al., 2002).
Expansion of the GIS applications in many countries has been observed to be fostered by having collaborative agreements among parties that use or can use GIS, including government collection sections, urban land administration and management sections and utility service providers. These agreements tend to include the primary purpose of GIS, in which land administration and management have frequently been the initial area of expansion the system portfolio. Integrating GIS database for property data with land administration facilitates the use of common address systems where the practice has always been to link the unique parcel or parcel identifier number with the customer identifier numbers (Jacoby et al., 2002).
The other common forms of agreements on GIS database institutionalization have been on roles and mandates within urban authority's departments and sections. In this regard, there lacks a standard practices in some issues such as administrative locations of databases. The usual practice on this issue has been to locate GIS database either in departments dealing with information technology, urban planning, and engineering or as a fully fledged GIS department (ibid). It is a common practice that updating and operational responsibilities are administered by units separated from the supervising or coordinating entities. There are even innovative cases especially in North America and Australia where updating and maintenance have been commissioned to the private sector (Rajabifard et al., 2006;McLaughlin & Nichols, 1994).
The other form of innovations has been to have direct cost recovery strategies inbuilt in the system institutionalization. This has been made possible first by creating platforms for data use and visualization whose consumers are beyond the traditional revenue departments (Masser et al., 2008;Crompvoets et al., 2004). The "paying" users include utility agencies who would buy a license to use the data, the general public, private land developers and planners as well as investors, where copies of hardcopy or digital data are made available at cost (Dessers et al., 2011).

Study Context and Sources of Information
The data compiled for this paper was a result of several protracted engagements of the author with councils and the ministry responsible for local government by then it was Prime Minister's Office, Regional Administration and Local Government, PMO-RALG. Currently the office has been moved to the President's office, (President Office, Regional Administration and Local Govern-

Evolution of Application of GIS in Tanzania
The history of the development of GIS in Tanzania shows that the earliest systematic institutionalization of GIS for urban development started in 1990-1992 when UN-HABITAT came to support a review of the Dar-es-Salaam Master Plan. The times were characterized by a paradigm shift in urban planning approaches as it was perceived that the binding urban land use master plans were too rigid and their preparation process was not inclusive, technocratically driven and less sensitive to environmental concerns (Halla, 2007;Namangaya, 2013;Kasala, 2015). UN-HABITAT introduced the system of Environmental Planning and Management (EPM), whose central component was to integrate Environmental Management Information System (EMIS), which could enable flexibility in land use evaluations and decisions making according to stakeholders concerns and environmental sensitivity. The GIS databases development involved digitization of images and hardcopy maps such as topographic sheet (1:50,000) and machine plots (1:2500) which provide altitude data in the form of contours and spot heights; building locations; landscapes level land cover data with generalized granularity and cadastral data. Most of these datasets were of vector format. The task was primarily for urban plans and therefore the Ministry of Lands, Housing and Human Settlements Development (MLHHSD), some sector ministries and the Dar-es-Salaam City Council were the main actors. The key software used was Map Info, Arc-Info and ArcView.
The process enabled some advancement in the establishment of EMIS in Dar es Salaam City and introduced the use and appetite of GIS databases in the government. However, in its operations, the system was isolated, not linked to other systems. Although its use was supposed to facilitate continuous spatial decision-making processes, its application was much limited to plan production. This phenomenon could be attributed to its failure to integrate business processes of the city council, even with the urban planning departments. The evaluation reports pinned the underperformance of EMIS on poor ownership of the project by local authorities and incapacity of local staff and administrative systems to absolve the technology (Tanzania Cities Network, 2012).
While the development of EMIS in Dar es Salaam was continuing, a parallel initiative was taking shape in Dar es Salaam from 1993 to 1999 under the World Bank and NORAD (Norwegian Development Agency) in the project called Urban Sector Engineering Project (USEP). The project target was to enhance properly tax collection initially in Dar es Salaam. Its GIS was principally about the use of the aerial photography to capture buildings and develop spatial buildings databases which are linked to valuation rolls.  billboards and similar data that had a potential of tax revenues.
Data for populating GIS database were collected through ground picking of buildings data, whose enumerator were guided by the high-resolution satellite imagery. Attribute data on the properties were collected and assembled in Microsoft Access files. GIS database was supposed to link with LGRCIS using a server and network that was also connected to servers in PMO-RALG head office.
GIS database was comprised of building footprint as polygons, with attribute data describing, height, use, materials, utility connections and photographs of structures. These data were compiled in the form that was envisaged to enable the system to undertake derivation of property values using algorithms that use the information in the database. The process of generating values and therefore tax rates for properties using an algorithm that is based on the information in the database is called mass valuation. Supposedly, the mass-valuation procedure would speed the process of generating taxable rates.

A Comparative Analysis of the GIS Data Structures
A comparative assessment of the data type as prescribed in Table 1 and Figure 2 shows that the GIS database in EMIS and UEMIS are substantially different from that under MRECOM and LGRCIS. The former focused on internal urban management functions while the latter focuses on revenue collection per se. All of them are unconnected to non-land functions of the councils and external functions of service providers like utility agencies. None of the GIS databases managed to be server based (web-enabled) despite the fact that LGRCIS and MRECOM were designed to be like that.
The resolution of the data in EMIS and UMIS was rather coarse, hence unable to show properties or buildings although they contained sets of data with utility lines. The resolution of the GIS database for LGRCIS was detailed enough to show buildings but did not contain data on utilities or even social facilities. None of the spatial datasets contained property cadaster data (plot boundaries) which is the major omission in terms of a potential multiplicity of use of data that would greatly contribute to the continued relevance of the datasets beyond one particular project.

The Impact of the Current System on the Revenue Mobilization
Examination of the impact of the LGRCIS on revenue collection for the past three years in the four studied secondary cities show that cities revenue collection jumped from a couple of hundred million to multiple billions from the year 2016/17 when the cities started using LGRCIS consistently (Table 2). There is Table 2. Revenue collections trends in the studied cities (values in millions of Tanzanian Shillings).
Year  or physical connection to the server, and property valuation was done without the use of maps or location data such that even when GIS is developed it cannot be linked to the building or property unique identifier. Faced with these contradictions, the central government has opted to move property tax collection from the city authorities to a central government agency, Tanzania Revenue Authority (TRA). TRA in most of the cities has ignored the rating in the valuation rolls and focuses on charging minimal flat rates for the property owners who will themselves come forward to pay taxes, as there is no reliable database to trace all properties. With the property tax moved out of local authorities, the possibility of linking LGRCIS with GIS database is becoming narrower, and the same problems of unconnected and un-updated building database are bound to continue.

Conclusion
Since 1990s, Tanzania cities have attempted to establish and to spread GIS in their business processes. The earlier attempts focused on planning and land use with data granularity too coarse to facilitate meaningful urban development monitoring (development control) or revenue collection.
The challenge of data granularity and relevance of UPIN also affects the recent attempt by TSCP and ULGSP as the reference to the buildings is in contradiction with the laws of the land which require reference to plots. The overarching explanation is that the focus of database in local government has never been to develop complete datasets for urban functionality but to have single purpose GIS database that responds to the purpose of a loan or grant.
This lack of integration of the GIS databases with wider business processes and the needs of the cities denies the councils to design a data structure that would capture other revenue sources, such as payment for solid waste or link payment for water and power with property data. Such linkages would be To conclude, the future of GIS requires first to examine the entire business process of urban councils and create an appropriate data structure that could support a functional set of city business processes, reflect required granularity of data, connectivity and interoperability. The recent decision by the PO-RALG to migrate to open source software, QGIS, if it will be actualized, will likely fasten more integration of database and sharing of data among departments and agencies in the cities. This is because the use of open source software will enable every user of spatial data to have similar sets of data and to add data accordingly, and thus facilitate the process of populating the GIS databases. The current use of proprietary software limits data exchanges within the councils and with other agencies.

Conflicts of Interest
The author declares no conflicts of interest regarding the publication of this paper.