Structural Adjustment Programmes and the Development of Low-Income Landlordism in Tanzania: The Case of Mbeya Municipality and Dar es Salaam City

Abstract

The contribution made by SAPs to landlords was to create rented house properties, which were beneficial both to the landlords and tenants. In Dar es Salaam city and Urban Mbeya there has been an increase in housing stock as a result of rented houses built by landlords in the context of the programmes. The rented house properties contributed were used by the owners as productive assets and rented out to generate incomes, which were used to meet various socio-economic needs of the landlords. The tenants benefited from the rented houses contributed by having places to live and carry out their various socio-economic activities.

Despite all the above benefits the study found that while in Dar es Salaam 81% of 99 rented houses surveyed were incomplete in various physical structures and lacked electricity that of Urban Mbeya constituted 74% of 100 rented houses, an indication of poor conditions of many rented houses available in the neighbourhoods. The houses in Dar es Salaam in addition of being characterised by those two aspects water was also missing in many of them. Three factors accounted for the situation of poor condition of rented houses in the surveyed areas of Dar es Salaam and Urban Mbeya. First, the inability of government agencies responsible for issuing security of tenure to landlords on rented properties. Secondly, the problem of inadequate finance existed to the side of the landlords, a situation attributed to an erosion of their incomes. And thirdly, bureaucracy exercised by some of TANESCO officials.

SAPs had never acted as a force that made incomes of the landlords to be eroded. Instead the programmes created various opportunities for the landlords and tenants to tap them in order to generate incomes that could be used as financial resources for improving and building housing respectively. The opportunities facilitated by SAPs were skills development, micro finance enterprises/organisations development and development of pro-poverty reduction strategies. It was found that many households however never benefited from the opportunities created by the programmes due to factors like unreliable market, stiff conditions of loans imposed by the micro finance enterprises, lack of loan management skills existed among the households, lack of awareness among the households on the existence of micro finance enterprises in the neighbourhoods and failure of the pro-poverty reduction strategies to trickle down to the households.