Moving Forward: Local Government Finance and Tanzania’s Poverty Reduction Strategy

Abstract

At the very outset of this book, we stressed the important role of local governments and local government finances in putting in place a pro-poor development strategy. In Chapter 1, we noted that decentralization reforms are used to pursue different goals in different countries, including improving the delivery of pro-poor public services, such as education and health care; empowering local communities by increasing participation and accountability of the public sector through local governments; and increasing the transparency and equity with which public resources are allocated across the national territory. In the context of Tanzania, the Policy Paper on Local Government Reform (MRALG, 1998) identifies the improvement of the quality of public service delivery in the context of poverty alleviation as the primary motivation behind decentralization by devolution.