Understanding urban property tax with Samuel B Biitir
05/16/25 • 31 min
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.
So, how can African 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.
Ahead of an upcoming ACRC workshop in Accra, Chris Jordan is joined by Samuel B Biitir for a conversation around the challenges and opportunities of urban property taxation in African cities. With a particular focus on the Accra context, they discuss how property taxation could help to improve essential urban infrastructure and services, the need for political buy-in, the potential benefits and blockages posed by digitalisation, and the importance of transparency when it comes to securing citizen support.
> Read more about ACRC’s urban property tax workshop in Accra
Samuel B Biitir is a senior lecturer in the Department of Land Management at SD Dombo University of Business and Integrated Development Studies, and led ACRC's land and connectivity domain research in Accra.
Chris Jordan is communications and impact manager for the Global Development Institute at The University of Manchester, and ACRC's communications manager.
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Music: Brighter Days | Broke in Summer
Sounds: Zapsplat
This podcast presents the views of the speakers featured and does not necessarily represent the views of the African Cities Research Consortium as a whole.
Stay up to date with the latest publications, announcements and insights from the African Cities Research Consortium:
> Website
> E-news
> Bluesky
> LinkedIn
> YouTube
> X (Twitter)
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.
So, how can African 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.
Ahead of an upcoming ACRC workshop in Accra, Chris Jordan is joined by Samuel B Biitir for a conversation around the challenges and opportunities of urban property taxation in African cities. With a particular focus on the Accra context, they discuss how property taxation could help to improve essential urban infrastructure and services, the need for political buy-in, the potential benefits and blockages posed by digitalisation, and the importance of transparency when it comes to securing citizen support.
> Read more about ACRC’s urban property tax workshop in Accra
Samuel B Biitir is a senior lecturer in the Department of Land Management at SD Dombo University of Business and Integrated Development Studies, and led ACRC's land and connectivity domain research in Accra.
Chris Jordan is communications and impact manager for the Global Development Institute at The University of Manchester, and ACRC's communications manager.
----
Music: Brighter Days | Broke in Summer
Sounds: Zapsplat
This podcast presents the views of the speakers featured and does not necessarily represent the views of the African Cities Research Consortium as a whole.
Stay up to date with the latest publications, announcements and insights from the African Cities Research Consortium:
> Website
> E-news
> Bluesky
> LinkedIn
> YouTube
> X (Twitter)
Previous Episode
Action research spotlight: Healthy school meals in Nairobi
School feeding programmes are a vital safety net for vulnerable children, providing them with healthy and nutritious meals that they might otherwise miss out on.
Such initiatives are not new and have run in Kenya in different forms for decades; in Nairobi, for example, the county government has an existing school feeding programme in public schools. But the current programme does not apply to informal private schools, meaning that the majority of children living in the city’s informal settlements have been excluded from the government initiative. An ACRC action research project aims to fill this gap.
In this episode, Veronica Mwangi, researcher and lecturer of economic geography at the University of Nairobi, joins Chris Jordan to talk about the issue of healthy diets and nutrition in African cities – particularly among children living in Nairobi’s informal settlements. They discuss the various economic, market-related and household-level factors hindering access to nutritious diets in these settlements – such as low incomes, high food prices and cultural practices – highlighting malnutrition and food insecurity as major concerns. They explore the potential that expanding the existing school feeding programme has to address these issues and improve the nutrition of children living in informal settlements, outlining how the action research team is working closely with the community to co-create an affordable, sustainable school feeding model that can be rolled out across informal schools.
> Read more about ACRC’s school feeding programme action research project
Veronica Mwangi is a researcher and lecturer of economic geography in the Department of Geography, Population and Environmental Studies at the University of Nairobi.
Chris Jordan is communications and impact manager for the Global Development Institute at The University of Manchester, and ACRC's communications manager.
----
Music: Brighter Days | Broke in Summer
Sounds: Zapsplat
This podcast presents the views of the speakers featured and does not necessarily represent the views of the African Cities Research Consortium as a whole.
Stay up to date with the latest publications, announcements and insights from the African Cities Research Consortium:
> Website
> E-news
> Bluesky
> LinkedIn
> YouTube
> X (Twitter)
African Cities - Understanding urban property tax with Samuel B Biitir
Transcript
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 th
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