POTENTIAL AND HURDLES IN PROPERTY RATING IN GHANA: EVIDENCE FROM THE WA MUNICIPALITY

Abstract

The growth of Africa’s towns and cities has outpaced local authority capacity in terms of management, infrastructure and financing. Many African towns and cities are now facing a governance crisis. Accordingly, the capability and capacity of urban local government to provide basic services to a growing population have entered the core of the development debate. In particular, fiscal decentralization has become a main theme of urban governance in recent years. This paper presents an overview of how property rating can be harnessed to create the bulk of revenue needed for local level development within identified challenges. Several challenges were identified to be militating against efficient and effective implementation of property rates in the Wa Municipality. These included poor property data system, political interferences, non-enforcement of the law on rate defaulters, low budget deficit in financing revaluation, insufficient staffing and low level technical capacity of the few staff available at the Municipal Land Valuation Division and Rating Unit of the Assembly. Field data revealed that, even within these numerous constraints to property rating identified generally in Ghana and especially in the Wa Municipality, property rating can generate up to 30% of the current budget of the Wa Municipality Assembly (WMA). This is possible, provided the current challenges are streamlined, much investment made in the rating and valuation units and management attention drawn towards improving property rating.