Abstract

Wilfred Uronu Lameck

Decentralization is a term which has gained popularity in development literature and has been a fundamental mode of administration which empowers grass root community to bring about development by themselves. In Tanzania, intra municipal decentralization is a new concept. It emerged in Western Europe in six Scandinavian countries as a result of amalgamation reforms. The study focused on localization with two main indicators; physical accessibility of office and openness in service delivery, and the question was: What is the effectiveness of physical accessibility of office and openness at neighbourhood and how can it be improved in Morogoro Municipality? Methodology used was qualitative approach of which judgmental sampling was used to select government officials for interview and simple random sampling was used to select neighborhoods to be studied. Researcher also used snow boll sampling to get citizens for focus group discussion because he was not familiar with research environment. In-depth interview was conducted with 15 municipal and neighborhood officials and four focus group discussions. An observation method was also used to cross check if respondents reported what they were doing. The study revealed that intra municipal decentralization is not effective because offices are not well accessible; staff use only one room and do not have reception areas. Schedule for meeting citizens are arranged by staff themselves and are often not accountable. The meeting of citizens with staff is limited because of ineffective layout of office and most people are not aware of open plan policy. Based on this, the researcher concluded that physical accessibility of office and openness is ineffective and recommended that financial resources be distributed to neighborhood based on population, size of the neighborhood and services they are providing and introducing intra municipal regulations. Priorities in fund allocation should also be reviewed to include office infrastructure and community participation should be sensitized