With a few exceptions access to land and shelter by the poor is through the informal land delivery system which creates unplanned areas which do not benefit from infrastructure, security of tenure or town planning regulations offered by the public sector. The poor to need to benefit from minimum standards and regulations so that they live in areas whose environment is tolerable. It is partly in realization of this situation that Land Reform is being carried out in Tanzania, where a new Land Policy was adopted in 1995. Among other things, this new Land Policy aims at recognizing and validating land occupied through informal means. It also recognizes land values, a step that may help streamline land markets and possibly remove the situation where most official land use schemes are highly undervalued and therefore subsidized usually at the expense of the poor.
Customary tenure is recognized and junior titles to land are proposed.
Fair and prompt compensation based on the equivalence principle is upheld. The land Reform that is going on in Tanzania is now at the state of proposing a new Land Act. There has been some debate generated on this proposed Act on a number of aspects some of which impact on poverty. While the Act asserts the right of every citizen to access and ownership of land, its upholding of customary types of tenure has been criticized since customary types of tenure is discriminatory against women in general, and single women and children out of wedlock in particular. Another major criticism of the new Land Act is the centralization of land management powers away from local authorities.