Good Life Maisha Bora

This research project is from the UCL Institute for Global Prosperity.

Project leads: Dr Saffron Woodcraft, Festo Makoba
Project partners: Centre for Community Initiatives (CCI)

The challenge

Traditional measures of prosperity often rely on economic indicators and do not reflect people’s lived experiences, particularly in informal or unplanned settlements.

In Dar es Salaam, there is a need for new ways of understanding and measuring prosperity that capture what supports and prevents people from living good lives.

Our Approach

The Maisha Bora (‘Good Life’) Study explored what prosperity means to people living in three unplanned settlements in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania: Mji Mpya, Bonde la Mpunga, and Keko Machungwa.

The research was co-designed over five years with citizen scientists, community members, community leaders, and government officials, and launched in partnership with the Centre for Community Initiatives (CCI).

The research has been carried out by a team of citizen scientists, people who live and work in the three settlements, trained by the UCL Citizen Science Academy and employed by CCI.

The Maisha Bora Index provides an innovative approach for assessing prosperity in unplanned settlements. Moving beyond traditional economic indicators, it integrates a multidimensional framework based on lived experiences and aspirations.

It incorporates economic security, social cohesion, environmental sustainability, and governance to provide a more holistic understanding of prosperity.

The Index builds on the Citizen Prosperity Index methodology developed in east London by the IGP, adapting it to the realities of unplanned settlements in Dar es Salaam.

Key findings

The Maisha Bora Index data reveals shared strengths and challenges across the settlements, as well as distinct patterns within each community:

• Livelihood security is the most significant cross-cutting challenge, with unstable incomes, high levels of informal employment, and gender disparities in economic participation
• Access to infrastructure presents fundamental challenges, with variation between settlements pointing to systemic inequalities
• High levels of belonging indicate strong social cohesion across all settlements
• Each settlement shows distinct patterns of prosperity shaped by its demographic and economic context
• Prosperity emerges from complex interactions between social, economic, and physical infrastructure

Impact and next steps

Residents, community leaders, and NGOs are using the findings to identify priorities for action, develop community-led interventions, and work with municipal and city officials to influence policymaking.

The Maisha Bora Index provides new, place-based evidence for policymakers to address poverty and inequality. Scaling the Index across Tanzania could support more inclusive and responsive governance systems.

A proposed roadmap includes pilot testing in rural and urban areas, developing a flexible Index model with core domains, expanding citizen science training, and supporting institutional integration.

Resources and outputs

• Working paper: Redefining prosperity with and for communities in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania Beyond economic metrics for African cities
• Methodology: Empowering communities to define, measure, and take action on creating a good life in Dar es Salaaam
• Working paper: Developing the Maisha Bora Index
• Policy brief: Scaling-up the Maisha Bora Index
• Blog: Redefining prosperity in African cities: the launch of the Maisha Bora Index by Professor Henrietta L. Moore
• Article: Empowering communities through citizen science: Redefining prosperity in Tanzania by Festo Makoba, Joseph Cook and Saffron Woodcraft

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