 I'll be talking to you today about local government revenues, looking at some of the sources, the challenges and reforms as well. The two previous speakers have already elaborated quite a lot about the revenues, some of the challenges that are faced and the difficulties that local governments generally have in order to be able to raise the revenues. What I'll quickly do is ask a question and it's a simple one, do we really need reform? And the picture is simple when you look at what we have on the board. Local government revenues are collected from property taxes and from payment or other sources of revenues, simply because governments, especially local governments tell us that they're going to do a couple of things for the citizens, schools, roads, garbage, utilities, public services, but the picture is quite an interesting one. What do we end up getting? In most of the cases, you'd find out there are no schools, all right, students still or children still study on the trees in some countries. The roads poor, garbage not collected, no electricity, no water, and you get a lot of rich government officials that are hanging out there. The outcome is generally there is a lot of dissatisfaction that sort of sets in and ultimately the voices get louder. This is actually the picture in most African cities today and that brings us to two key issues. The first is do we need to reform the collection component as well as do we need to reform the expenditure and taxpayer perception components? I think these are very two important aspects that need to be covered in order to improve revenue collections in African cities. Now, local government revenues, what is the status quo? There is a proliferation of small taxes, right, that create a lot of complexity. Most of these taxes are nuisance taxes for the simple reason that it created a lot of psychological burden on the taxpayers, facilitated corruption because there are so numerous and ultimately raise very little revenue for the local government authorities. Overall, the collection is still low and there is huge potential. If you take, for example, the ratio local government revenues to probably GDP, in Germany you would have approximately 7%, France 12%, but in some of the African countries you get as low as 0.4%. There is a growing focus, therefore, on trying to improve, right, the more conventional sources of local government, collecting local government revenues and as well abolish those other forms of nuisance taxes that really do not generate much. And ahead of all of these discussions is the governance issue. The two previous speakers already mentioned this and I would say for a start that you need two things to happen for the system to be optimal in terms of collecting local government revenues. The first is governance has to be effective and by that I mean having tax laws that are well elaborated and that basically cover all the key aspects of the system that has to be used to generate the revenues. The administrative component as well is very important because if you don't have a good administration, definitely the collection is going to pose a problem as well as the enforcement components. And then third, the second key issue is, and it's a direct result of the first, is from the moment that the system is effectively, that the governance system is effective, there is a logical follow through in terms of voluntary compliance and that is when I think the system becomes ultimately optimal. Now the key idea is you should ensure that the revenues are translated into effective public benefits to the citizens. The key problem is there is actually no link in most of the cities today between the revenues that are collected and what the revenues are used for. An opportunity is you strengthen the system and ultimately the citizens feel involved in decision making and because they feel involved in decision making they ultimately would comply voluntarily, but the challenge is how do you do this? Some of the key challenges you'd find in optimizing local government revenues or the mobilization of local government revenues would be first of all collecting and enforcing the collection and enforcement challenges, excuse me. It's difficult to identify taxpayers in the cities and even when you identify them, for some they are unable to pay. There are cases in which you, for example, meet somebody who actually owes the taxes, but the financial abilities to pay for the taxes does not exist. Another challenge you're going to find is economic efficiency. So many taxes yielding very little revenues, you have to spend a lot to collect them, but then you do not get enough in return. And the nuisance taxes opens opportunities for corruption, as we already said, and that also is a major problem. There are high levels of complexity in the systems because in most of the systems, for example, you have different taxes, levies, charges tailored to suit specific types of businesses, cover certain types of properties and not others, locations and social impacts as well. That also creates, the complexity also creates a situation in which mobilizing local government revenues is difficult. Other challenges that you might find are high levels of corruption, we've talked about that already, local government, local revenues sometimes are kept totally off the books. Bribes are collected by some government officials, it's also a problem. There's little space for public engagement and this is generally observed across the board, especially in countries where collection is central as opposed to local, because at a local level there is still some room for direct engagement between the citizens, as the tax-paying citizens and their government authorities. At the central level, that is very difficult. You think of the weak links that exist between revenues and spending and because those links are weak, it makes it relatively difficult for the citizens to voluntarily want to comply. Reforming existing systems, is there potential? Yes, I would say there's huge potential in mobilizing local government revenues. In Africa, for example, we see on 0.2% in most of the countries or lower. That means there is enough space, enough potential to expand the revenue base. In some countries where reform has already been initiated, you can see the results. You take for example, the city of Bo in Sierra Leone where revenues were more than that six-fold increases in revenues. You take for example, the city of Arusha where coverage increased from 31,000 to approximately 104,000 and where actual collections increased from about a million one to about a million nine. That tells us that there is huge potentials and many cities on the continent are beginning to grab this opportunity. If you take the case of Freetown for example, the mayor is actually initiating reforms at the moment to double or increase the coverage from 70,000 properties to about 300,000 properties and she's actually intending to move the revenue from approximately a million to 3.7 million. Now in terms of implementing reform, so we think there's a general agenda that can be followed, you eliminate many of the small taxes or the nuisance taxes. You simplify the tax laws. You strengthen transparency as well. You could also build on local capacity and that is one of the areas in which most of the local governments do so far. And then you strengthen in our opinion property taxes because in our view that is where the greatest potential lies. And in terms of reforming property taxes there are a couple of things we think you need to do. The first is you improve and you simplify the devaluation systems. You increase the use of ICTs in order to facilitate collection and to facilitate assessment. You clarify the role that exists between the central government and the local government authorities. And then you do as much as possible establish a link between the property taxes, the pay, and the public services they get in return. That is in fact moving the current system from the social contract sort of arrangement into one that is more related to the fiscal contract. That is the pay, but they get in effect something in return. Broadly, to conclude, we think you need to focus on improving local capacity. You need effective enforcement as well. And the solutions you need to adopt have to be practical and has to be locally based. I think, thank you.