Tanzania Extends Paperless Services to Six Public Functions

What changed

Tanzania is moving paperless public services beyond isolated online forms and into six document-heavy functions: procurement, financial management, recruitment, National Assembly operations, business registration and local revenue collection.

The shift is becoming more connected. By August 2026, the National e-Procurement System of Tanzania, NeST, had handled 397,395 procurement proceedings worth 40.4 trillion shillings. NeST is now integrated with MUSE, the government’s financial-management platform, while GAMIS had recorded 4,159,971 assets across 644 public institutions by April.

Why it matters

The biggest change is not that fewer forms are printed. It is that one government system can begin doing work for another.

Electronic procurement avoided an estimated 288.57 million printed pages and saved about 27.64 billion shillings in paper and toner during the 2023/24 and 2024/25 financial years. Suppliers also avoided more than 15.4 million kilometres of travel, about 1.7 million litres of fuel and roughly 3.2 billion shillings in transport costs.

Those savings show the practical value of digitisation. But integration is where the harder test begins. When NeST feeds procurement and contract information into MUSE, the goal is no longer simply to replace a paper file with a digital file. It is to remove a step from the process.

That logic is also visible at BRELA. By April 2026, the agency had registered 16,864 companies and 30,631 business names. Its online services allow registration and post-registration transactions without requiring every process to start at a physical counter.

The promise is straightforward: identity checks, payments and supporting information could move securely between public systems instead of being requested again and again. Whether all six functions can exchange verified data reliably is still unsettled, and the report does not quantify the full cost of implementation or any service gaps.

Recruitment shows why online access still needs human support. During 2025/26, the Public Service Recruitment Secretariat assisted 19,802 Ajira Portal users by telephone and 22,968 by email. Another 2,419 people received help at offices in Dodoma, Dar es Salaam and Zanzibar. The portal was also changed so successful health and education candidates could be assigned directly to facilities at their allocated work stations.

Tanzania’s digital-government project is therefore entering its more demanding phase. The easy win is removing paper. The real measure will be whether public systems can recognise trusted information once and use it securely across services.