As Tanzania’s leading mobile operator and mobile financial services provider, Vodacom Tanzania Public Limited Company has a major role in enhancing the lives of the country’s population
As Tanzania’s leading mobile operator and mobile financial services provider, Vodacom Tanzania Public Limited Company has a major role in enhancing the lives of the country’s population - its network leadership helps to transform communities, to create jobs through direct and indirect employment, advance solutions in health and education, and connect the country to the future.
Vodacom Tanzania is the country’s leading communications company, providing a wide range of services for consumers and businesses including voice, data, messaging, financial services and enterprise solutions. The company has the widest coverage network
with the fastest internet speeds in Tanzania, providing services to more than 18.6 million customers.
Since its foundation, Vodacom Tanzania has used its mobile technology to improve lives across the country. Vodacom Tanzania Plc’s Managing Director, Mr
Philip Besiimire noted that through innovation and community-driven insights, the company has been able to come up with products and services that touch on key socio-economic sectors such as health, education, agriculture, and mobile financial services.
The company’s M-PESA platform is helping to improve financial inclusion, while its education platform such as E-Fahamu is helping provide free educational resources to students and teachers. The M-Kulima platform was designed to provide farmers with digital agricultural services.
Vodacom also recently announced that the mobile m-mama service offered through its Vodacom Tanzania Foundation, which provides emergency transport for pregnant and postpartum women, will be scaled up from one Tanzanian region to cover more than 50% of the national population across all regions. This scale up is an example of public-private-partnership and made possible through partners like USAID and Vodafone Foundation.
“At the centre of what we do is ‘purpose’. It is not a buzzword or phrase, we actually believe in it, and we practice it. We are using technology
to really make things better for society, to solve real human problems,” emphasised Philip Besiimire.
Vodacom Tanzania employs some 560 people directly, but indirect employment includes close to 200,000 people working as agents within the distribution network and in network maintenance.
The company is amongst the top 10 taxpayers in the country and rising, having achieved an excellent financial performance over the last 12 months, posting a net annual profit of Sh44.6 billion (€ 16.9 million). Mr Besiimire explained that this growth has been the result of several factors, including reduced levies on mobile financial services, but primarily of enhanced commercial operations.
“We saw an increase in customer numbers, and we saw more customers using data, in other words, more users and more usage,” he said, pointing out that Vodacom’s alternative businesses - enterprise business and fixed services business - have also grown.
Also last year, Vodacom Tanzania signed a major fibre investment deal to support the Tanzanian government as it seeks to give 80%
of the population access to broadband by 2025. The contract, worth €4.29 million, signed by Vodacom Tanzania with The National ICT Broadband Backbone (NICTBB), a national fibre optic cable network, will allow Vodacom to enhance connectivity in rural Tanzania.
“In a country where three-quarters of the country’s workforce works in the agriculture sector and most of them reside in rural Tanzania, our innovative solutions have accelerated farmers’ registration on their M-Kulima platform reaching over 3.1 million farmers. M-Kulima is designed to provide farmers with digital agricultural services including cashless electronic payments, market information, and weather forecasts, all delivered through mobile devices, and through their latest partnership with UCSAF, more farmers will benefit from such services.”
Vodacom’s role in moving the country forward is unquestionable. The company describes itself as a creator and change agent that powers digital inclusion and social innovation for positive impact in Tanzania. “We are solving real future problems with our technology and the capability
we have. We’ve got a clear framework internally on how we want to evolve, and what we would look like in a few years’ time from now,” affirmed Mr Besiimire.
Investment in local communities is an important priority for the company. To this end, in 2006 the company established the Vodacom Tanzania Foundation that works collaboratively with a diverse set of expert Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) and Community Based Organizations (CBOs) to support and complement development efforts by Tanzania’s government.
“Community development initiatives include health and education, but now we are starting to focus also on entrepreneurship and innovation in that space. For example, our entire distribution network is outsourced to a third party. And for some of these people, it is the first time they’ve actually run a business. So, there’s a lot of business upskilling needed.”
He further emphasised that Vodacom is a strong advocate of diversity and inclusion. “Within the executive team, more than 50% are women, and within the broader leadership team we have 44% female representation. We are very focused on growing that
throughout the rest of the organisation, making sure that the entry criteria are continuously shining the light on gender diversity.”
Going forward, the company is set to expand its reach. In 2022, Vodacom introduced Tanzania’s first 5G network, in line with the company’s network investment to meet growing customer needs, and invested significantly in network coverage, capacity enhancement,
and IT infrastructure improvements, adding 260 5G sites and deploying 283 kilometres of fibre, providing highspeed connectivity to businesses.
Additionally, Mr Besiimire said, Vodacom invested $63.2 million in the Tanzania Communications Regulatory Authority’s spectrum auction and purchased four blocks of key low- and mid-band spectrum. “With this acquisition, we will be able to maximise our fixed-wireless access
growth potential and make even more progress towards closing the digital divide,” said Mr Besiimire.
“We are also focusing on the Internet of Things and its deployment as we are going outside of the traditional space of consumer-led solutions, moving to providing Enterprise and Government Solutions. We are also progressing in the arena of financial inclusion, building a big merchant ecosystem so that we can support
the government’s ambition of going over to a cashless economy.”
In concluding, he affirmed that his personal goal is for Vodacom to continue to grow in line with the purpose-led vision. “It’s important that we maintain a purpose-led organisation, because that’s the only way we can be sustainable as a business. Then we can invest in the community, open up new opportunities for people, all while changing lives for the better through technology.”
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“Community development initiatives include health and education, but now we are starting to focus also on entrepreneurship and innovation in that space.
