Tanzania

We operate in Tanzania as Vodacom Tanzania, the country’s leading technology and telecommunications company, which provides a wide range of services for consumers and businesses, including voice, data, messaging and mobile financial services through M-PESA for its millions of customers.

Tanzania is comprised of vast wilderness areas, lakes – including Victoria, the second largest freshwater lake in the world – and mountains. Around 65% of the population live in rural areas, according to the World Bank.

Despite being one of the UN’s least developed countries, Tanzania has been growing at a sustained rate for two decades. It reached an important milestone in July 2020, when it formally graduated from low-income country to lower-middle-income country status. Tanzania’s success in reducing poverty and growing its economy is partly due to its sustained progress in expanding women’s economic opportunities and improving standard of living.

Despite progress on lifting women’s economic capacity in the country, there is still room to improve on access to timely medical attention through healthcare facilities for women and children. Too many pregnant women, women in childbirth and newborns die in Tanzania from largely preventable causes. The Government of Tanzania has made substantial improvements to the delivery of healthcare, but maternal and newborn mortality and morbidity continue to be stubbornly high. 

To address such health gaps through the surge of mobile penetration and technological advances in Tanzania, the Government of Tanzania has worked with Vodacom Tanzania to develop a scalable innovative technology infrastructure that offers an emergency transportation service for maternal and newborn emergencies. This simple, integrated technology has reduced maternal deaths by close to 38% and newborn deaths by 47% in Shinyanga region when piloted. The system is being rolled out all over Tanzania in the rural and semi-rural areas to prevent more maternal and newborn deaths and disabilities.  

The innovative emergency transportation system developed by Vodacom Tanzania Foundation and Vodafone Foundation is known as ‘m-mama’. It provides emergency transport for pregnant and postpartum women, optimising government ambulances, community taxi ambulances and a referral system to direct pregnant women to healthcare facilities on time.  

In April 2022, Her Excellency President of United Republic of Tanzania, Samia Hassan Suluhu, announced a scale up of m-mama from one region to 31 regions, including the isles, in Dodoma. Starting from June 2022, the m-mama service is expected to transport 53,000 women on an annual basis and empower more than 3,100 community drivers across regions and save 27% of pregnant women by reducing maternal mortality.

On the map: Tanzania’s national animal is the giraffe, its flower the Eastern African Clove, and Mount Kilimanjaro is a famous landmark.

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