Tanzania has been placed in the World Bank’s highest GovTech maturity bracket for the 2025 cycle.
The classification signals the country has built, at scale, the core digital systems, online service channels, citizen engagement tools, and enabling rules that the bank tracks as the “plumbing” of a modern digital state.
In the GovTech Maturity Index (GTMI) 2025, Tanzania is listed in Group A (Extensive GovTech Maturity), alongside Kenya, Rwanda, Uganda, and Egypt, placing several economies that share trade, investment and mobility links in the same top cluster.
The GTMI is not presented as a league table. The World Bank explicitly states the index “is not a ranking,” but an overview of GovTech practices that helps governments and partners spot gaps and design reforms.
Grouping is based on normalised GTMI scores: Group A is ≥0.75 to 1.0, with Group B, C and D below that.
The 2025 update covers 197 economies, and the World Bank reports that 80 economies—41 per cent—are now in Group A, up from earlier cycles, while warning that progress remains uneven and the digital divide is widening.
Methodologically, the 2025 GTMI update draws on two sources: self-reported survey responses from 158 participating economies and publicly available data for 39 non-participating economies.
The World Bank says more than 1,000 government officials contributed to the 2025 update through the global online survey.
The GTMI’s relevance is in what it measures. The index tracks four pillars through 48 key indicators: Core Government Systems, Online Public Service Delivery, Digital Citizen Engagement, and GovTech Enablers (including strategy, institutions, laws and regulations, digital skills and innovation policies).
The GTMI score is calculated as the simple average of the normalised scores of those four components.
In Tanzania’s case, the country’s own narrative of why it meets the “Extensive” threshold centres on core systems and interoperability, areas that typically determine whether digital government is experienced as one connected service, or as separate portals that cannot share information.
The summary of Tanzania’s systems credits the country’s progress to the presence and use of Core Government Systems, including public workforce management platforms such as the Human Capital Information Management System (HCIMS) and recruitment through the Ajira Portal, alongside an interoperability push designed to connect public institutions.
That interoperability layer is anchored by the Government Enterprise Service Bus (GovESB), described as a backbone that enables government systems to exchange data securely and efficiently, with the practical goal of reducing duplication, speeding up service delivery and strengthening accountability.
Service delivery platforms cited include the Government e-Payment Gateway (GePG) for government payments, the National e-Procurement System (NeST) for procurement workflows, and local government service systems such as TAUSI.
Together, those tools align with the GTMI’s emphasis on whether online delivery is institutionalised rather than episodic.
The digital citizen engagement pillar is often the hardest to sustain because it turns digitisation into a governance issue: whether feedback loops work, whether institutions respond, and whether citizens can track outcomes.
The World Bank flags Digital Citizen Engagement as an area where “CivicTech lags behind other dimensions,” and it highlights that “monitoring the use and uptake is an issue in most economies.”
Tanzania’s narrative points to e-Mrejesho as a key engagement channel, positioned as a platform for citizens to submit complaints, suggestions, advice and compliments, and to receive feedback.
In GTMI terms, the existence of such channels matters; however, the World Bank’s emphasis on uptake means the next layer of credibility is whether response performance can be tracked, published and improved over time.
Another pillar that GTMI rewards is the enabling environment. The World Bank’s indicators explicitly include whether governments have the institutional and legal foundations for digital transformation—ranging from a GovTech strategy and whole-of-government approach to laws and regulations that support delivery and trust.
On Tanzania’s side, the summary attributes part of the GTMI outcome to government policies, laws, regulations, standards and e-Government guidelines that steer ICT projects under a unified national direction.
Commenting on the assessment, Benedict Ndomba, Director General of the e-Government Authority (e-GA), said the result reflects a long evidence-collection process rather than a short review.
“The World Bank conducted this study for about a year, collecting evidence and various information on the use of ICT in government, an evidence-based GovTech Maturity Index survey, across different countries,” he said.
Ndomba urged public institutions to keep implementing ICT projects in line with national laws, standards and guidelines, strengthen citizen engagement systems, and connect institutional platforms through GovESB.
The regional significance is that the GTMI Group A list now contains multiple economies that share supply chains, contractors, professional services and cross-border investment flows.
In practice, that increases the pressure for interoperability, procurement traceability and online service consistency to keep improving, because businesses and citizens increasingly compare experiences across borders, and because regional trade corridors function best when administrative processes become predictable, verifiable and fast.
The World Bank’s own framing makes the next question clear; after the platforms and policies, the hardest work is proving adoption and performance.
The GTMI is designed to show whether the machinery exists and is supported by institutions; the public test is whether that machinery reliably reduces friction in payments, procurement, staffing processes and citizen feedback, at scale and over time.
