Ten stories this week: MoneyGram-NALA stablecoin deal, Vodacom's M-Pesa rebuild, BOT's new cyber rules for bank boards, and more.

Tuesday is here. MoneyGram picked NALA as its African and Asian stablecoin partner on April 17, eight years after the company was founded in Dar es Salaam.

The Bank of Tanzania published draft cybersecurity rules after a Sh147.5 billion card-cloning fraud pushed several banks into court.

Vodacom switched on M-Pesa Fintech 2.0 at the start of April with capacity for 86 million transactions a day.

Seven more stories and two events follow.

1. MoneyGram Names NALA as Its Stablecoin Partner for Africa and Asia

MoneyGram said on April 17 it will handle its payouts across Africa and Asia through NALA, the Tanzania-founded cross-border payments startup, using stablecoins for settlement in place of its existing network of partner banks.

The deal runs MoneyGram’s flows through Rafiki, the NALA-built platform that holds the licences to move money between digital dollars and local currencies and that plugs into banks and mobile money operators in ten countries.

NALA was founded by Benjamin Fernandes in Dar es Salaam in 2017 and went through Y Combinator in 2022.

Rafiki launched in January and pays out into M-Pesa, Airtel Money, and bank accounts in Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Nigeria, Senegal, Cameroon, Cote d’Ivoire, Pakistan, and the Philippines. Under the agreement, MoneyGram’s retail and business customers will settle through the same rails in near real time.

African central banks have been cautious about stablecoin settlement since the 2022 collapse of FTX erased roughly $9 billion of customer funds.

The MoneyGram-NALA agreement is among the first large commercial deployments of stablecoin settlement for African payouts.

2. BoT Drafts Cybersecurity Rules Placing Personal Liability on Bank Directors

The Bank of Tanzania has circulated draft cybersecurity rules that require directors of banks, microfinance companies and payment firms to personally approve their institution’s cybersecurity strategy, policies, procedures, and minimum controls.

The draft follows a Sh147.5 billion card-cloning fraud that the Prevention and Combating of Corruption Bureau has referred to court.

Licensed firms will have to run vulnerability scans every quarter and full penetration tests every year, through firms accredited by the Tanzania Communications Regulatory Authority (TCRA).

Multi-factor authentication becomes compulsory for staff accounts, remote-access sessions, high-risk transactions, and customer-facing applications. The draft is issued under the Banking and Financial Institutions Act and the National Payment Systems (NPS) Act.

Individual directors carry personal responsibility for the adoption of the controls. The draft is open for public comment and the central bank has said it intends to publish the final rules before October.

3. Vodacom Completes 15-Month Rebuild of M-Pesa Platform

Vodacom Tanzania completed a 15-month rebuild of its M-Pesa platform in the early hours of 30 March, moving the service off its previous software, called G2, onto a new system it calls Fintech 2.0.

Vodacom said Fintech 2.0 supports live updates. On G2, the company had to take M-Pesa offline between midnight and four in the morning to push any significant update.

The $28 million rebuild sits inside a wider $100 million modernization programme Vodacom announced in September to mark 25 years of operations in Tanzania.

Tap-to-pay went live alongside the migration, which Vodacom said makes Tanzania the first country on the continent where M-Pesa supports contactless payments.

The M-Pesa product team can now release features to specific regions or customer segments without a nationwide rollout. Future products from M-Pesa Africa, the group-wide unit, can now also be built on the Tanzania platform first.

Vodacom said G2 had reached the end of its vendor support, could not be expanded to meet projected growth, and would not have handled the load implied by a Tanzanian population that the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) expects to roughly double by 2050.

Fintech 2.0 can process more than 1,000 transactions a second and currently carries 30 million M-Pesa customers and around 600,000 registered merchants.

Vodacom rehearsed the cutover three times before going through with it, the last dress rehearsal on March 22. Hundreds of engineering and operations staff were on site in Dar on the night of the migration.

Vodacom Tanzania now leads the Vodacom Group on customer data protection and platform controls, Mlinga said. The company runs 10 to 15 graduate engineers through an internal training programme each year.

“We have become a hunting ground,” Mlinga said, naming Tanzanian financial institutions, other African markets, and Vodacom sister companies as the destinations for Vodacom staff and alumni of their trainee programme.

Lesotho’s M-Pesa unit went through a similar platform migration in 2025. Vodacom Mozambique is next in the group sequence.

Vodacom said the largest remaining fraud risk on M-Pesa is social engineering, in which fraudsters impersonate agents or relatives to trick customers into sending money or disclosing PINs, rather than direct platform compromise. Even Huawei engineers access the platform only on request, with each session tracked.

M-Pesa Director Epimack Mbeteni believes that while his team continues to invest heavily in consumer awareness regarding digital safety, the time it takes for these lessons to become common practice is the most gradual factor in their fight against fraud.

4. State Accepts Handover of 1,100 Kilometres of Fibre and 758 New Telecom Towers

President Samia Suluhu Hassan on April 10 accepted the handover of more than 1,100 kilometres of national fibre and 758 new telecom towers from a consortium of telecom operators at the Jakaya Kikwete Convention Centre (JKCC) in Dodoma. The infrastructure was built under a long-standing public-private arrangement and has now been transferred to the government as part of the National ICT Broadband Backbone (NICTBB).

TTCL director general Moremi Marwa told the President that the backbone now reaches every region of the country and 82 percent of districts. Yas Tanzania, the rebranded Tigo operator, delivered 261 of the new towers and said it has completed the upgrade of its 2G footprint to 4G.

According to data from the TCRA, 4G population coverage reached 94.21 percent at the end of December 2025, up from 50.4 percent in 2021. 5G covers 26 percent of the population and 3.6 percent of the country’s land area. Tanzania has 92.7 million mobile subscriptions.

5. Tanzania Asks Meta and UNESCO to Treat Kiswahili as a Primary Platform Language

Tanzania’s Minister of Information, Culture, Arts and Sports Paul Makonda said on April 13 that his ministry has opened formal discussions with UNESCO and Meta to secure first-class support for Kiswahili on Meta’s platforms. Makonda said the ministry would put similar requests to OpenAI, Google, and other global platforms.

Meta operates Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Threads, which together reach more than 3 billion monthly active users. According to the ministry, Meta currently treats Kiswahili as a secondary locale in its advertising, search, and content-moderation systems.

First-class support would affect ad targeting, content ranking, and moderation treatment for more than 200 million Kiswahili speakers across Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, and eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

UNESCO launched an online English-Kiswahili AI dictionary last year. Tanzania completed a national AI readiness assessment with UNESCO support earlier in the quarter.

6. Government Opens Dedicated Capital Line for Youth-Owned Tech Startups

President Samia on April 10 in Dodoma announced a dedicated capital line for youth-owned startups, to be administered through the Ministry of Information and Communication Technology (MICT). The fund will support founders working in telecoms, education, health, and e-commerce. The Presidency did not disclose the allocation amount.

The announcement follows a Sh200 billion cheque delivered by Prime Minister Mwigulu Nchemba to the Ministry of State for Youth Development in February, which operates through loan guarantees.

The new MICT-administered line differs in being targeted specifically at technology founders. However, the government has not yet published ticket sizes, eligibility criteria, or disbursement timelines.

7. COSTECH and Sahara Ventures Launch Tanzania Ventures Lab With 1,000-Startup Target by 2029

COSTECH and Sahara Ventures have launched the Tanzania Ventures Lab, a four-year programme targeting approximately 1,000 high-growth startups between 2026 and 2029.

The programme plans to admit about 250 founders per year across energy, mining, tourism, agriculture, manufacturing, and emerging technologies including artificial intelligence.

Implementation runs through a public-private partnership (PPP). COSTECH contributes its innovation arms, the Dar Teknohama Business Incubator (DTBi) and the Buni Innovation Hub.

Meanwhile, Sahara Ventures manages the acceleration work and continues to operate its IEEP programme in partnership with AiDiA and GIZ, which sends Tanzanian founders to Hamburg for commercial engagement.

Selected startups receive technical mentorship, business-development support, and access to government-backed innovation funds.

The 1,000-startup target, if met, would roughly double the current reported base of over 1,041 Tanzanian startups on the Tanzania Startup Association’s (TSA) books. Of that current base, only about ten percent of companies have raised outside capital, according to some estimates.

8. Madica Invests $200,000 in Kilimo Fresh Alongside Kenya and Nigeria Cheques

Madica, the structured pre-seed programme backed by Flourish Ventures, disclosed on April 15 a $600,000 deployment across three African startups.

Kilimo Fresh of Tanzania, Hakimu of Kenya, and Biovana of Nigeria each received up to $200,000 in seed capital and entry into an 18-month programme of executive coaching, mentorship, and immersion visits to global technology hubs.

Kilimo Fresh operates a business-to-business (B2B) produce marketplace that sources from smallholder farmers in Tanzania and sells to business buyers. Madica said its investment thesis targets founders it considers underserved by mainstream venture capital.

Madica also published a 75-page fundraising guidebook this week for early-stage African founders preparing a first institutional raise. The guide is available to download at no cost.

9. Finance Minister Omar Pitches Tanzanian Tech to US Investors at BCIU in Washington

Minister of Finance Ambassador Khamis Mussa Omar on April 17 led a Tanzanian delegation to a Business Council for International Understanding (BCIU) investment forum in Washington, held on the sidelines of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank (WB) Winter Meetings.

Omar told US investors that demand for digital services in Tanzania is creating opportunities in technology, innovation, and telecommunications.

He cited foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows of $1.72 billion in 2024, up from $1.34 billion in 2023, a 28.3 percent year-on-year increase published by Planning Minister Prof. Mkumbo earlier this month.

Omar also said the Tanzania Investment and Special Economic Zones Authority (TISEZA), which replaced the Tanzania Investment Centre (TIC) in July 2025, had registered 2,020 projects worth $23.67 billion between March 2021 and February 2025, with 523,000 jobs attached.

10. Microfinance Technology Summit Opens in Dar With Bank of Tanzania as Co-Host

The 4th Microfinance Technology Summit opened earlier this month at Julius Nyerere International Convention Centre (JNICC) in Dar es Salaam.

The Bank of Tanzania (BoT) was a co-host, alongside the Association of Microfinance Institutions in Rwanda (AMIR), the Tanzania Association of Microfinance Institutions (TAMFI), and the Tanzania Microfinance Non-Deposit Taking Union.

Delegates came from more than 15 countries. Regulators attending included counterparts from Rwanda, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Senegal, Nigeria, and Kenya. Fintech vendors attending include MVend, Orion Systems, Energize Global Services, WIZER, Eclectics International, Peerless, ADFinance, PCES, and Qlana.

The programme included a compliance review of Tanzanian digital lenders against the Tier 2 microfinance rules the Bank of Tanzania issued last year. A separate session covered interoperability between microfinance back-office systems and mobile money platforms.

Additional headlines

The Capital Markets and Securities Authority (CSMA) has opened public comment on draft private equity and venture capital regulations, and separately on draft rules for a supervised testing programme for new fintech products.

Final publication is expected within the quarter. A Fund Management Licence will be required for any fund operating as a private equity or venture capital vehicle in Tanzania.

The Central Bank of Kenya (CBK) and the National Bank of Rwanda ( signed a memorandum of understanding in March on fintech licence passporting. Under the arrangement, a fintech licensed in either country will be able to operate in the other without a new licensing process.

The memorandum sits inside the East African Community Cross-Border Payment System Masterplan approved in May 2025. Tanzania is not part of the initial phase.

NALA has a separate plan reported by PYMNTS to raise 120 million US dollars. The company is offering a 10 to 15 percent equity stake, implying a valuation between 800 million and 1.2 billion US dollars. The round has not closed.

Upcoming events

1st Tanzania Annual Data Privacy Conference 2026

The Personal Data Protection Commission (PDPC), which sits under the Ministry of Communication and Information Technology (MCIT), is hosting Tanzania’s first Annual Data Privacy Conference at Mlimani City Conference Centre (MCCC) in Dar es Salaam from June 29 to July 1, 2026.

Director General Dr. Emmanuel L. Mkilia confirmed the new dates in a letter on April 15, relocating the conference from its original April 21 to 23 slot following requests from newly registered Data Protection Officers (DPOs) for additional preparation time.

The three-day programme covers compliance with the Personal Data Protection Act (PDPA), digital trust, responsible innovation, and data governance for Vision 2050.

The participation fee is TZS 1,000,000 per person, covering the conference only, not accommodation or meals. Registration closes on June 25, 2026 through the Government Training and Seminars Management System at tsms.gov.go.tz or through pdpc.go.tz. Information at conference@pdpc.go.tz. Sponsorship at sponsorship@pdpc.go.tz.

Tanzania Investment Summit 2026

The Tanzania Investment Growth Facility (TIGF) is running the Tanzania Investment Summit 2026 at the Gran Melia Hotel in Arusha from 3 to 5 June 2026, under the theme Unlocking Bankable Opportunities for Inclusive Growth.

The format is deal-focused, with 8 to 10 large-scale projects worth approximately $100 million in combined value on offer across tourism, transport, renewable energy, water, blue economy, and agro-processing. Registration and detail at tigf.or.tz.