Dar es Salaam Loses 53 Percent of Its Water Before Anyone Drinks It. The City Is Adding 500,000 People Every Year.

The Loss Numbers

Financial losses from water loss across Tanzania's water authorities reached TZS 243.74 billion in 2024/25. This represents the monetised value of water that enters the distribution system, is paid for at the production end, and is lost before it reaches a paying customer. Twenty-two of Tanzania's 34 water and sanitation authorities face water supply deficits of between 20 and 85 percent of demand. The regulatory tolerance for distribution losses is 20 percent. The actual losses are running at multiples of that threshold across every major urban water system in the country.

The city-level data is specific. Dar es Salaam loses 53 percent of its distributed water. Morogoro loses 50 percent. Arusha loses 47 percent. Mwanza loses 45 percent. Mpanda loses 70 percent. These are not small-city marginal infrastructure problems. Dar es Salaam, Arusha, and Mwanza are Tanzania's three largest urban economies and the cities where the majority of the country's formal sector employment, manufacturing activity, and commercial investment are concentrated. Water loss rates of 45 to 53 percent in these cities are not operational inefficiencies at the margin. They are structural constraints on the urban economic productivity that Tanzania's industrialisation agenda depends on.

The cause is documented and consistent across every authority: aged and deteriorating infrastructure combined with inadequate maintenance systems. The pipe networks in most of Tanzania's urban water systems were built decades ago, have not been systematically replaced or rehabilitated, and are losing water through pervasive leakage that worsens with each year of deferred maintenance.

The Projects That Should Have Fixed This

The Kimbiji and Mpera water projects for Dar es Salaam, with a combined value of TZS 25.05 billion, have failed to complete. The reason: disputes that have been ongoing for more than 12 years combined with inadequate contract management. These are not new projects that encountered unexpected difficulties. They are projects whose completion delays have been documented in successive CAG reports and whose failure to deliver has compounded Dar es Salaam's water deficit through more than a decade of population growth.

The Tanga water authority issued a Green Bond of TZS 41.15 billion to finance water infrastructure projects. The projects funded by this bond are at risk of not completing on time. The CAG flags this as a threat to the authority's ability to service its bond obligations. An infrastructure authority that issues commercial debt instruments and fails to complete the projects the debt was raised to finance is an authority whose creditworthiness for future capital market access is directly at risk.

New customer connection delays across multiple authorities are documented as a systemic problem, with connection queues stretching months beyond committed timelines. Customer complaints are going unresolved within required timeframes. Billing systems are generating estimated rather than metered bills across multiple authorities for extended periods, producing revenue figures that do not reflect actual consumption.

The 10 Million People Problem

Dar es Salaam will have 10 million people by 2030. That is four years away. At current water loss rates, a city of 10 million people is being served by a water system delivering less than half of what it produces. The infrastructure investment required to close that gap, to reduce losses from 53 percent toward the regulatory 20 percent threshold while simultaneously expanding supply capacity to serve 3 million additional residents, dwarfs what the current investment trajectory suggests is planned.

The Kidunda Dam, which Uchumi360's infrastructure analysis documented as Dar es Salaam's primary water security project, addresses supply. The CAG's water sector findings address distribution. A city can have all the supply it needs and still fail its population if the distribution system is losing more than half of that supply before it reaches anyone. The supply and distribution problems are both real, and they require simultaneous investment responses rather than sequential ones.

Tanzania's water sector is one of the clearest examples in the CAG report of the systemic gap between infrastructure ambition and operational accountability. The ambition is appropriate. The accountability infrastructure that would ensure that completed investments actually deliver their intended outcomes is the missing variable.