Beyond Tourism: Transport Services Now Generate Billions for Tanzania

DAR ES SALAAM — Transport and logistics services earned Tanzania USD 2,647.6 million in 2025, up 12.5 percent from USD 2,353.4 million in 2024, according to the National Development Plan 2026/27. The figure makes transport services Tanzania's second-largest foreign exchange earning sector after tourism, and the 8.0 percent sectoral growth rate confirms that the infrastructure investment decade whose physical outputs are now operational is generating real commercial returns. The Central Corridor advantage The SGR Central Corridor's commercial logic is straightforward. Landlocked countries including Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda's western regions, the DRC's eastern provinces, Zambia's Copperbelt, and Malawi have a choice of routing their imports and exports through Mombasa-Northern Corridor or Dar es Salaam-Central Corridor. The determinant is total delivered cost and time, which depends on port efficiency, rail and road logistics cost, border crossing time, and reliability. Tanzania's SGR freight service, launched commercially in 2025, changes the Central Corridor economics materially. Rail freight from Dar es Salaam to Dodoma, with extension planned toward Tabora, Mwanza, Kigoma, and eventually Rwandan and Burundian borders, offers transport cost and time reductions relative to road-only logistics that shift the corridor comparison in Tanzania's favour for a growing share of cargo. Port cargo handling at 32,753,618 tonnes in FY2024/25, with a target of 42,372,709 tonnes in FY2026/27, reflects the pipeline of transit volume growth that the SGR efficiency improvement is attracting and that Dar es Salaam port's expansion infrastructure, including the concession arrangement with DP World confirmed in the PPP pipeline, will need to accommodate at higher volumes. Air Tanzania's commercial contribution Air Tanzania's fleet expansion to 16 aircraft and 33 route points, carrying 1,072,528 passengers in the July 2025 to March 2026 period up 22.38 percent, contributes to transport services foreign exchange earnings through international route revenue and through the air freight capacity whose availability complements the port's cargo handling. The plan targets ATCL fleet expansion to 18 aircraft in FY2026/27, with passenger targets of 1,750,056 for the full year, and further expansion to 28 aircraft by 2030 with 3,125,463 annual passengers. Each new route is simultaneously a transport infrastructure investment and a tourism connectivity investment whose returns are counted in both the transport services and tourism revenue categories. The lakes network Lake transport contributes to the transport services total through ferry services on Victoria, Tanganyika, and Nyasa. The completion of MV New Mwanza on Lake Victoria and the MT Sangara rehabilitation enabling fuel transport between Kigoma and DRC's Kalemie demonstrate the lake network's role in regional connectivity that road and rail infrastructure cannot reach. The planned shipbuilding facility on Lake Tanganyika for vessels up to 5,000 tonnes represents the infrastructure investment that would scale lake transport significantly.