Opinion: Tanzania Has Spent Trillions Building Infrastructure. After Six Decades, Why Are Foreign Firms Still Doing the Engineering?

DAR ES SALAAM — TANROADS is currently managing 79 major road and bridge projects worth approximately TZS 6 trillion. The Standard Gauge Railway carried over 2.5 million passengers in the first nine months of FY2025/26. Ports, airports, dams, and industrial parks are all under simultaneous development at a scale Tanzania has not seen before. The physical transformation is real. Journey times are falling. Logistics costs are improving. Communities that were commercially isolated are connecting to markets. Beneath that transformation sits a question that almost nobody in Tanzania's development policy conversation is asking seriously. Who is accumulating the engineering knowledge those projects generate? Infrastructure produces two outputs. Tanzania is capturing one. Every infrastructure project creates two distinct forms of value. The first is the physical asset: the road, the bridge, the terminal, the grid connection. The second is the knowledge embedded in its execution: geotechnical investigation, structural design, digital modelling, contract management, procurement systems, quality assurance, and the professional judgement that comes from solving problems under construction conditions. Physical assets depreciate. Knowledge compounds. A road built in 2026 will require resurfacing in fifteen years. An engineer who designed that road carries the capability to design the next five without importing the expertise again. The concern is not that Tanzania is failing to build infrastructure. It is building it at pace. The concern is that the knowledge side of that equation is largely flowing out with the consultants rather than accumulating inside Tanzanian institutions and firms. Six decades of investment, same procurement structure Tanzania gained independence in 1961. It has been investing in infrastructure continuously since then, accelerating dramatically in the past decade with the SGR, JNHPP, port expansion, and the current road programme. The country has engineering faculties at the University of Dar es Salaam, Mbeya University of Science and Technology, and Ardhi University. It has the Engineers Registration Board and the Institution of Engineers Tanzania. It produces thousands of engineering graduates annually. And yet, on most major infrastructure projects, the detailed design, structural calculations, project supervision, and technical management remain concentrated in international consulting firms. Donor-funded transport programmes, several of which are currently running with World Bank support, continue to engage international consultants for engineering supervision and project management alongside domestic institutions like TANROADS, DART, and the ERB. This pattern is not new and it is not unique to Tanzania. What is unusual is that after six decades and trillions of shillings in cumulative investment, the procurement architecture has not materially changed to reflect a country that now has the institutional base to absorb more of its own technical work. The question is not whether this was acceptable in 1970. It is whether it is acceptable in 2026, when Tanzania is targeting a USD 1 trillion economy by 2050. The economic concept Tanzania's procurement is ignoring In a 1962 paper that remains one of the most cited in development economics, Kenneth Arrow documented what he called learning by doing: the mechanism through which production experience generates productivity improvements that cannot be purchased or transferred through instruction alone. You learn engineering by engineering. You develop judgment by solving problems on live projects under real constraints. Arrow's insight has direct implications for infrastructure procurement. If domestic engineers are employed in supporting or administrative roles while international firms hold the technical design and supervision functions, the learning accrues to the international firms. The project is delivered. The capability stays abroad. This is not a theory. It is the mechanism that explains why some countries built engineering industries and others did not. What South Korea and China actually did South Korea's infrastructure programme in the 1960s and 1970s was not designed only to build roads. It was designed to build the companies that would eventually build roads for other countries. The government used procurement requirements, joint venture mandates, and progressive increases in domestic technical scope to develop firms like Hyundai Engineering and Construction and Samsung C&T. By the 1980s, South Korean construction companies were competing for contracts across the Middle East. Engineering services had become an export. China followed a more aggressive version of the same strategy, requiring technology transfer as a condition of foreign participation in major projects, mandating progressively increasing domestic content in technical roles, and protecting domestic firms through the period when they were not yet cost-competitive. The China State Construction Engineering Corporation, now one of the world's largest construction companies, was built on this foundation. Chinese engineering firms now compete for infrastructure contracts across Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America. Both countries used their domestic infrastructure programmes as deliberate industrial policy. Every project was simultaneously a delivery mechanism and a training mechanism. The road was the output. The engineers were the asset. Tanzania's procurement treats delivery as the only objective. That is a measurable and consequential gap. The three procurement changes that would shift this The argument is not that Tanzania should immediately exclude international firms or compromise delivery timelines in the name of local content. That trade-off is real and the economic cost of delays on major infrastructure is significant. The argument is that procurement can be structured to deliver both the asset and the capability without choosing between them. Three specific changes would begin closing the gap. The first is mandatory joint venture requirements with named technical role obligations. International firms bidding on major contracts would be required to partner with registered Tanzanian engineering firms and to assign a defined share of technical design and supervision roles, not just administrative support functions, to domestic engineers by name. This is not a novelty. South Africa's construction sector procurement framework has required this in various forms for years, with measurable results on domestic capability development. The second is embedded graduate engineering programmes as a contract condition. Firms awarded contracts above a defined value threshold would be required to employ and formally develop a specified number of Tanzanian graduate engineers over the contract period, including structured exposure to technical design roles. The cost to the contractor is modest. The knowledge transfer effect compounds across the career of each graduate. The third is knowledge transfer metrics in contractor performance assessments. Currently, contractors are evaluated on cost, quality, and time. Adding a fourth dimension, how much measurable domestic engineering capability the contract produced, would change the incentive structure. Firms that actively develop local partners and engineers would be scored more favourably in future procurement. Firms that treat local participation as a compliance box to tick would not. None of these changes requires new institutions. TANROADS, the ERB, and the procurement regulations that already govern public contracts provide the framework. What they require is political will to redefine what procurement success means. The fiscal argument Infrastructure generates two financial flows. The first is the asset value, the economic return from improved logistics, reduced transport costs, and unlocked productive capacity. The second is the consultancy and supervision fees paid to manage the process of creating that asset. Tanzania currently captures the first flow and exports a significant share of the second. In a single infrastructure programme of TZS 6 trillion, engineering consultancy, supervision, and technical management fees typically represent 8 to 15 percent of total project value, depending on project type and complexity. On a programme of that scale, that is between TZS 480 billion and TZS 900 billion in technical services expenditure over the programme period. If a growing share of that expenditure went to domestic firms and domestic engineers, the fiscal return on infrastructure investment would improve, the professional services sector would expand, and the knowledge base for future projects would deepen. The road itself does not change. The economic multiplier from building it does. What Vision 2050 actually requires Tanzania's National Development Plan 2026/27 targets GDP reaching TZS 258,954 billion by 2030 and a USD 1 trillion economy by 2050. It targets manufacturing rising from 5.9 percent to 8 percent of GDP. It targets the development of a competitive services export sector. An economy at that scale, in the sectors that Vision 2050 identifies, cannot be built on permanently imported engineering expertise. Every generation of infrastructure will require expansion, maintenance, and eventually replacement. If each generation still requires importing the technical capability to deliver it, the consultancy fee outflows continue indefinitely and the domestic engineering industry remains structurally dependent. The countries that industrialised used their infrastructure booms to build engineering industries. Tanzania is in the middle of its most significant infrastructure boom. The window to make that choice deliberately, through procurement policy rather than by accident, is open now. Concrete depreciates. The engineers who designed it do not. Tanzania's infrastructure boom should be producing both. FAQ Is Tanzania wrong to use international engineering firms on major projects? No. Complex infrastructure requires specialist expertise that takes decades to build domestically, and international firms can accelerate delivery and introduce technical standards that benefit the sector. The argument is against procurement structures that make foreign participation permanent by not requiring knowledge transfer as a measured contract outcome. Does Tanzania have enough qualified engineers to absorb more technical work? The constraint is not supply of graduates. Tanzania produces thousands of engineering graduates annually through the University of Dar es Salaam, Mbeya University of Science and Technology, and Ardhi University. The constraint is structured opportunity: graduates need exposure to complex technical roles on live projects to develop professional capability, and current procurement does not systematically create that exposure. What does knowledge transfer in procurement actually mean in practice? It means requiring international firms to partner with domestic counterparts in joint ventures with specific technical role obligations, not just administrative support. It means embedding graduate engineering programmes in contracts as a condition of award. It means measuring how much domestic capability a contractor developed alongside how well it delivered the asset. These are not novel mechanisms. South Africa's construction sector charter has applied versions of them for years. How did China build its engineering industry? Through a combination of procurement requirements mandating domestic participation in technical roles, technology transfer conditions on international firm participation, and protection of domestic firms through the period when they were not yet cost-competitive. The China State Construction Engineering Corporation grew to become one of the world's largest construction companies through this process. Chinese engineering firms now export services across Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America. Why does this matter for Vision 2050? An economy targeting USD 1 trillion by 2050 with manufacturing and services as growth drivers cannot remain permanently dependent on imported engineering expertise. Every generation of infrastructure will require expansion and eventually replacement. If each generation still requires importing the technical capability to deliver it, the consultancy fee outflows continue indefinitely and the domestic engineering industry cannot develop the scale and experience needed to compete regionally. Building that industry is not a soft development goal. It is a precondition for the industrial economy Vision 2050 describes.