Tanzania’s National Digital Procurement Platform registers 37,000 tendering firms and 130,000 users
Nearly 37,000 tendering firms have been enrolled into national digital procurement platform, which now boasts over 130,000 users
Tanzania has by June 2025 registered 38,163 tender entities, into the transaction portal, among them 36,377 being local tenderers while 1,776 are foreign entities.
That indicates the fast-growing pace of the national digital procurement platform.
That was stated in Arusha by Director General of the Public Procurement Regulatory Authority (PPRA), Dennis Simba, who added that by June 11, 2025, more than 91,415 public institutions had been registered into the National e-Procurement System of Tanzania (NeST), which now has a total of 131,202 users.
The Minister of Community Development, Gender, Women, and Special Groups, Dorothy Gwajima has on the other hand, implored procurement authorities in the country to ensure that all purchases being made align with the sustainable development agendas.
Minister Gwajima made the calls during the occasion to officially open the 9th Public Procurement Regulatory Authority (PPRA) conference of 2025 in Arusha, on behalf of the Minister of Finance, Mwigulu Nchemba.
The Minister insisted that, all procurements and tendering should be made through digital platforms for transparency and processing effectiveness.
“Gone are the days when we used to move from office to office, building to building or travel distances just to have papers signed before making purchases, this time all can be accomplished digitally,” she pointed out.
Gwajima lauded the National e-Procurement System of Tanzania (NeST), saying it was making things easier, faster while saving billions in the process.
On his part the Director General of the Public Procurement Regulatory Authority (PPRA), Dennis Simba, said the new the National e-Procurement System of Tanzania (NeST), established in July 2023 now operates through six modules.
“They include e-registration, e-tendering and e-contract that have already been perfected, under which three other modules addressing contract preparations, payment systems and contract annulment that had taken us so much time to accomplish,” said Simba.
The latest e-Procurement platform is described to be even more transparent, fool-proof and totally shielded from hacks to guarantee safety among users.
The National e-Procurement System of Tanzania (NeST), is the latest electronic system which facilitates e-registration, e-tendering, e-contract management, e-payment, e-catalogue and e-auctioning processes.
NeST replaces the former Tanzanian National e-Procurement System TANePS which was a web-based, collaborative system, developed in accordance with the requirement of public procurement laws, to facilitate public procurement processes in Tanzania.
But while TANePS also offered a secure, interactive, dynamic environment for carrying out procurement of all categories, the system was actually temporarily hired from Greek developers at the time when Tanzania was still working on its own system, which eventually became NeST.
NeST is a tailor-made digital procurement system built by Tanzanian experts and specifically suited to address all requirements of public purchases, tendering and payments.
As of now the system has registered nearly 15,000 tenders, with more than 300 bids opening daily and a total of 400 submissions already on the platform.
Through NeST a total of 2802 contracts valued at nearly 1 trillion/- have been awarded to various firms in the country.
The new NeST platform has also helped to prune out dubious tenderers and related awardees from accessing plum contracts.