DAR ES SALAAM, Dec 12 (NNN-DAILYNEWS) — TANZANIA’S journey to ensuring clean and reliable water access reflects a complex narrative of progress, reforms, economic scaling, climate pressure and political prioritisation that has evolved over 64 years of independence.
When Tanzania attained freedom in 1961, access to safe and managed water systems was limited, especially outside major townships.
Urban water networks were rudimentary and often strained, while rural households largely depended on untreated natural sources such as rivers, springs and hand-dug shallow wells.
In many communities, these sources were seasonal, exposed to human and animal contamination and offered neither treatment nor quality safeguards.
The early post-independence government recognised water access as an urgent development need, but resources were constrained and dispersed settlements made rural infrastructure extension particularly challenging.
Over time, the country gradually shifted to structured policies, institutional reforms and long-term national investment planning.
The launch of the Water Sector Development Programme (WSDP) in 2006 marked a foundation for national water sector reforms, emphasising supply expansion, water-resource governance and sanitation integration.
By 2015, Tanzania adopted strategic milestones tied to national goals, including Vision 2025 and Sustainable Development Goal 6 (SDG6), signalling that water access must expand faster while embedding affordability, reliability and public-health safeguards.
Institutional reforms strengthened basin-level governance through the establishment of water basin boards, better lab systems for water testing, decentralised management models and increased monitoring standards.
The Rural Water Supply and Sanitation Agency (RUWASA), formed by parliamentary act, later became a key institution for implementing rural-water projects, resource protection and community water governance support, accelerating water-service extension deeper into rural constituencies.
CCM’s 2020–2025 manifesto documented improved water coverage overall household access to clean water reached 77 per cent by 2020, rural access improved from 47 per cent in 2015 to 70.1 per cent by 2020 and urban access rose from 74 per cent to 85 per cent during the same period, reflecting multi-year progress though gaps persisted, especially in remote villages and expanding peri-urban settlements.
These figures, published in the party’s official documents, provided a benchmark for CCM’s renewed 2025–2030 commitments. The CCM 2025–2030 manifesto underscores an intensified water agenda anchored in measurable promises.
CCM pledged to raise nationwide household access to clean and safe water to a minimum of 90 per cent by 2030, a bold national benchmark designed to reduce water burdens that disproportionately impact rural women, children and farming households.
The manifesto also proposes establishing a National Water Grid, designed to draw water from strategic mega-sources including lakes and perennial rivers, then channel supply into regional, rural, agricultural and industrial nodes, similar to national long-distance power-distribution design, a transformative attempt to end chronic regional water scarcity through inter-regional water transfer, cluster-hub distribution, treatment safeguards and supply reliability.
As Tanzania entered 2025, fiscal planning signalled even more concrete momentum.
According to parliamentary budget proposals for the 2025/26 fiscal year, the Ministry of Water requested 1.016 trin/- for its operations, marking a 62 per cent increase from the 627.78 bn/- approved in 2024/25, reflecting an unprecedented annual budget escalation for the sector and signalling greater prioritisation of national water infrastructure, project completion and resource sustainability.
The 2025/26 budget prioritises the completion of 1,544 ongoing watersupply projects nationwide, of which 1,318 are in rural areas and 226 in urban centres, anchoring the budget’s execution success heavily in rural delivery and periurban consolidation.
The plan further includes finalising the National Water Master Plan, protecting and developing new and existing water sources, expanding borehole drilling, rehabilitating treatment systems, constructing rainwater harvesting facilities, strengthening water basin committees, supporting water-user associations and reinforcing water-quality monitoring and lab capacity across the country, ensuring access, conservation and quality improvements move in parallel.
Development expenditure within the 2025/26 allocation includes 943.12 bn/- earmarked for major water-infrastructure works, while the balance supports recruitment, salaries and operational sustainability for Ministry functions and agencies under its mandate, ensuring institutional delivery capacity, lab staffing, contractor payments, water basin governance operations and monitoring oversight are supported while development funds drive infrastructure completion.
This 2025/26 budget push sits on top of project systems already underway: bulk-water intake feasibility assessments on major rivers, pipeline engineering that supports inter-regional abstraction and transfer, climate-adaptive infrastructure design, rural-borehole electrification through solar pumps, hydro-geological surveys, lab expansion, non revenue water reduction strategies, digitised billing, remote pump sensors, mobile metering systems, contractor clustering for faster rural execution, women-led water-committee governance training, city network rehabilitation and sanitation expansion, signalling a more consolidated phase of water planning is now shifting into execution and completion.
Major pipeline corridors that continue to represent national ambitions up to 2030 include engineered intakes and long-distance pipeline distribution models from lake systems, inland cluster pipelines, coastal pumping corridors and basin-board oversight improvements to protect water resources ensuring coverage expands while reducing contamination risk, aquatic ecosystem degradation and non-revenue losses.
The country’s geographical scale, semi-arid central belt, migration-driven urban hubs, drought-exposed rural aquifers, and coastal salinity pressure make this long term water portfolio both a human-needs response and a national resilience strategy for community health, irrigation economics, industrial processing and infrastructure sustainability.
Water scarcity remains one of Tanzania’s most defining lived infrastructure challenges.
The sector’s push for intake diversification, inter-regional cluster systems, resource protection, science-based national master planning and high impact project completion reflects an understanding that water access gains depend not only on finance but on system maintenance, resource integrity and community ownership.
Exposing villages to grid nodes, small treatment plants and constituency boreholes is critical, but ensuring watersheds are protected, that labs are functional, that water committees can handle pump management, and that non revenue losses are reduced to help expand affordability will ultimately shape the long-term success of Tanzania’s 64-year independence water narrative.
Every year of independence has been a layer some slower than hoped, some faster than expected, but 2025/26 presents itself as the most decisive layer yet, focused on completion of 1,544 projects, grid planning, resource sustainability and quality monitoring before 2030.
Tanzanians themselves will, in the end, measure water progress not through aggregate percentages, party documents or budget volumes but through real turning points, taps that start flowing every day, boreholes that stop drying mid season, pipeline pressure that reaches industrial belts, laboratories that detect contamination early, villages where schoolgirls no longer miss class fetching water, hospitals where maternity wards never lack clean water, towns where leakage stops eating revenue and farming communities where irrigation water supports real economics, not seasonal uncertainty.
Water remains a national equaliser. It sits at the intersection of citizen health, women’s economic participation, rural dignity, urban expansion, climate pressure, social equity, political priorities, industrial demand, agricultural growth, pipeline engineering, aquifer integrity and waterborne disease reduction, a story of access, but even more a story of equality, sustainability and national resilience that Tanzania continues to write toward 2030.
Independence is both a celebration and a reminder. Sixty-four years after the Union flag first flew over a free Tanzania, equitable water access is no longer a question of if it matters, but when every project, grid node and borehole will reach full completion, monitored quality and daily reliability for every citizen before 2030’s deadline arrives.
This 2025/26 budget shows the political and fiscal lane is open, the targets are measurable and the systems are in motion.
What remains now is not planning but completion, delivery, monitoring, integrity, ownership, oversight and the daily fulfilment of the independence promise, healthy communities, resilient systems and taps that run without discrimination by geography, class, or vulnerability.
The 64-year water narrative now moves from reflection to expectation, from investment to delivery and from projects-in-progress to projects completed, defining both a basic human right and a national development frontier for Tanzania’s next five years and beyond. — NNN-DAILYNEWS