In the early morning in rural Mtwara, a farmer stacks heavy sacks of cashews onto the back of a truck. The first few kilometres roll smoothly over a recently paved stretch of road, but before long, the tarmac dissolves into red earth. Ruts deepen, dust clouds rise, and the truck slows to a crawl. By the time it reaches the highway, the journey has taken twice as long and cost twice as much as it should.
This is the reality for thousands of farmers across Tanzania: the last mile between farm and market often decides whether they profit or merely scrape by. Roads don’t just connect places; they shape the possibilities of entire lives. In a country where the majority still live in rural areas, the road that ends too soon can mean a harvest that never reaches its full value, a child missing school, or a patient arriving too late at a clinic.
The Promise of Connectivity
Over 70% of Tanzanians live in rural areas. For them, a road isn’t just infrastructure — it’s access. It’s the difference between a mother reaching a hospital in time, a child arriving at school dry instead of muddy, and a farmer selling maize while it’s fresh rather than after it spoils.
Recognising this, Tanzania created the Tanzania Rural and Urban Roads Agency (TARURA), which now oversees more than 80% of the country’s road network. Its mandate is enormous: to maintain and expand the small feeder and community roads that knit villages to markets, clinics, and towns. Studies show that households living near all-weather roads consistently earn more, have better health outcomes, and keep children in school longer.
Connectivity, then, isn’t just about asphalt — it is about inclusion. Each kilometre of feeder road brings citizens closer to opportunities that might otherwise remain out of reach.
Lake Zone Roads: Feeding the Hub
If the south is about unlocking new corridors, the Lake Zone is about sustaining the country’s busiest food basket. Cotton, maize, rice, and fish converge daily on Mwanza and Shinyanga, the commercial heart of the zone. But most of it travels along fragile feeder roads — gravel tracks that turn into mud in the rainy season and dust bowls in the dry.
When rains come, whole villages are cut off. Trucks bog down axle-deep in mud, fish spoil before reaching market, cotton bales sit idle in ginneries. It isn’t just inconvenience — it’s money lost, food wasted, and trust eroded. Farmers see prices fall simply because they can’t deliver on time.
TARURA has tried to chip away at the backlog. Contracts for dozens of feeder roads have been signed across Mwanza, Tabora, and Shinyanga, gradually upgrading gravel to all-weather surfaces. In Dar alone, TARURA signed works for more than 160 kilometres of new tarmac roads in 2024, showing the scale of ambition nationwide. Yet demand far outstrips delivery. For every road upgraded, dozens remain stuck in poor condition.
The Lake Zone doesn’t lack crops or ambition — it lacks reliable connections. Until those last links are secured, Tanzania’s breadbasket will keep bleeding value at the roadside.
The Human Side of the Last Mile
For the people who live along these roads, connectivity isn’t abstract — it’s daily life.
A mother in Geita carries her sick child to a dispensary, but when rains wash out the feeder road, she must wait for hours before a motorbike can risk the mud. In Kigoma, students wade through flooded tracks to reach school, uniforms soaked before class begins. In Shinyanga, farmers lose 20–30% of their harvests post-harvest — not because of low yields, but because poor access delays transport and storage.
When feeder roads fail, the consequences ripple. Women and children, often tasked with fetching water or firewood, bear the heaviest burden of long detours. Emergency services are slowed, sometimes fatally. And even where trucks can pass, transport costs rise so sharply that profits vanish. A farmer who should gain from good harvests ends up poorer because the road betrays him.
Connectivity is therefore not about cars and cargo alone. It is about dignity, fairness, and the right to opportunity. A paved road is a chance for a student to attend class every day, a patient to reach care in time, a farmer to sell goods at a fair price. The last mile is often the most human one.
The Politics and the Potholes
Rural roads are never just technical projects — they are political currency. MPs campaign on promises to bring tarmac to their constituencies, and ribbon-cuttings on feeder roads are as much about votes as about transport. In election years, road projects multiply; in off-years, maintenance lags.
But building is only half the story. An audit in 2024 revealed that one in ten newly paved urban roads was of poor quality, failing within a few seasons. TARURA, stretched thin, struggles with monitoring and enforcement, while the Roads Fund covers only a fraction of what is needed for upkeep. The result is a cycle of fanfare followed by potholes, where communities celebrate a new road only to watch it crumble.
People notice. For rural voters, a road that holds through rainy season is proof of commitment. A road that collapses is a betrayal. Infrastructure, in this sense, is both a service and a signal: it tells citizens whether they are seen or forgotten.
The politics of rural roads are written in the potholes. And until maintenance matches ambition, promises risk sinking into the mud along with the trucks.
Imagining the Connected Countryside
Imagine a Tanzania where no village is more than a few minutes from an all-weather road. Cotton bales move swiftly from Shinyanga to Mwanza, fresh fish reach markets before spoiling, and cashews from Mtwara arrive in Dar without losing half their value to transport costs. Children step into classrooms every morning because the road outside their home isn’t washed away. Mothers carry infants to clinics without fearing the rain will cut them off.
Connectivity at this scale isn’t just about economics — though the numbers are striking. Post-harvest losses fall, farmer incomes rise, and national GDP grows as rural supply chains tighten. It is also about dignity and inclusion. A connected countryside means fewer forgotten regions, fewer citizens stranded outside the story of national progress.
Roads alone won’t solve rural poverty, but without them, every other intervention — from schools to health programs to markets — falters. Imagining the connected countryside is imagining a Tanzania where opportunity travels as easily to the margins as it does to the centre.
The Last Mile Is the First Step
Rural roads may not make headlines like hydropower dams or ports, but they shape the everyday lives of more Tanzanians than any mega-project. They are the first step in turning harvests into income, children into students, patients into survivors.
Neglecting them keeps the country’s future uneven, weighted toward cities while villages shoulder the heaviest burdens. Building them — and maintaining them — creates the foundation on which every other ambition can stand.
The story of Tanzania’s development does not begin with towers in Dar or ships in Bagamoyo. It begins with a dusty track outside a farmer’s field, paved into a promise. Because the last mile is not just the end of a road — it is the first step toward a fairer future.
