The National Facilitation Team (NFT) working under the supervision of the Ministry of Finance and Planning (MOFP) will help fast-track technical capacity of municipalities to generate bankable infrastructure projects to be financed using alternative sources of financing and municipal bonds.

Today, the guest of honor Mr. Emmanuel Tutuba, the Permanent Secretary Ministry of Finance and Planning announced the newly formed NFT to serve as a national coordinating body, responsible for providing technical assistance to local government authorities (LGAs) to develop portfolios of income generating infrastructure investments.

At the launching ceremony, Mr. Peter Malika, the Global LFI Manager & Chief Technical Advisor in Tanzania, was in charge of presenting a cheque of TZS 460 million to the government as initial funding to jump start the NFT project development activities.

NFT is tasked to champion the implementation of government’s Alternative Project Financing Strategy (APF) that aims at exploring alternative long-term financing mechanism to fund Central and Local development, apart from utilizing traditional government grants. These alternative financing instruments include among others: municipal bonds, PPPs, blended finance and more. The 35 appointed members have been sourced from relevant government institutions such as the Ministry of Finance and Planning, the President’s Office Regional Administration and Local Government, the regions, LGAs, the Office of the Treasury Registrar, the Bank of Tanzania, the Capital Markets and the Securities Authority, and the Dar es Salaam Stock Exchange.

This is a result of the Government Initiatives in making use of Long Term Development Finance and directives made during the meeting of H.E. Ms. Samia Suluhu Hassan the President of Tanzania on 25^th October 2021 with Preeti Sinha, the Executive Secretary of UNCDF, to move forward with municipal bonds implementation as an alternative approach to finance local development.

Speaking at the launch Mr. Tutuba said “having alternative sources of income is very significant for our country’s development. This initiative will enable the Government to implement more development projects and increase the involvement of the Private Sector in the implementation of Strategic Projects as per the Five-Year Development Plan III,” in addition “…This will allow the Government to focus on other areas that the Private Sector may not be able to make these interventions...”

“UNCDF is delighted to partner with the government of Tanzania in their efforts to build national capacities to access new sources of financing. Specifically, to increase [the] ability of the government to tap into sustainable sources of capital financing by mobilizing public and private capital investment and to strengthen the Tanzania financial markets and market intermediaries to facilitate capital access for development,” said Mr. Malika. Through the UNCDF Local Finance Initiative programme (LFI) we work to capacitate sub-national entities and local governments to prioritize key infrastructure projects with needed project finance, management, governance and implementation support.