Vodacom Tanzania Plc Managing Director together with different stakeholders of the company, market the company's 20 year anniversary.

Vodacom Tanzania has launched the Vodacom@20 campaign to mark its 20th anniversary of operation in the East African country.

The campaign will feature “promotions, activations and recognitions” in the next few months, the company explains, adding that it now has a customer base of over 10 million M-Pesa customers, 15 million voice & data subscribers and a 32% market share.

The company began operating in Tanzania in August 2000. It claims that continued investment in its network infrastructure has resulted in voice, high speed 3G and 4G data connectivity for 92% of the local population.

In a statement released to the media, the operator said: “Through partnership with Universal Communication Services Access Fund (UCSAF) the Company has reached more Tanzanians in rural areas through construction of 218 communication sites, reaching over 200 wards and connecting over 3.6 million Tanzanians to mobile services as such as voice, data and M-Pesa.”

It adds: “Since the 2008 introduction of mobile money services in Tanzania, financial inclusion has more than halved, with M-Pesa playing vital role. It’s a fact that Mobile technology and connectivity is driving social and financial inclusion-positively contributing to Tanzania making measurable progress in achieving the UN Sustainable Goals.”

In early October the operator announced the opening of its M-Pesa Application Programing interface (API) to encourage developers to create innovative new use cases for the mobile payments service.

The company said Vodacom M-Pesa has undergone lots of transformation over the years, including a historic migration and upgrade to a second-generation platform “which is robust, faster, more secure and futuristic and more importantly hosted locally in Tanzania for easier maintenance.”

The platform has since then diversified earning accolades and international recognition including a GSMA certification.

Hisham Hendi, MD, Vodacom Tanzania said the opening of the M-Pesa API App is another step to fuel innovation in Tanzania around Fintech and digital business.

"As a company with a vision to digitise Tanzania, we support the innovation ecosystems to come up with solutions that transform lives which is why we have now opened our API's making it easier for your businesses and developers to integrate with our M-Pesa system allowing you to test and enable a wide range of extra capabilities to the system that will bring real change."

The operator remains focused on investment in initiatives that it believes can yield measurable effects and visible change within education, finance and agriculture sectors.

“Since listing in the Dar es salaam stock exchange in 2017, more than 40,000 Tanzanians own shares in the company and have received dividend payouts,” the company stated.