There’s a particular kind of ambition that shows up when a country decides it wants the benefits of a technology without repeating the mistakes of everyone who adopted it first. That’s roughly where Tanzania’s health sector found itself this July, moving through a month of announcements that all circle the same tension: how do you bring artificial intelligence into a national healthcare system without quietly handing your data, your standards, and eventually your decision-making, to someone else?
A Warning, Delivered at a Health Conference
The clearest articulation of that tension came on July 31, at the University of Dodoma’s Scientific Health Conference. Emmanuel Tayari, Deputy Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Health, told delegates that healthcare development can no longer be separated from AI — but paired the endorsement with an unusually blunt warning about what he called digital colonialism. His argument was straightforward: most AI systems currently in use are trained overwhelmingly on data generated in Europe and the United States, which means their outputs don’t necessarily reflect Tanzania’s disease patterns, health infrastructure, or patient realities. Left unaddressed, he argued, the country risks importing AI-driven healthcare decisions built on a picture of medicine that isn’t actually Tanzania’s own.
His prescription was concrete rather than rhetorical: health data generated inside Tanzania should stay inside Tanzania, every AI system used in a clinical setting should require approval from the relevant authorities before deployment, and the country needs to build its own capacity to produce — not just consume — this kind of technology, including publishing Tanzanian-generated health research and data that future AI systems could actually learn from.
The Workforce Question
Two weeks earlier, at the 4th Human Resources for Health Conference, the conversation had already been heading in this direction. Health leaders warned that Tanzania’s healthcare system risks being overwhelmed by future demands unless it invests now in a new generation of professionals equipped with digital skills, AI literacy, and leadership capability — explicitly framing this as a shift away from a purely treatment-focused model toward one built around prevention. Dr. Ulisubisya, addressing the conference, pushed policymakers to think in terms of long-term health planning rather than reacting only to immediate pressures — a notably strategic ask for a sector that, like most public health systems, spends much of its time firefighting.
The Infrastructure Underneath the Ambition
None of this works without connectivity, and telecom operators seem to have noticed. At the fourth Mkapa Legacy Summit in Zanzibar, Yas Tanzania disclosed that it has invested roughly TZS 1.2 trillion over the past four years expanding access to 4G and 5G networks, framing that infrastructure explicitly as groundwork for a digitally enabled healthcare system. Yas’s chief financial officer, Innocent Rwetabura, tied the investment directly to Vision 2050 — positioning connectivity not as a side benefit of telecom competition, but as a deliberate input into the country’s health transformation agenda.
There’s already a working example of what that transformation can look like at scale. The Government of Tanzania Hospital Management Information System, known as GOTHOMIS, has reached roughly 70.6 percent adoption nationally, according to a recent independent study of the platform. The system integrates with national databases including NIDA, NHIF, and GePG, and — critically for a country with patchy connectivity in rural areas — retains offline functionality so that facilities don’t lose service continuity when networks drop. The same study flagged persistent infrastructure limitations and technical support gaps as the main brakes on further progress, with government partnerships alongside UNICEF and GIZ credited as key drivers of what success the system has achieved so far.
Where the Money Follows
Underpinning all of this is a healthcare sector that is simply getting bigger. Industry analysts project Tanzania’s pharmaceutical market to grow from roughly $1.08 billion in 2023 to $1.55 billion by 2028, driven by rising healthcare spending, population growth, and expanding access to services. That growth is fueling demand well beyond medicine cabinets — laboratory equipment, medical imaging, cold-chain logistics, hospital information systems, and AI-assisted diagnostics are all seeing increased procurement interest as facilities modernize. Healthcare executives interviewed by industry press pointed specifically to a shift toward technologies that cut operating costs and strengthen supply chains, alongside tools that support clinical decision-making directly at the point of care.
The Bigger Picture
Put together, July’s health-sector news tells a coherent story: Tanzania isn’t asking whether to adopt AI and digital health infrastructure — that decision already looks settled. What’s actually being negotiated, in real time, across conferences in Dodoma and Zanzibar, is the terms. Who owns the data. Who approves the algorithms. Whether the workforce is trained to use these tools critically rather than just operate them. It’s a more cautious, more sovereignty-conscious version of digital transformation than the sector saw a decade ago — and one worth watching closely, given how directly it echoes a debate playing out across health systems throughout the African continent.
