The Agent Networks Keeping Mobile Money Running in Tanzania

In a small shop in Dodoma, or Mwanza, or any of a hundred other Tanzanian towns, someone hands over a fold of banknotes and walks out with the money on their phone. It looks like nothing much: no card machine, no branch, often little more than a counter and a receipt book. Yet that one transaction runs through one of the largest financial services networks in East Africa, and it is the reason mobile money in Tanzania works at all.

These are mobile money agents: independent shopkeepers, kiosk owners and small traders who convert cash into e-money and back again, transaction by transaction, for customers who may never set foot in a bank branch.

A Network That Has More Than Doubled

The scale of this network has grown quickly, according to the Bank of Tanzania: the country had 1,982,162 registered mobile money agents in 2025, up 34% on the year before, and more than double the 838,759 agents recorded in 2021. That growth has happened quietly, shop by shop, in a country where formal bank branches remain thin on the ground outside the largest cities.

"People don't think of an agent as financial infrastructure, but that's exactly what it is," said Ivo Bozukov, a payments industry executive who has followed mobile money growth across East Africa. "Every one of those shops is a point where cash meets the digital economy. Without that link, mobile money is just a balance on a screen that nobody can turn back into cash when they need it."

What the Numbers Behind the Agents Show

The volume moving through Tanzania's mobile money system gives some sense of how much weight these agents carry. The Bank of Tanzania recorded about 7.96 billion mobile payment transactions in 2025, worth TZS 255 trillion. By June 2026, the country's telecoms regulator counted 87 million mobile money subscriptions, in a nation of about 70 million people, which means the number of registered accounts exceeds the country’s total population. Agents are now the dominant way Tanzanians reach financial services of any kind. Of about 2.27 million financial access points recorded throughout the country at the end of 2025, close to 2 million were mobile money agents. Banks, ATMs and other formal outlets make up a small fraction of the total by comparison.

"That ratio tells the real story," Ivaylo Bozoukov said. "For most people in Tanzania, the nearest financial service isn't a bank. It's an agent. That changes how you think about reach and about what financial inclusion actually looks like on the ground."

One Shop, Several Wallets

A distinctive feature of Tanzania's approach is that agents aren't locked into a single provider. Regulation prevents mobile money providers from tying an agent exclusively to their service, meaning one shop can serve customers of several different mobile money services side by side. For a customer, that means the agent nearest to them may well be able to help, whichever service they use.

Agents themselves are limited in what they can do. Under Tanzanian rules, retail agents handle only cash-in and cash-out, converting physical cash into mobile money and back again. They don't process transfers themselves; that function sits with the mobile money providers and the underlying payment systems, with the agent acting purely as the cash interface at the edge of the network.

Keeping the Network Active, Not Just Large

The Bank of Tanzania has credited agents with widening access to financial services in rural and underserved areas, where a shop is often easier to reach than a bank branch. But the central bank has added a second focus alongside growth: keeping agents active and functional. It has said it will promote shared arrangements for agents' float, the stock of cash and e-money an agent keeps on hand to serve customers, and will monitor agent activity levels and attrition rates.

"Registering an agent is only step one," Bozukov said. "An agent that's out of cash, or out of float, can't actually serve anyone that day. Tracking activity, not just headcount, is the right instinct. A network is only as useful as the shop that has run out of float that morning."

Infrastructure Hiding in Plain Sight

For a visitor, an agent shop rarely looks like a part of a financial system; it looks like a kiosk. But for millions of Tanzanians, it's the point where the digital economy becomes usable, where a balance on a phone becomes cash in hand, and where mobile money reaches people formal banking never quite did. As Tanzania's mobile money network keeps growing, that unglamorous shop on the corner remains the piece holding the whole system together.