A new platform under development in Arusha aims to do what Google Maps has not — connect Tanzanians to verified, trustworthy local services, from hospitals to government offices, in a single place.
By Staff Writer, East Africa Digital Review
ARUSHA, Tanzania — March 2026
The first time Samwel Efrem Mosha visited Arusha, he spent an uncomfortable stretch of time simply trying to find a nearby church. Later, when he fell ill in the city, locating a reliable hospital proved similarly frustrating. He turned, as most people now do, to Google Maps. What he found there did not fully solve the problem. Listings were incomplete. Some businesses appeared on the map that no longer existed at the addresses shown. Others had been entered by owners or third parties who had never set foot at the location themselves.
That experience — of needing a social service, searching for it, and being let down by the information available — is not unique to Mosha. It is a daily reality for millions of Tanzanians: the first-time visitor to a new city, the elderly resident who does not know what public services exist nearby, the student who has relocated to another region for university and needs to navigate unfamiliar institutions, the tourist who requires urgent assistance, the rural community member for whom finding any formalised service requires significant time and travel.
Mosha, 22, is attempting to address this problem directly. He is developing SAMALEN JAMII MKONONI, a digital platform designed to bring Tanzania’s social services — all of them, across all regions — into a single, accessible, and verified directory that any Tanzanian can use from a mobile phone or computer.
The Problem With What Already Exists
Tanzania’s rapid adoption of smartphones has made digital tools the first point of call for most information needs. But the quality of that information, particularly for local social services, has lagged behind the pace of adoption. Global platforms like Google Maps depend primarily on self-reported listings — any individual or business can add or edit an entry, often without any physical verification of whether the information is accurate.
In mature markets with established review cultures and dense internet penetration, this crowdsourced approach works reasonably well. In Tanzania, where many service providers have limited or inconsistent digital presence, and where users may lack the experience to distinguish reliable listings from inaccurate ones, the gap between what appears on a map and what exists on the ground can be significant.
For social services in particular — hospitals, government offices, schools, police stations, legal aid providers, water and electricity offices, banks — that inaccuracy is not merely inconvenient. It can mean a sick person travelling to a clinic that has moved. It can mean an elder making a long journey to a government office on the wrong day or at the wrong address. The stakes of bad information are higher here than in most other categories.
“People list their services online without anyone ever visiting. We will make sure every listed service is physically verified — that it is in the place written, and that it can be trusted.”
What SAMALEN JAMII MKONONI Proposes
The platform Mosha is building sets out to solve this with a principle that is simple but operationally demanding: every service listed on SAMALEN JAMII MKONONI will be physically verified before it appears. No listing goes live based on self-reporting alone. The platform’s team will confirm that a service exists at the stated location, operates as described, and meets the standards required for inclusion.
This verification-first approach is the core differentiator between SAMALEN JAMII MKONONI and the global mapping tools currently available. It is also the source of the platform’s most significant operational challenge — physical verification at scale, across all of Tanzania’s regions, is a resource-intensive undertaking. Mosha’s plan is to begin with Arusha, where the concept is being developed and tested, before expanding progressively to other regions.
The scope of services the platform intends to cover is broad: hospitals and health clinics, government offices including national identity, tax, and civil registration services, schools and educational institutions, police and emergency services, banks and financial service providers, water and electricity offices, legal services, and other community-facing organisations. The intention is that a user with any urgent or routine social service need should be able to find a verified option nearby, regardless of where in Tanzania they are.
Who It Is Built For
Mosha describes his target user not as a single demographic but as almost anyone navigating unfamiliar territory — literally or figuratively. Tourists and guests arriving in a new city. Students who have moved from their home region to study at a university elsewhere and need to locate services they have never had to find before. Elderly Tanzanians who may know their immediate neighbourhood but struggle to identify what formal services are available to them and where. Rural community members for whom locating any formalised service requires advance planning and often significant travel.
The thread connecting these different users is the same: they are in a place, they have a need, and they do not know where to go. SAMALEN JAMII MKONONI is designed to answer that question — reliably, quickly, and without requiring the user to cross-reference multiple sources of uncertain accuracy.
The platform will allow users to find services near their current location, book appointments directly through the platform where applicable, and contact service offices or providers without having to search separately for contact details. Service providers wishing to be listed can apply to do so under the platform’s verification guidelines and standards.
The Business Model
Access to SAMALEN JAMII MKONONI will be free for the public. The cost of using the platform to find, book, or contact services will not fall on the individual user. The revenue model, as Mosha describes it, is directed at the service providers listed on the platform rather than at the people using it to find them. Once the platform reaches operational scale, listed businesses and organisations will pay a modest fee — a contribution that Mosha describes as a way of sustaining the platform’s operations and meeting the obligations of running a formal business, including applicable taxes and regulatory costs.
This approach — free access for citizens, fees from listed providers — follows a model familiar from other directory and marketplace platforms and has the advantage of keeping the service accessible to the broadest possible user base, including those in lower-income communities and rural areas for whom any additional cost to access information would be a barrier.
The Platform and How It Works
SAMALEN JAMII MKONONI is being developed as a mobile application available on both Android and iPhone, as well as a web-based platform accessible through any browser. The choice to build across all three access points reflects an awareness that different users in Tanzania have different devices and different levels of data access, and that limiting the platform to a single channel would exclude a meaningful portion of its intended audience.
A Platform Still Being Built
SAMALEN JAMII MKONONI is not yet publicly available. The platform is currently in development, with Arusha designated as the initial focus for the verification and listing process before any national rollout. Mosha is candid about where the project stands: the idea is defined, the architecture is in progress, and the operational model is established. What comes next is the work of building it out at a scale that can deliver on the promise of verified, comprehensive coverage.
That is not a small undertaking for an independently operating entrepreneur in his early twenties working from Arusha. The resources required to verify services physically across a country of Tanzania’s geographic scale, build and maintain a reliable multi-platform application, and sustain operations long enough to reach the user base needed for commercial viability are considerable. Whether SAMALEN JAMII MKONONI can secure the partnerships, technical support, and funding needed to move from a well-conceived concept to a fully operational national platform is the question that will define the project in the years ahead.
“A lot of people are living somewhere but it is hard for them to find social services nearby. That is the problem we are solving — simply, in one place.”
Why It Matters
Access to social services is not a luxury. The ability to find a hospital, reach a government office, locate a school, or contact emergency services is foundational to participation in civic and economic life. When that information is absent or unreliable, the burden falls disproportionately on those least equipped to navigate the gap — the elderly, the rural, the recently arrived, the young person in an unfamiliar city.
Tanzania’s digital infrastructure is expanding rapidly. Mobile phone penetration is high and growing. The conditions exist for a platform like SAMALEN JAMII MKONONI to reach the people it is designed to serve. What has been missing is not the technology or the connectivity — it is a locally built, locally verified, trustworthy directory of the services that matter most.
Whether Mosha’s platform becomes that directory will depend on execution, resources, and the partnerships he is able to build. But the problem it sets out to solve is real, it is widely experienced, and it has not yet been adequately answered by any existing tool available to Tanzanians. That gap, more than any feature or business model, is the most compelling argument for why SAMALEN JAMII MKONONI deserves attention.
— East Africa Digital Review | Arusha Bureau | March 2026