By 
DAR ES SALAAM — In many African markets, the conversation about capital markets still tends to begin with liquidity, listings and the search for deeper pools of long-term finance. Tanzania’s Capital Markets and Securities Authority is widening that conversation.
Its latest push shows that the next phase of market development in East Africa may depend not only on money, but also on market literacy, professional standards and the patient building of investor confidence. That is why CMSA’s recent graduation and university challenge awards matter beyond the ceremony itself. They point to a regulator building the human infrastructure that stronger markets require.
The numbers help explain the shift. In its quarterly report for the period ended September 30, 2025, CMSA said the value of investment in Tanzania’s capital markets rose 23.6 percent year-on-year to TSh55.38 trillion, from TSh44.81 trillion a year earlier. Total market capitalisation climbed 46.06 percent to TSh21.34 trillion, while equity turnover surged 672 percent to TSh239.87 billion. By December 2025, Finance Minister Khamis Mussa Omar said total investment in the market had reached TSh63.15 trillion, alongside growth in collective investment schemes to TSh4.4 trillion and equity and bond issuances to TSh6.9 trillion. Those are still the figures of a young market that is visibly broadening.
Minister of Finance for Tanzania H.E Khamis Mussa Omar
That broadening is no longer limited to equities and government paper. CMSA’s own reporting shows a steadily more varied ecosystem. By the end of September 2025, the Authority oversaw one stock exchange, one commodity exchange, 20 licensed dealing members, 26 investment advisers, 24 fund managers, 21 collective investment schemes, 10 custodians, eight bond traders, three nominated advisers, one crowdfunding platform operator and one credit rating agent. That is a more complex market architecture than Tanzania had even a few years ago, and it shows that the regulator is no longer supervising a narrow corner of the financial system. It is helping shape a more diversified platform for savings, investment and enterprise finance.
What makes the current moment especially significant, however, is the way CMSA is pairing market growth with deliberate capacity-building. The Authority’s Securities Industry Certification Course is part of the East African Common Market logic under which regulators in the region agreed that intermediaries serving East African markets should pass a globally recognised certification programme. CMSA runs its version with the Chartered Institute for Securities and Investment in London. During the quarter ended September 2025, the regulator said it trained 93 candidates. In March this year, it extended the start of the 2026 course to allow more candidates to enrol, a small but telling sign that the pipeline is being treated as a serious part of market development rather than an administrative side note.
The same approach is visible in its university outreach. CMSA’s Capital Markets Universities and Higher Learning Institutions Challenge 2025 drew 28,393 students, according to the Authority’s official notice, reflecting an unusually broad attempt to turn awareness into participation among younger Tanzanians. The programme is linked to the country’s Financial Sector Development Master Plan 2019/20–2029/30, which targets a rise in the share of adults invested in capital markets to 5 percent by 2030. CMSA says earlier editions of the challenge helped generate more than 10,000 actual investors in listed equities and supported a youth investment forum with over 6,000 members. That matters because African capital markets are often discussed as though their next leap will come mainly from institutions. Tanzania’s regulator is making a different bet: that retail culture, if built early enough, can become part of the market’s long-term base.
Product development is moving in parallel. In the quarter ended December 31, 2025, CMSA highlighted approvals and progress around the EFTA Bond, Ziada Fund, the Mwalimu Commercial Bank Plc rights issue, and the iTrust EAC Large Cap ETF. That ETF is especially notable. Approved in October 2025 and subsequently launched in early 2026, it was presented by CMSA as the first regional exchange-traded fund to be listed on a stock exchange in East Africa. Its design — investing in large-cap equities across East African bourses — matters because it gives investors a practical regional instrument rather than another abstract argument for integration. In other words, Tanzania is not only talking about regional markets; it is beginning to package them.
There is also a policy layer to this story. In May 2025, Tanzania brought into force regulations for corporate and subnational sustainability bonds, widening the market’s framework for thematic finance. Then, in June 2025, the Cabinet approved Tanzania Development Vision 2050, later tabled in Parliament, setting out a longer-term growth agenda built around competitiveness, inclusion and stronger systems. CMSA’s recent messaging has increasingly located capital markets within that national development frame. That is a sensible shift. Tanzania’s seriousness about financing industrial growth, infrastructure, municipalities and enterprise expansion over the long term, show a need for more trusted capital markets as part of the national story rather than remain a specialist niche.
For East Africa, that makes CMSA’s current strategy worth watching. The region’s capital-markets challenge has never been simply the absence of ambition. It has been the slower work of building enough trust, professionalism, investable products and public understanding to make those ambitions durable. OECD analysis published last year noted that African markets remain less developed than those in other regions and that institutional investors’ share of listed equity remains below 5 percent in countries including Tanzania, Kenya, Nigeria and Zambia. Against that backdrop, Tanzania’s approach is constructive and practical. It is building market plumbing, product range and human capability at the same time.
There is still distance to travel. Tanzania’s capital market is growing, in the direction to carry the full weight of the country’s development ambitions. The direction is increasingly clear. CMSA is moving the market from a narrow financial arena into a broader public-finance and investment culture. That is a patient strategy, and it may prove to be the right one. In East Africa’s next phase of market building, the winners may not simply be those with the biggest exchanges, but those that manage to produce the confidence, talent and investable products that make markets feel usable to more people. Tanzania is showing early signs that it intends to compete on exactly that terrain.
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