Dear Tanzania,

You have just built one of the largest power stations in Africa. In April 2025 all nine turbines at the Julius Nyerere Hydropower Station on the Rufiji were running, with a capacity of 2,115 megawatts. Half your land is forest. You hold Kilimanjaro, the Serengeti and a long Indian Ocean coast, and you are home to 70.5 million people.

Your World Bank programme is among the largest in Africa: a $750 million development policy financing, a productive social safety net, the Tanzania-Zambia transmission interconnector, rural water and sanitation paid on results, a programme to boost primary learning, rural electrification and food systems resilience. The instruments are aimed at the right guarantees.

The work ahead is plain, and it is worth saying plainly. Only eleven in every hundred of you cook with clean fuel. Only twenty-eight in every hundred of you have a safely managed toilet at home. Seventy in every hundred of you lived below $4.20 a day at the last count, in 2018. Clean energy sets your Coverage today, at 11 out of 100, with shelter and income close behind. Each of them is within your reach.

The station on the Rufiji is the hardest part. The wires, meters and connections that carry its power to a clinic, a pump and a classroom are smaller, cheaper and quicker to build, and every one of them can be counted.

Now imagine that same resolve turned toward every home in the country. Picture Perfect Tanzania: a morning when every family cooks with clean fuel and sits down to a full table; when every tap runs clean and every home has a safe toilet; when every child walks to a school where a teacher is waiting, and reads with ease by the age of ten; when every mother lives within reach of a clinic with the lights on, and every young person finds work that pays. And no Tanzanian falls below a decent life, because the nation has decided that none will.

“You built the power station. Now build the last mile to every home.”

So this is an invitation. Bring your vision, your story and your solutions to the Perfect Tanzania Design Studio, and join the Co-designers who are already imagining what comes next. Perfect Tanzania will not be designed for you. It will be designed by you.