Editorial policy

Who the guides are for

The guides are written for an ordinary person in Tanzania who is thinking about borrowing: a shopkeeper who needs stock before the festive season, a parent facing a school fees deadline, a boda boda rider buying the motorcycle instead of renting it, somebody who has already borrowed from two places and cannot see the way out. They explain how loans work here — the rates quoted per month, the fees taken off at payout, the collateral and guarantors — in plain language, with worked examples in shillings.

They are general information, not advice about your own situation or about any particular lender. When a decision is large, or you are already behind on payments, talk to the lender, to someone you trust who understands money, or to the complaints desk the regulations require every licensed lender to have.

Where the facts come from

When a guide says what the law requires, it relies on the document itself, not on a summary of it: mainly the Microfinance Act, 2018 and the Microfinance (Non-Deposit Taking Microfinance Service Providers) Regulations, 2019, published by the Bank of Tanzania, and the Bank's public register of licensed lenders. Those documents are named and linked at the end of the guides that use them, so you can read the source yourself. We do not cite a rule we have not read in the original, and where the law is silent we say so rather than guess.

The lender directory is built from the Bank of Tanzania's register of Tier 2 microfinance service providers (the edition dated 14 August 2026). A register listing shows what the register shows: name, licence number, region, district and contact details. Nothing is added to it unless the lender claims the page and adds it itself. Three lenders that are not on the register signed up on their own; their pages say so. A listing is not a recommendation, and the default order puts register listings first.

How a guide is written and checked

Guides are researched and drafted with the help of AI writing tools, working from the official documents themselves rather than from other websites. Nothing is published on the strength of a draft. Before a guide goes up, it is checked in three ways:

• every statement about the law is compared with the provision it relies on, read in the original document, including who the rule applies to;
• every worked example is recalculated, using the same code that runs the loan calculators (tested against figures worked out by hand) or arithmetic set out in the guide so you can repeat it;
• every link is opened, and every list or count taken from an official document is counted again.

A claim that fails any of these checks is corrected or removed. The Kopesha team decides what is published and answers for every word of it. If a guide and a calculator ever disagree, one of them is wrong, and we fix it.

Independence

No lender pays for anything written in the guides, and no lender can buy a better position in the directory or a kinder sentence in an article. The loan-management system that lenders subscribe to is a separate product; a lender's subscription does not change what the guides say about borrowing, fees or lenders' obligations.

The guides and the tools may carry Google advertising, which keeps them free. Google chooses the advertisements, not Kopesha and not any lender. Advertising is labelled, placed below the content rather than inside it, kept off the lender directory and never shown inside anyone's account, and it has no say over what we write. We do not pass anything you type into the tools or a loan request to advertisers — the tools do not send your figures anywhere at all.

Keeping the guides current

Each guide shows when it was first published and when it last changed, and ends with a list of what changed. A date moves only when the guide does. We review the guides when the Bank of Tanzania publishes a new register or a new list of approved loan apps, issues new rules, or warns the public about a new kind of fraud, and whenever a reader tells us something has changed. Older material is updated or removed rather than left to mislead. Site-wide changes are listed on the updates page.

Corrections

If you find a mistake — a wrong figure, an out-of-date rule, a lender's details that are no longer right — write to info@kopesha.tz or use the contact form. Tell us which page and what is wrong. We check it against the source, correct the page if you are right, and update its review date.

About Kopesha · Borrower guides · Privacy policy · Last reviewed 29 September 2026