Written by the Kopesha team · Last reviewed 23 September 2026 · No lender pays for these guides · How we write them
Why a licence is the first thing to check
It takes a minute and it removes the whole category of lender who does not exist. An unlicensed operation can disappear between your deposit and your loan, and there is no supervisor to complain to afterwards because there is no institution to complain about.
It also changes the conversation. A licensed institution knows it can be complained about, and that knowledge does more for a borrower's position than any promise made across a desk.
What the register is
Microfinance in Tanzania is organised in tiers. The tier that covers most of the small and medium lenders a borrower meets — the ones with a branch on the main road — is Tier 2, and the Bank of Tanzania publishes the list of licensed Tier 2 microfinance service providers with a licence number against each name.
Licence numbers in that register look like MSP2 followed by a code — for example MSP2-0689. If an institution gives you a number in that shape, it is claiming to be on that list, and the claim can be checked.
The register also records where the institution is: its region and district. That matters, because a lender whose registered office is in another region and whose "branch" is a phone number is worth more questions.
The Bank of Tanzania keeps the register under section 54 of the Microfinance Act, 2018, and updates it as licences are granted. The latest edition when this guide was written is dated 14 August 2026; it is linked at the end of this guide.
How to check a name
Search the name in the directory on this site. Every registered Tier 2 provider in the country is listed with its licence number, region and district, taken from the published register. If the name is there and the licence number matches the one you were given, the first check is done.
Watch the exact name. Fraud commonly uses a real institution's name with one word changed, or the same name in a district where that institution has no office. If the name is nearly right but not right, treat it as wrong.
Then get the institution's own number from its register entry or from its office, and call that — never the number that contacted you. Cloning a business's name is easy; taking over its published contacts is not.
What a licence proves, and what it does not
It proves the institution exists as a supervised legal entity with an address and an owner. It does not prove that the rate is fair, that the officer you met is honest, or that the terms are good for you. Those are still yours to check.
A licensed lender can still be expensive, slow or unpleasant to deal with. The licence just means that when something goes wrong there is a name, an office and a supervisor — which is exactly what is missing in every story that ends with a number that no longer rings.
If the lender is not on the register
It is not automatically a fraud. A SACCOS is registered under co-operative law rather than this register, an employer's staff loan scheme is neither, and a shopkeeper who lets a regular customer pay next week is simply a shopkeeper.
So ask the question directly: under what law are you registered, by whom, and what is the number? An institution operating properly answers in a sentence. One that changes the subject has answered too.
Sources
This article is general information about borrowing in Tanzania. It is not advice about any particular lender, and the worked examples are examples only — not a quote or an offer from anybody.
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