What is FinScope, and why does it matter?
FinScope Tanzania is the country's authoritative demand-side survey of how adults actually use money — what they save with, borrow from, insure with, and invest in.
The 2023 wave (the fifth, after 2006, 2009, 2013 and 2017) was run by the National Bureau of Statistics, who interviewed 9,915 adults aged 16 and over between March and April 2023, under oversight from the Ministry of Finance, the Bank of Tanzania and the Financial Sector Deepening Trust (FSDT).
It is the closest thing Tanzania has to a national map of financial behaviour — which makes it the right place to ask "who invests?"
How financially included is Tanzania?
Formal financial inclusion rose to 76% of adults in 2023, up from 65% in 2017. The number of financially excluded adults fell to 6.4 million (from 7.8 million) — more impressive than it sounds, because the adult population grew about 23% over the same period.
But "included" mostly means mobile money, not banking or investing:
- Mobile money — 72% of adults (up from 60%)
- Commercial banks — 22% (up from 17%)
- Community microfinance / savings groups — 16%
- Capital markets — 0.5% (up from 0.01%)
So the financial system the average Tanzanian touches is a phone wallet, not a brokerage account.
So how many Tanzanians actually invest in the stock market?
About one in two hundred adults — 0.5%. That is the single most important number for understanding the Dar es Salaam Stock Exchange's retail base: it is small.
The hopeful read is the trajectory. Capital-markets uptake went from 0.01% in 2017 to 0.5% in 2023 — a fiftyfold rise off a near-zero base. The pipeline that feeds it is widening fast: 89% of adults now own a mobile phone, 86% live within 5km of a financial access point, and 63% hold a National ID (NIN) — the rails that make opening an account, and eventually investing, possible.
Who is left out — and who's most likely to start investing?
Exclusion is concentrated: women, youth under 25, rural dwellers and dependents have the highest exclusion rates. The dominant barrier is income, not interest — 62% of excluded adults say they simply don't have enough regular income to use formal services, and most saving and borrowing is for cashflow and emergencies, not for building assets.
Read forward, that points to who the next DSE investors look like: urban, phone-owning, bank-using Tanzanians who have moved past day-to-day cashflow — increasingly women and youth, the segments banks are now actively courting. They are financially included; the next step is financially capable.
What does this mean if you're thinking about the DSE?
Three things:
- You're early, not late. A market where 0.5% of adults participate is the beginning of a curve, not the end of one.
- The on-ramp is a phone. The same mobile-money and ID rails that drove inclusion are what make a first share purchase realistic — see How to buy shares on the DSE and What is the DSE?.
- Literacy is the gap, not access. With access widening faster than understanding, the useful next step is learning how the market works — what an index is, how dividends work, and reading the daily market close.
Where can I see the FinScope data myself?
FSDT publishes the full FinScope Tanzania 2023 report and an interactive data dashboard for free at fsdt.or.tz/finscope, with regional ("zonal") breakdowns and a Zanzibar report. The next waves — FinScope MSME 2025 and the Small Trader Diaries 2025/26 — will deepen the picture of how small businesses and traders use finance.
Figures: FinScope Tanzania 2023 (FSDT / National Bureau of Statistics). Educational and informational only — nothing here is investment advice, a recommendation, or a prediction. Verify all figures against the published FinScope report before relying on them.