How postcodes will unlock online trade, growth

Mwanza/Dar. Online businesses are set for a major boost as the government yesterday announced it would allocate Sh45 billion for implementation of the residential addresses plan and postcode allocations in 194 councils across Tanzania and Zanzibar.

For over a decade, the government has been working to advance e-commerce and improve its postal system to catch up with the changing business environment and competition posed by technological advancement.

Mr Silvanus Mtembei who trades in clothes in Dar es Salaam said he has been spending a lot of money and airtime to direct a delivery person sending a product to a destination because most customers do not have clear addresses.

“Oncepostcodes are well established, a driver can deliver the product without much hussle to the home or office of the customer, hence less delivery costs,” he said.

Mr Mtembei, a resident of Sinza, is one of the many owners of online businesses that rely on day to day communication with customers in many parts of the city, whose addresses cannot be found easily.

Ms Anastasia Goroka a seller of aromatherapy products said the postcode development would simplify delivery of the products so that means some of the charges on delivery would go down.

“If the delivery charges will drop, that means the business will grow more and more as sometimes people cancel to buy products due to delivery cost, adding a postal code has come at the right time as mobile charges have increased,” the businesswoman said.

Ms Goroka also added that the use of postcodes would reduce online fraud as there were unfaithful people who abused lack of clear addresses to commit fraud.

She noted that if TCRA were to rollout addresses countrywide, then this would for sure help the Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs).

The government says it was now embarking on an initiative to ensure that every street had a name and every house had a recognizable number to facilitate government operations for the community towards a digital economy and simplify delivery of products and services from individuals and companies when the owner of the house orders.

Speaking yesterday in Mwanza during her visit which aimed to inspect the implementation of the plan in Mwanza City, Information, Communications and Information Technology minister Ashatu Kijaji said the addresses and postcodes would be installed in all 184 councils in Tanzania and 10 in Zanzibar.

“The government intention is to reach out to the people everywhere, so that when an individual has a problem like a fire incident, then help would be easy to implement because of street names, house numbers and postcodes,” Dr Kijaji observed.

The ICT minister said so as to make the initiative a success, the government decided to start implementing it in Mwanza City as a pilot area in order to measure its efficiency and see how it could be implemented nationwide successfully.

The chairman of the Mwanza City Council Housing and Postcode Experts Committee, Mr Moses Seleki, said that up to October 14, 2021 over 108,000 houses from 18 wards in the city had been alloted with house numbers to make them recognizable.

According to him, the exercise of allocating the numbers and postcode addresses commenced on July 1, 2021, and over 5,823 stalls with street names have been installed in 18 wards of the council.

“More than 98,801 postcodes have been issued to residents of Mwanza City of which 74,248 are buildings and 24,588 are vacant plots, from the owners of land and houses in our city are known,” said Seleki.