Assessment of performance of Special Economic Zone (SEZ) in making Tanzania the export-oriented country: Case study in Benjamini William Mkapa Special Economic Zone

Tanzania's strategic geographical positioning, with its lake and sea ports, airports, and border gateways, makes it a key player in international trade, enabling vital economic activities such as importation, exportation, and transshipment. It is easier to make SEZ as the major engine of Tanzanian Exports all over the world if we understand the performance and other challenges which made it difficult to happen. However, various researches and other writings did not target to explorer how SEZ could be the main engine of making Tanzania Export Oriented Country. The main Objective of this quantitative and qualitative study was to explore the ability of SEZ project over the normal industrialization and exportation out of SEZ by making assessment on its performance in five years from 2019 to 2023. Data were generated through structured questionnaires and research question guard lines sheet for interviewed respondents and analyzed by using SPSS software and Advance Microsoft Excel. The analysis revealed the following, the exportation under SEZ showed positive in trend, every year there was increase in quantities of products to be exported, although of this encouraged findings the researcher found the type of product mostly exported was raw materials about seventy percent only thirty percent was exportation of manufactured goods which is unhealthy to the economy. Also researcher discovered there is high rate of inflow of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI), and the main reason of this inflow discovered there is natural geographical positioning which Tanzania endowed by God like natural resources, ocean and lake, all these the government added value by developing production, communication and transportation infrastructures to the project. Another finding was the introduction of other incentives where by even in other countries the Foreign Investors could get, these types of incentives did not show the uniqueness of competitive to opponent countries. Also there was low participation of domestic industries in the project of SEZ due to presence of unclear incentives to export in regional countries like SADC, EAC, and COMESA. The findings suggested that, there should be insisting the value addition and not to export raw materials, to review the other incentives to be competitive to opponents countries with the same interest to attract investors, to assist and develop domestic Small and Medium Enterprises to SEZ project to wards adaptation of technology and increase of employment and to conquer the regional markets and other globally markets.