Pro­tec­tion gaps in Tan­zania’s e-commerce law

De­vel­op­ment sum­mary

Mariam Juma Mgend­wa as­sesses wheth­er Tan­zania’s e-commerce legal regime ad­equately pro­tects di­git­al market par­ti­cipants in con­tem­por­ary elec­tron­ic com­merce, and why re­cog­ni­tion of elec­tron­ic trans­ac­tions does not by itself provide that pro­tec­tion. The ana­lys­is fo­cuses on the ad­equacy of the legal frame­work for elec­tron­ic trans­ac­tions, con­tracts, per­son­al data and di­git­al dis­putes.

Using a doc­trin­al meth­od­o­logy, the art­icle ex­am­ines Tan­zani­an le­gis­la­tion to­geth­er with rel­ev­ant in­ter­na­tion­al and re­gion­al in­stru­ments. It argues that re­cog­ni­tion of elec­tron­ic trans­ac­tions has out­paced the de­vel­op­ment of com­pre­hens­ive pro­tec­tion, ef­fect­ive rem­ed­ies, in­ter­me­di­ary li­ab­il­ity, cross-border en­force­ment, emerging-technology reg­u­la­tion and in­sti­tu­tion­al co­ordin­a­tion. The art­icle con­cludes that the Tan­zani­an frame­work is not devoid of pro­tec­tion but is a found­a­tion­al, frag­men­ted and in­com­plete system re­quir­ing tar­geted le­gis­lat­ive con­sol­id­a­tion, clear­er al­loc­a­tion of plat­form re­spons­ib­il­ity and an ac­cess­ible dispute-resolution mech­an­ism suited to low-value di­git­al dis­putes.