"An indispensable part of Tanzania's justice system" — for €159,000 a year
Two new studies test a proposition the field has asserted for twenty years: that free access to law changes something.
At the closing event of the Promotion of the Rule of Law and Judiciary in Africa programme, a law student living with a visual impairment said TanzLII made his studies possible. As Muhamet Brahimi of GIZ PRoLA notes in his foreword to the evaluation we publish today, that does not show up on a usage graph — but it is exactly what this work is meant to achieve.
The rest of the evidence does show up, and it is unusually direct.
The verdict
Justice in Data Report 2, prepared by ALT Advisory, is an independent impact evaluation of TanzLII assessed against the OECD-DAC criteria. It rests on a near-complete national corpus of citation data, a sector-wide survey, interviews at every level of the courts, and a full cost analysis. Laws.Africa commissioned and co-funded it but did not write it, and the citation analysis was run independently by Parallax Information Consulting.
It concludes that TanzLII has become an indispensable part of Tanzania's justice system. The evidence behind that word is behavioural, not attitudinal. The volume of case citation in Tanzanian judgments rose roughly twenty-five-fold over the decade to 2025. The free, court-assigned neutral citation went from under 5% of all citations before 2023 to 69% by 2026 — becoming the standard way the profession refers to authority. Nearly nine in ten judges and magistrates now cite TanzLII decisions with the same confidence as printed law reports, and 93.5% of surveyed users say losing the platform would have a major or significant impact on their work.
The cost of producing that change was approximately €159,000 a year during the intensive build period — between a fifth and a tenth of what a comparable standalone national institution spends, measured on gross spend, cost per judgment and cost per visit alike.
Why the student is not a footnote
The accessibility upgrade that made those studies possible was not a trade-off between reach and cost. Digital text that works with a screen reader is both more useful and far cheaper to produce than converting material into Braille. That logic runs through the whole finding: because the law was digitised once to open, structured standards, each new service built on it costs a fraction of the original. Structured data not only lowers the cost of the next service. It lowers the cost of including the next reader.
The second study, prepared by HiiL across Tanzania, Kenya, South Africa, France and the United Kingdom, traces how that foundation reaches small businesses, investors, women and the justice innovation ecosystem, and sets out the institutional and financing pathways available to governments building it.
What is not yet done
Both studies are candid about the limits, and so are we. TanzLII's gains reach the professional core of the justice sector reliably and the wider public unevenly. Its user base still skews to the urban legal hubs. And the platform remains grant-funded: completing the governance transition to the TanzLII Trust and securing a domestic budget line is the decisive task ahead.
We have presented that unfinished work as what it is — the clearest available map of where the next investment compounds fastest, since in each case the expensive part is already built and paid for.
Why this matters beyond Tanzania
The most transferable finding is not a number. It is a sequence: content and coverage first, then editorial standards and formal authority, then the features, training and outreach that drive adoption, with governance and a sustainability plan running underneath from the start. For any government or partner weighing a comparable investment, that order is the lesson.
Justice in Data Report 2 was prepared by ALT Advisory and commissioned by Laws.Africa. The five-country comparative study was prepared by HiiL. Both were supported by GIZ under the PRoLA programme.
