Introduction
On 22 August 2026, President Samia Suluhu Hassan stood at Stiegler's Gorge on the Rufiji River and formally inaugurated the Julius Nyerere Hydropower Plant (JNHPP), the largest infrastructure investment in Tanzania's history and, at 2,115 MW, one of the largest hydropower facilities in Africa. Most of the coverage that followed was a story about power. It should also be read as a story about food.
Tanzania's cooking-energy landscape remains stubbornly biomass-dependent: roughly 80 percent of households still cook primarily with firewood or charcoal, and only about 2 percent use electricity as their main cooking fuel. Yet the country now has, for the first time, the generation surplus, the appliance technology and the financing architecture needed to change that picture at scale. JNHPP does not solve Tanzania's clean cooking challenge on its own. But it removes the single biggest excuse for not solving it: the assumption that there simply is not enough reliable electricity to cook with.
A Landmark Day at JNHPP
The inauguration ceremony, held within Nyerere National Park in Rufiji District, Pwani Region, brought together heads of state and senior officials from across the region. President Samia was joined by Vice President Hon. Emmanuel Nchimbi, Prime Minister Hon. Mwigulu Nchemba, Egyptian Prime Minister Hon. Moustafa Madbouly, and former African Development Bank President Hon. Akinwumi Adesina, among other government, development-partner and private-sector representatives. TaTEDO-SESO and SESCOM Ltd, represented respectively by their Chief Executive Officer and Manager, were privileged to attend on behalf of Tanzania's clean cooking sector.
President of the United Republic of Tanzania, Hon Samia Suluhu Hassan, inaugurating Julius Nyerere Hydropower Plant at Stiegler's Gorge on the Rufiji River, Pwani Region
During the inauguration, President Samia told the gathering, “When we make decisions in the national interest, we should not give up simply because the path is difficult.”, This reflected the project's long and, at times, contested history. Dr. Adesina struck a similarly forward-looking note, describing Tanzania's expanded power base as a foundation from which the country could become “an energy and industrial hub for the region.”
The plant's nine generating units, each rated at approximately 235 MW, were built at a cost of roughly TZS 7.45 trillion (about USD 2.9–3.35 billion), financed entirely from the Government of Tanzania's own resources, without external borrowing. It is, by any measure, a landmark act of national investment.
What 2,115 Extra Megawatts Actually Mean
The scale of the addition is best understood against Tanzania's existing power system. Ahead of the inauguration, the Minister of Energy reported that national installed generation capacity has reached approximately 4,646 MW, against peak national demand of around 2,010 MW. The country has a surplus of roughly 2,636 MW. JNHPP has been central to that shift: government figures show the plant supplied approximately 44.9 percent of all electricity fed into the national grid in the year to 31 May 2026, making it, even before its formal commissioning, the backbone of Tanzania's electricity supply.
A generation surplus of that size is, on its own, only a technical fact. Its developmental value depends entirely on what Tanzanians are able to do with the electricity it makes available. For decades, national electrification efforts have understandably focused on generation, transmission, distribution and household connection. From now on, this initiative must ask: what do we hope to achieve through this connection?
The Gap Between Electrification and Clean Cooking
That question is especially urgent for cooking, which is Tanzania's single largest category of household energy use and its most stubborn clean-energy gap. National household electricity access reached 71.2 percent by 2025 (84 percent in urban areas, 61 percent in rural areas), according to the National Bureau of Statistics. Clean cooking access, by contrast, has risen from just 6.9 percent in 2021 to 23.2 percent in 2025, this is a real progress, but still far short of the 80 percent access target set out in Tanzania's National Clean Cooking Strategy (NCCS) (2024–2034), launched by President Samia in May 2024.
In other words: millions of Tanzanian households already have an electricity connection yet continue to cook with firewood or charcoal. Indoor air pollution from biomass cooking is now Tanzania's largest single environmental health risk, linked to an estimated 33,024 premature deaths and 1.4 million healthy years of life lost (DALYs) annually. Urban households can spend up to 30 percent of their income on charcoal; rural women and girls spend hours each day collecting firewood. The World Bank puts the total annual cost of this inaction, health, lost female productivity and climate impacts combined at approximately USD 39 billion.
Why Electric Cooking, and Why Now
Modern electric cooking appliances (above all the Electric Pressure Cooker (EPC)) have already answered the question of whether electricity can practically replace charcoal in a Tanzanian kitchen. Field evidence gathered by TaTEDO-SESO and partners shows that roughly 92 percent of everyday Tanzanian dishes, including energy-intensive foods such as beans, makande and meat stews, can be cooked in an EPC, typically in 20 to 35 minutes rather than the 45 to 90 minutes needed on charcoal. On Tanzania's standard domestic tariff, a meal cooked by EPC costs approximately TZS 352, compared with TZS 2,000 to 3,000 for the same meal cooked on charcoal, a saving of four to six times, and an appliance payback period of roughly six to ten months.
Reliability is what turns that economic case into a household decision. A brief power cut is a minor inconvenience for a light bulb or a phone charger; it is a much bigger problem halfway through preparing a family's evening meal. Where supply has felt unpredictable, households have understandably kept charcoal, LPG or firewood as a backup, a pattern known as fuel stacking, which quietly erodes the health and environmental gains a full transition would deliver. By adding 2,115 MW of new capacity and a wide margin above peak demand, JNHPP directly strengthens the case for treating electricity as a dependable, everyday cooking fuel rather than a fallback option.
“Women are responsible for cooking, but they do not decide what technology to buy.”
— Civil-society respondent, TaTEDO-SESO / JustGESI Key Informant Interviews, 2026
Tanzania Is Already Proving the Model
Tanzania is not starting this transition from zero. TaTEDO-SESO and social enterprise SESCOM Ltd have distributed more than 28,500 EPCs to date through three regional service and support centres and a network of women-led community sales agents, while also exporting appliances to the Democratic Republic of Congo. SESCOM's own-brand EPC carries Global LEAP recognition, a mark of quality in the international efficient-appliance market.
The financing picture is shifting just as fast. In October 2025, TANESCO launched ‘Konekt Umeme, Pika kwa Umeme’ (Connect Electricity, Cook with Electricity). This was Africa's first utility on-bill financing scheme for electric cooking appliances, allowing customers to repay an EPC through their monthly electricity bill using the existing LUKU prepayment infrastructure. An earlier TANESCO staff scheme offering subsidised EPCs saw roughly 1,000 units taken up within a single week, with 11,000 subsidised units planned in total, an early but telling signal of latent demand once the upfront cost barrier is removed. In parallel, the Kibasila Primary School eCooking Model Kitchen, developed with SE4ALL, the World Food Programme, the Government of Tanzania and the MECS Programme, is piloting institutional electric cooking with a target of 50 government schools.
The Return: Health, Forests, Gender and Climate
The potential payoff is large. Analysis in TaTEDO-SESO's Tanzania Electric
Cooking Transition Assessment 2026 estimates that if just 40 percent of urban
charcoal-using households switched to electric cooking, Tanzania would see USD
220 million in net social benefit per year, 2,691 DALYs avoided annually, 1.3
million tonnes of CO₂-equivalent emissions avoided per year, and 429 million hours of women's
time freed from cooking and fuel-related labor each year, alongside an
estimated 530 GWh of new, productive electricity demand for the sector JNHPP
now helps supply. 
The gender dimension is central rather than incidental. Women perform the overwhelming majority of household cooking and bear the greatest health burden from smoke exposure, yet 72 percent of mainland Tanzanian households are male-headed, and men typically control the financial decisions that determine which cooking technology a household buy. The World Bank estimates Tanzania loses roughly USD 12 billion a year in female productivity to cooking and firewood collection alone. Closing that gap, there are initiatives through financing products that do not require a male co-signatory, women-led distribution networks, and appliance financing routed through women's savings groups. This is the assessment argues, not simply a social good but a market-design imperative.
There is an environmental dividend too. Biomass demand is linked to an estimated 469,420 hectares of forest loss per year between 2015 and 2020. Every household that shifts from charcoal to electricity generated increasingly from clean sources such as hydro, gas and solar now makes up roughly 70 percent of Tanzania's generation mix, which eases pressure somewhere along that supply chain, even as Tanzania's cooking transition remains, realistically, a multi-fuel one for years to come.
What Still Needs to Happen
Generation capacity was never the hardest part of this problem. Research shows that 86 percent of EPC buyers could not have afforded the appliance without financing, underlining why affordability, not electricity supply. Affordability remains to be the primary barrier to adoption. Import duty and VAT reductions on EPCs, mandated under the NCCS by June 2026, are still pending and represent the highest-impact, lowest-cost policy lever available to government. A National Clean Cooking Fund, also due by June 2025 under the strategy, has yet to become operational. Appliance quality standards are still under development through the Tanzania Bureau of Standards, and after-sales service infrastructure, technicians, spare parts, and repair centres. This will need to expand well beyond what TaTEDO-SESO and SESCOM currently provide if the market is to serve hundreds of thousands, rather than tens of thousands, of households.
The priorities for 2026–2028 are correspondingly clear: scale TANESCO's on-bill financing from an early cohort toward 100,000 households; remove import duty and VAT on EPCs; launch a coordinated national demand-generation campaign built around community-level demonstrations, which primary research consistently finds more persuasive than awareness messaging alone; extend institutional electric cooking to 500 or more schools and health facilities; and establish a national eCooking monitoring system so that policymakers, financiers and distributors are working from a shared, current picture of progress toward the NCCS's 80-percent target.
From Megawatts to Meals
The success of the Julius Nyerere Hydropower Plant will ultimately be measured not only in megawatts, but in what those megawatts change about daily life in Tanzanian households. A unit of electricity generated at JNHPP becomes development when it lights a clinic, runs a workshop, powers a school and when it reaches an ordinary kitchen and lets a family prepare dinner affordably, quickly and without smoke.
The chain from that turbine to that kitchen is now more complete than it has ever for reliable generation, a strengthening grid, falling appliance prices, on-bill financing, and a growing base of Tanzanian households and institutions already using EPCs every day. What remains is coordination between the Ministry of Energy, TANESCO, the Rural Energy Agency, EWURA, TaTEDO-SESO and other related programmes, financial institutions and local government to turn a generation surplus into a national cooking transition, deliberately planned for rather than left to chance.
The turbines at JNHPP are turning, and electricity is flowing. The next task for JNHPP is to become not only Tanzania's largest power plant, but one of the engines of its clean cooking future. This ensures that power reaches every Tanzanian kitchen.
Key Facts at a Glance
Sources
- TANESCO,
Invitation to the Official Inauguration of JNHPP, Ref.
MD/GENCORRE/EXTERNAL/031, 10 August 2026.
- The
Citizen, “Tanzania positions as energy hub with 2,636MW power surplus,” 15
August 2026.
- The
Citizen, “Why Sh7.45 trillion Julius Nyerere hydropower dam is a turning point
for Tanzania,” 2026.
- The
Citizen, “Samia launches 2,115MW Julius Nyerere Hydropower Project, silences
critics,” 22 August 2026.
- The
Citizen, “Julius Nyerere hydropower dam becomes backbone of national grid,
supplies half of Tanzania's electricity,” 2026.
- Daily
News, “Dr Samia switches on JNHPP plant, a landmark energy project to bolster
Tanzania's power security,” 22 August 2026.
- Tanzania
Invest, “JNHPP Julius Nyerere Hydropower Project Launch,” 2026.
- TaTEDO-SESO
/ SESCOM Ltd, in collaboration with the MECS Programme (JustGESI Project),
Tanzania Electric Cooking Transition Assessment 2026: Policy, Financing,
Marketing, and Investment Pathways for Achieving the National Clean Cooking
Strategy 2024–2034, Dar es Salaam, April 2026.
- United
Republic of Tanzania, Ministry of Energy, National Clean Cooking Strategy
2024–2034.
- National
Bureau of Statistics (NBS), 2025 household electricity access and fuel-mix
data.
- World Bank, 2023–2024 estimates on household air pollution, forest loss and the economic cost of Tanzania's biomass dependence.
