At 6:10 am, before the city fully wakes, Kevin Mwinuka is already on his feet. He arranges fruits on a wooden stall inches from the road in Mbagala, one of Dar es Salaam’s most congested neighbourhoods. As the first commuter bus lurches forward, a plume of exhaust drifts across the street.
Mwinuka coughs. Then again.
“I breathe in a lot of smoke every day. My chest hurts,” he mutters. “Sometimes I feel dizzy. But if I leave the roadside, customers don’t come. This place feeds my children, although it’s slowly killing me.”
Mwinuka does not own a car. He has never imported a vehicle. Yet, his life is shaped daily by Tanzania’s accelerating motorisation — and now, indirectly, by a new tax on it.
In July 2025, Tanzania introduced a levy on first-time motor vehicle registration as part of a broader HIV Response Levy under the Finance Act. The government expects the package of new domestic taxes to raise a whopping Sh586.4 billion (US$238.6), with 70 per cent earmarked for the HIV/AIDS Trust Fund and the rest for the Universal Health Insurance Fund.
Officials describe the levy as a necessary pivot toward self-reliant health financing amid shrinking donor support. Critics, however, warn that it risks deepening pollution and inequality by monetising dirty transport rather than steering the country toward cleaner alternatives, even as climate and public health pressures mount.
The question increasingly asked — in policy circles and on polluted streets — is whether Tanzania is taxing pollution or learning to live off it.
Over the past year, Tanzania has confronted the fragility of donor-funded health systems. The scaling back of US-supported programmes has disrupted HIV prevention and care, exposing how dependent critical services remain on external aid.
Across the country, PEPFAR-funded HIV programmes have stalled. Initiatives such as DREAMS, which supported adolescent girls and young women, have been paused, while pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) for key populations has been disrupted.
“There were rumours antiretrovirals (ARVs) would run out,” says Kandi Lussingu, a clinician at a government health facility in Bagamoyo. “We saw patients hoarding medicines. Some dropped out of care entirely because they were afraid treatment would stop.”
For now, the government insists ARV stocks are secure. But uncertainty looms beyond 2025, particularly for laboratory services, surveillance systems and data platforms previously supported by USAID.
In Parliament, Prime Minister Mwigulu Nchemba framed the new levies as unavoidable.
“We cannot continue to depend on external aid for critical health services,” he said.
That urgency now shapes fiscal decisions far beyond the health sector — including how Tanzania taxes its roads.
The HIV Response Levy spreads the burden across multiple sectors, including mining, alcohol, fuel, gaming, airline travel, train tickets and vehicle registration, all funnelled into the AIDS Trust Fund under the Tanzania Commission for AIDS Act.
For Goodluck Temu, a legal scholar at the University of Dar es Salaam School of Law, the move reflects sobre realism.
“This is a serious attempt at domestic resource mobilisation,” he says. “It recognises that HIV financing must be predictable and sovereign, not hostage to foreign politics.”
But Temu also raises a caution.
“The danger is when fiscal urgency overtakes strategic thinking,” he says. “Especially when the tax base itself creates other public health and environmental harms.”
Few sectors illustrate that tension more clearly than transport.
Tanzania’s roads are filling rapidly with vehicles imported largely second-hand from Asia and Europe. Many are more than a decade old, fuel-inefficient and lacking modern emission controls. Motorcycles and minibuses dominate urban transport, while heavy trucks rumble through city centres.
According to the government’s Transport Sector Environmental Action Plan 2025-2030, road transport has become one of the fastest-growing sources of greenhouse gas emissions in the country. Vehicles emit carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxides, sulphur dioxide and fine particulate matter — pollutants linked to respiratory disease, heart conditions and premature death.
In Dar es Salaam, the consequences are immediate.
“I breathe smoke all day,” says Juma Selemani, a security guard who commutes from Kimara by daladala (shared minibus taxis in Tanzania). “When I’m stuck behind a truck, the fumes enter straight into the bus. By the time I reach work, my head is heavy.”
Traffic police are exposed too. Under the flyover in Ubungo, Corporal Hassan Mbele directs vehicles through a choking intersection.
“It’s not easy guiding motorists,” he says. “You inhale a lot of smoke, but you cannot leave your post.”
The Action Plan notes that those least responsible for emissions — pedestrians, cyclists and street vendors — are often the most exposed. Informal settlements cluster near busy roads where land is cheaper, but air quality is poorest.
Yet critics argue the new vehicle levy does little to change this reality.
Under the Finance Act, the vehicle levy is tiered by engine capacity rather than emissions performance, fuel efficiency or vehicle age. A newer, cleaner vehicle can attract a higher levy than an older, dirtier one with a smaller engine.
“If you are serious about reducing pollution, you tax emissions, not metal,” says Lulu Msuya, an environmental activist in Dar es Salaam. “Right now, the policy risks locking in dirty vehicles while pricing cleaner ones out of reach.”
Tanzania lacks a comprehensive national system for emissions testing and enforcement. Without it, higher taxes may raise revenue without reducing tailpipe pollution.
“There is no guarantee this levy will reduce a single cough in Mbagala,” Msuya says.
Instead, critics warn, costs are likely to be passed on to consumers through higher transport fares, while pollution levels remain unchanged.
The irony is difficult to ignore. The levy is designed to fund the HIV response — a public health imperative — using revenue drawn partly from a sector that actively undermines public health.
At Palestina Hospital in Dar es Salaam, the link is visible.
“We treat HIV patients who also have asthma, heart disease, chronic cough,” says Judith Mushi, the hospital’s chief medical officer. “Air pollution complicates everything. Treatment becomes harder.”
Long-term exposure to vehicle emissions weakens immune systems and exacerbates non-communicable diseases, increasing vulnerability in populations already under strain.
For low-income urban households, the costs accumulate. In Ilala district, Salum Juma, who lives near a busy road and railway line, says medical expenses are rising.
“Children get sick often,” he says. “We spend money on transport, medicine — everything.”
Yet there is no legal requirement that vehicle levy revenues be reinvested in air-quality monitoring, cleaner public transport or non-motorised infrastructure.
“If climate policy is driven by fiscal desperation,” Temu warns, “you risk solving one crisis by deepening another.”
Across Africa, governments are scrambling to fill health financing gaps as cities choke on traffic. Tanzania’s decision to tax imported vehicles to fund its HIV response sits at the crossroads of shrinking donor support, rapid motorisation and climate vulnerability.
“Domestic resource mobilisation is unavoidable,” says Godius Kahyarara, a senior official at the Ministry of Transport. “We cannot depend indefinitely on donors whose priorities change.”
He acknowledges, however, that aligning fiscal measures with climate goals remains a work in progress.
Climate advocates say the problem extends beyond Tanzania. Environmental policy, they argue, is increasingly shaped by revenue needs rather than ecological outcomes.
“If you tax vehicles without targeting emissions, you are not discouraging pollution,” says Neema Lema, an environmental policy analyst in Dar es Salaam. “You are simply raising money from it.”
The result, she says, is a paradox in which pollution is monetised to fund healthcare, even as it generates new health burdens — and new inequalities.
“People who don’t own cars still pay,” says Selemani. “When fares go up, when food prices rise — that is how we feel it.”
Beyond the city, the impacts stretch into rural landscapes.
In Chalinze, along the Dar es Salaam–Morogoro highway, Mzee Rashid Bakari watches trucks thunder past his maize field.
“When they pass, dust settles on the crops,” he says. “Sometimes I wonder what we are eating.”
The Environmental Action Plan links road transport to soil degradation and water pollution as fuel leaks and runoff contaminate land and rivers — impacts rarely factored into fiscal debates yet deeply felt by rural communities.
For women working roadside markets, the exposure is constant.
“We spend the whole day here,” Mwinuka says, packing up his stall as evening traffic swells. “The smoke follows you home.”
Government officials insist the levy is only a first step.
“We are moving toward greener transport,” says Kahyarara. “But transition takes time, resources and behavioural change.”
Civil society groups are less patient.
“Revenue without reform is not sustainability,” Lema says. “If we don’t link taxation to emissions, we are just selling the right to pollute.”
As donor support recedes, Tanzania faces a defining choice: whether to build a climate-aligned fiscal state, or a pollution-financed one.
As engines idle and the city exhales exhaust, Mwinuka reflects on the levy.
“I hear the government says this money will help people with HIV,” he says. “That is good. But what about this air?”
He gestures toward the road. “This air makes people sick too.”
The question is no longer whether Tanzania can afford cleaner transport. It is whether it can afford not to.