How does Tanzania compare to your home country on LGBTQ+ rights, democracy and press freedom?
LGBTQ+ rights
Democracy & press freedom
Women's rights
Rule of law
Prevention of child labour
One of these numbers is older than the story it describes
Tanzania is sold as the part of Africa with no politics in it: the Serengeti, the crater, Kilimanjaro, a week on a Zanzibar beach at the end. The country is welcoming, the guiding is excellent, and Zanzibar had its best tourism year on record in 2025 — 917,167 international arrivals, up from 736,755 the year before.* This page takes all of that as read.
What happened in the same twelve months is. In the general election of 29 October 2025 the two leading opposition candidates were removed from the ballot, the incumbent was declared re-elected with close to 98% of the vote, security forces killed protesters — and, Human Rights Watch found, shot bystanders who were not demonstrating at all — and the internet was cut nationwide for days.*
The democracy score below does not know that happened. Our figure comes from the EIU's 2024 edition, published before the election, and at 5.20 it places Tanzania above Georgia, Tunisia, Kenya and Thailand — which the current picture does not support. We show the sourced number rather than an adjusted one, because every figure on this site has to trace back to something you can look up. But we would rather point at the gap than let it pass: the up-to-date picture is in the democracy section, sourced separately, and it is the reason the arrow on that dimension points down.
LGBTQ+ rights
Equaldex scores Tanzania 15/100 — a Legal Index of 16 and a Public Opinion Index of 14 — placing it 157th of the countries it measures.* Unusually for this site, the two halves agree with each other. On most low-scoring countries one number carries the other; here the law and the public are in the same place.
On the mainland, same-sex conduct between men is punishable by up to life imprisonment, with a statutory minimum of thirty years, under section 154 of the Penal Code as amended by the Sexual Offences Special Provisions Act of 1998. Same-sex marriage is banned, adoption is closed, legal gender change is not available, and article 175 of the Penal Code — the provision on material "tending to corrupt morals" — is used to censor LGBT content.* Zanzibar has its own penal code and its own penalties, which the mainland code does not reach — see the separate section further down, because that difference matters most in the place most visitors actually go.
The state moved from law to enforcement in 2016. After a television discussion of HIV outreach work, a member of parliament accused the channel of "glorifying gayism"; days later the regional commissioner for Dar es Salaam undertook to arrest gay people and ban the organisations working with them. Health ministry directives in October 2016 and February 2017 then banned the distribution of lubricant and prohibited community organisations from doing HIV outreach to men who have sex with men, and the drop-in centres providing testing were closed. Human Rights Watch documented the consequences in a 112-page report in 2020, and the title is the finding: "If We Don't Get Services, We Will Die."*
Two things sit against that, and both are worth stating. Public attitudes are hostile but not uniform — Afrobarometer's 2021–2023 round found 91.6% of Tanzanians would dislike having homosexual neighbours, against a study average of 74.4%, while 7.8% said they would not mind.* And the Tanzania Sentencing Guidelines of 2023 treat a killing motivated by the victim's sexual orientation as a high-seriousness offence carrying a minimum of ten years — a narrow provision, in a country that criminalises the same people, and the single reason the Legal Index is 16 rather than lower.*
There is no scene to point you towards and no venue that advertises itself as one. Foreign visitors are not the target of enforcement, but Tanzanians are, and discretion here protects the person you are with rather than you. The practical risk to a visitor is being photographed or reported; the practical risk to a Tanzanian is prosecution. Assume that anything you post naming or picturing someone reaches them and not you, and be careful with dating apps, which have been used to entrap people in the region.
Democracy & press freedom
The EIU put Tanzania at 5.20 in its 2024 edition — 86th of 167, in the "hybrid regime" band, with an electoral-process component of 4.42 and civil liberties at 4.71.* As the note above the scores says, that edition closed before the events that now define the picture. What follows is sourced from elsewhere, and it is the part that is current.
Tundu Lissu, chairman of the main opposition party Chadema, was arrested in April 2025 and charged with treason over remarks at a party meeting; the electoral commission then barred Chadema from the election on the ground that it had not signed a government code of conduct. President Samia Suluhu Hassan was declared re-elected on 29 October 2025 with close to 98% of the vote. In the protests that followed, Human Rights Watch found that security forces killed and injured people who were not taking part in demonstrations at all, and believes hundreds may have been killed nationwide; Chadema has claimed a far higher figure and alleged that police disposed of bodies, which has not been independently confirmed — and the nationwide internet shutdown is part of why nobody can yet count.** Some opposition figures were released in November 2025 while hundreds of people faced treason and related charges.* On 21 August 2026, after fourteen months in detention, a three-judge High Court panel ruled that Lissu has a case to answer and must open his defence. The charge carries a potential death sentence.*
Press freedom moved with it. RSF's 2026 Index places Tanzania 117th of 180, down 22 places, and its regional analysis opens by calling the country "once a leader of press freedom in the region."* That is the honest shape of this dimension: not a country that was always closed, but one that had been among the region's better performers and is now its steepest faller. In August 2026 the newspaper Mwanahalisi was shut for six months over a report about the vice-president.*
Safari circuits and the islands carry on unaffected by this, and Tanzanians talk about politics readily in private. What has changed is the cost of publishing: cybercrime and media-services legislation is used against people who post, and a Tanzanian who shares your post carries a risk you don't. Avoid photographing police, soldiers and government buildings. If you travel around an election or a court date, expect the possibility of network disruption and don't rely on being able to get online.
Women's rights
The 6.5 is a 50/50 blend of lived conditions (Georgetown WPS Index 0.624, 121st of 177) and formal legal rights (World Bank WBL 2026 Legal Frameworks, 66.85). Inside the legal half the spread is the story: Pay scores 100 and Marriage scores 100, while Safety scores 12.5, childcare 41.75, and both entrepreneurship and assets 50.* A composite that averages a perfect score and a near-zero produces a middling number describing neither.
The Marriage 100 deserves the closest look, because it scores the law as written. Sections 13 and 17 of the 1971 Law of Marriage Act allow a girl to marry at 14 with a court's consent and 15 with a parent's, where boys must be 18. The High Court ruled those provisions unconstitutional in 2016 in a case brought by the Msichana Initiative, and the Court of Appeal upheld that ruling in October 2019.* Seven years on from the first judgment, parliament has still not amended the Act, and Equality Now and its partners are still asking it to.* A court can strike a provision down; only a legislature can take it off the statute book.
The Safety 12.5 measures the other end of the same gap — the absence of comprehensive legislation on domestic violence and related protections. Against that, Tanzania has had a woman head of state since 2021, women's representation in parliament is comparatively high on regional terms, and the WPS Index's own components put the country mid-table on financial inclusion rather than at the bottom.
Tanzania is generally straightforward for women travelling alone, including on organised safari and trekking routes, with normal urban precautions in Dar es Salaam and Arusha. Dress expectations are noticeably more conservative on Zanzibar and along the Swahili coast than on the mainland circuits — covering shoulders and knees away from the beach is both expected and appreciated. Reproductive rights sit outside this score, as on every Fair Away page: on the mainland abortion is permitted to preserve the woman's life, a broader health ground exists in common-law argument but has never been written into the statute, and the Maputo Protocol is ratified but not domesticated.*
Rule of law
The World Justice Project puts Tanzania at 0.46 in 2025 — 98th of 143, down 1.2% on the year and one rank place.* This is a direct reading of the house index, not a proxy, so there is no tilde on it.
The interesting part is where the weakness sits. On WJP's factor breakdown Tanzania does relatively better on order and security and on constraints on government powers than it does on fundamental rights and open government, which are its two weakest factors.* That is the pattern of a state that functions rather than one that has collapsed — courts sit, contracts hold, the roads are policed — and where what erodes is the part that protects a citizen against the state. WJP also records Tanzania among the countries where both fundamental rights and constraints on government powers have fallen over the past seven years, and the 2025 movement is downward again.
Everyday legal risk for a visitor is low, and tourist areas are actively policed because tourism matters to the economy. Two things carry consequences far beyond what a European traveller expects: drug offences, and wildlife offences — buying or carrying ivory or other wildlife products is a serious crime with long sentences, not a customs formality. Plastic bags are banned nationwide and are confiscated on arrival. Petty corruption at roadblocks exists; the safe answer is to ask for a written receipt rather than to argue.
Prevention of child labour
The US Department of Labor places Tanzania in the Moderate Advancement tier for 2024, the second of four, one of 63 countries in that band.* ILAB publishes a tier rather than a score, so the 6.0 is our approximation of that tier — which is what the tilde on the bar means. It earned the tier for real work: Tanzania launched a new child-labour elimination plan in 2024 and was one of five countries to publish national labour survey results that year. It also remains one of 38 countries whose law does not prohibit the use of children in illicit activities, and it has no public mechanism for reporting worst-forms violations.
Read the tier for what it is. It measures government effort, not how many children are working — and on the second question the same department's reporting points the other way. ILAB's 2024 list of goods produced with child labour names eleven Tanzanian goods: cattle, cloves, coffee, gold, Nile perch, rice, sisal, stones, tanzanite, tea and tobacco. Cattle, rice and stones were added in 2024.* Forced child labour is documented in mining, quarrying and domestic work.
Two items on that list of eleven are the souvenirs. Cloves are what every Zanzibar spice tour sells you at the end, and tanzanite is mined nowhere else on earth and sold to visitors in Arusha as the stone of the country. That does not mean the packet in your bag was picked by a child — it means the supply chain is one where it can happen and where nobody at the stall is being asked. Buying from a registered dealer who can name the mine or the farm, and being willing to walk away when nobody can, is a small thing that is at least aimed at the right question. Gold and gemstones bought informally are the highest-risk purchase you can make here.
Zanzibar is part of Tanzania and a different jurisdiction
Every score on this page is national, because every index we use measures nations. Most visitors to Tanzania spend part of their trip — often most of it — in a place where some of those national numbers do not straightforwardly apply.
Zanzibar is semi-autonomous within the United Republic of Tanzania. It has its own president, its own House of Representatives, its own health ministry and, most concretely for this page, its own penal code, which the mainland Penal Code does not reach. Zanzibar revised that code in 2004, criminalising same-sex acts between men with up to 25 years' imprisonment and separately adding a provision on "acts of lesbianism" carrying up to five years and a fine.* Mainland law does not criminalise sex between women in the same way. So the single LGBTQ+ figure at the top of this page sits on top of a genuine legal split — and the stricter side of it is the side with the beach hotels.
The same separation runs through other things. When the government banned lubricant distribution and HIV outreach in 2016 and 2017, the directives came from the mainland health ministry; Zanzibar's health administration is its own.* Zanzibar is also a majority-Muslim society with dress and alcohol norms noticeably more conservative than Arusha or the safari circuit, and its own recent elections have been disputed.
We flag this rather than score it. None of our five indices publishes a Zanzibar figure, and inventing one would be exactly the kind of number this site refuses to put on a page. But a visitor who reads "Tanzania" and lands in Zanzibar is in a place with different criminal law, and that is worth knowing before you go rather than after.
How to travel Tanzania in a way that supports your values
Tanzania still has organisations working legally and in the open — a legal-aid centre three decades old, a journalist-owned newsroom, a feminist network in sixty districts — which is more than several of the low-scoring countries on this site can say, and which is exactly what makes them worth supporting from outside. Tourism is one of the country's largest earners of foreign currency, so where your money lands is a real question rather than a rhetorical one.
↑ Back to the scoresTravelling with LGBTQ+ rights in mind
LGBT Voice Tanzania has operated from Dar es Salaam since 2009 and is the only Tanzanian LGBT organisation Equaldex lists. Its direct-aid service is the practical part: people refused healthcare, evicted, dismissed, expelled from school, or dealing with the police. In a country that shut the drop-in centres, an organisation that still answers is the thing worth funding.
On most amber pages we point to community-run accommodation directories. We have deliberately left that off here. Same-sex conduct carries up to life imprisonment on the mainland and up to 25 years on Zanzibar, and a public label is not a protection in that environment — it is a marker. The useful advice is the opposite of a badge: choose accommodation on how discreet and how locally owned it is, and don't ask a Tanzanian host to be publicly identified with the question.
Human Rights Watch's 112-page investigation into the crackdown is the single best account of what the 2016–17 directives did to people's access to healthcare. It is also the clearest illustration of a point this site keeps running into: the damage was done less by the criminal law, which is decades old, than by an administrative decision about who gets HIV services.
Travelling with press freedom and rule of law in mind
The Chanzo is journalist-owned, founded in 2020, publishes in English and Kiswahili, and has kept reporting through the crackdown — including on the suspension of other outlets. Its about page sets out who runs it. Reading it before you travel gives you a picture the safari brochure and the international wires both miss.
The Legal and Human Rights Centre has provided legal aid in Tanzania since 1995 — offices in Dar es Salaam, Arusha and Dodoma, 533 trained paralegals, and 36,778 legal-aid beneficiaries in 2024 alone. It publishes the annual Tanzania Human Rights Report that much of the international reporting rests on, and it takes donations directly.
RSF's Tanzania profile carries the current ranking and the detention figures. Read it alongside the newsroom rather than instead of it: a 22-place fall tells you the direction, and only the case-by-case reporting tells you what it looks like on the ground.
Travelling with women's rights in mind
TGNP Mtandao has been building a Tanzanian feminist movement since 1993 and works at community level across 20 regions and 62 districts — which is the part of the country the national statistics are least good at describing.
The child-marriage provisions of the 1971 Marriage Act have been unconstitutional since 2016 and are still on the statute book. Equality Now tracks the campaign to have parliament finish the job. It is a rare case where the specific ask is public, narrow and easy to understand.
Put your money into local hands
Cloves and tanzanite are both on the US Department of Labor's list of Tanzanian goods produced with child labour, and they are both sold to visitors as the souvenir of the trip. Buy tanzanite from a licensed dealer who will name the mine and give you a certificate, buy spices from a cooperative or farm shop that will tell you whose farm it is, and treat "don't worry about that" as an answer. The point is not that you can audit a supply chain at a market stall. It is that nobody currently gets asked.
Safari and Kilimanjaro trekking are run through long chains of intermediaries, and a large share of what a European pays never reaches the country. Booking with a Tanzanian-registered operator rather than an overseas reseller, and paying guides, cooks and porters directly, moves a materially larger share of the same money to the people in front of you.
This is the clearest labour-rights choice most visitors to Tanzania will actually face. Porter welfare on Kilimanjaro — load limits, pay, shelter, food — depends almost entirely on which operator you booked, and the cheapest quote is cheap for a reason. Ask an operator directly what it pays porters, what weight it limits loads to and whether it is a member of a porter-welfare programme, before you book rather than at the trailhead.
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☕ Buy me a double espressoSources & further reading
What the five scores come from
Equaldex Equality Index LGBTQ+ rights → 1.5 Equaldex Equality Index 15/100 (÷10): a Legal Index of 16 and a Public Opinion Index of 14, rank 157. The same source is used for every country on the site, so this score is comparable with your home country's. Read on 31 August 2026, a week after the quarterly freeze, because Tanzania was added between freezes.
EIU Democracy Index 2024 Democracy & press freedom → 5.2 5.20, 86th of 167, "hybrid regime"; electoral process 4.42, civil liberties 4.71. This edition closed before the October 2025 election; see the note above the scores and the RSF entry below for the current picture.
Georgetown WPS Index 2025 + World Bank WBL 2026 Women’s rights → 6.5 50/50 average of lived conditions (WPS 0.624, 121st of 177 → 6.2) and legal frameworks (WBL Legal Frameworks 66.85 → 6.7). Within the WBL half: Pay 100 and Marriage 100 against Safety 12.5, Childcare 41.75, Entrepreneurship 50 and Assets 50.
WJP Rule of Law Index 2025 Rule of law → 4.6 0.46, 98th of 143, down 1.2% and one rank place. Direct reading, no proxy. Fundamental rights and open government are the weakest of the eight factors.
US ILAB, Findings on the Worst Forms of Child Labor 2024 Prevention of child labour → ~6.0 "Moderate Advancement", the second of four tiers, one of 63 countries in that band. ILAB publishes a tier, not a score, so the 6.0 is approximated from the tier and marked with a tilde.
Background — not part of any score
RSF World Press Freedom Index 2026 Press freedom — 117th of 180, down 22 places; RSF's Africa analysis describes Tanzania as "once a leader of press freedom in the region". This is the source behind the downward trend arrow on the democracy dimension.
US ILAB, List of Goods Produced by Child Labor or Forced Labor 2024 eleven Tanzanian goods listed: cattle, cloves, coffee, gold, Nile perch, rice, sisal, stones, tanzanite, tea and tobacco. Cattle, rice and stones were added in the 2024 edition.
Human Rights Watch, March 2026 Post-election crackdown — security forces killed and injured people who were not participating in demonstrations; HRW believes hundreds may have been killed nationwide
Human Rights Watch, 2020 — "If We Don't Get Services, We Will Die" LGBTQ+ health access — the 2016–17 directives banning lubricant distribution and HIV outreach, and the closure of drop-in centres; also the source distinguishing mainland from Zanzibar health administration
Human Dignity Trust — Tanzania country profile Zanzibar — the separate Zanzibar penal code and its 2004 revision, which the mainland Penal Code does not reach
The Chanzo, August 2026 Opposition and the courts — day-by-day timeline of the Lissu treason trial to the "case to answer" ruling of 21 August 2026
Human Rights Watch, October 2019 Child marriage — the Court of Appeal upholding the 2016 High Court ruling that sections 13 and 17 of the Law of Marriage Act are unconstitutional; the Act has still not been amended
Center for Reproductive Rights — World's Abortion Laws Reproductive rights — not part of the women's-rights score above, shown here as a separate sourced line
The Citizen — Zanzibar tourism arrivals 2025 Tourism — 917,167 international arrivals to Zanzibar in 2025, a record, up from 736,755 in 2024
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