The investment and business environment for gold exploration and mining in Tanzania.

Tanzania is the third largest gold producer in Africa after South Africa and Ghana. Although large-scale foreign investment is a relatively recent phenomenon, gold exploration and mining have a long history in the country. In the 1890s German prospectors discovered gold in the Lake Victoria area. Significant gold mining began in Tanganyika after the First World War (1914-18), when the British protectorate replaced Deutsch-Ostafrika (1919). Large-scale commercial mining took off in the 1930s only to die out by 1950. Despite low gold prices, small-scale and alluvial mining survived after large-scale mining virtually disappeared, and became an important source of official exports and revenue during the early 1990s. Multinational mining companies came to dominate gold and other mineral production during the late 1990s, in part at the expense of small-scale miners.