About PRIME-IS Tanzania

A national register for schools that teach international curricula in Tanzania

A unified national education intelligence platform integrating international school systems with Tanzania's regulatory framework.

One platform, formally part of the national education framework

International schools in Tanzania teach curricula set elsewhere — Cambridge, IB, American, and others — while operating inside Tanzanian law. Both facts have to be true at once: the teaching is international, the accountability is national.

PRIME-IS Tanzania System (PITS) is the system that holds that relationship. It registers the school, records the students and teachers inside it, tracks the documents that authorise it to operate, and provides the workflow through which a foreign qualification is compared with Tanzanian standards.

It is operated by the National Examinations Council of Tanzania (NECTA) together with the Tanzania International Schools Association (TISA), within the national education framework alongside the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology and PO-RALG — each institution acting on the part of the record it is responsible for.

One

Verified profile per registered school

One

Student identity across schools and years

One

Route for certificate equivalence review

NECTA holds the record, TISA represents the schools

Two institutions carry PRIME-IS between them. Keeping both in the same system is deliberate: a register written only by the regulator drifts from what schools can actually maintain, and one written only by schools has no standing.

Examinations and standards authority

NECTA

The National Examinations Council of Tanzania

NECTA hosts the PRIME-IS secretariat. It approves school registrations, issues and reconciles candidate identifiers, and carries out certificate equivalence review against national standards.

Approving school registration and status changes
Candidate identifiers and examination records
Certificate equivalence decisions
Custody of the national record

Visit NECTA

Membership body for international schools

TISA

Tanzania International Schools Association

TISA represents international schools operating in Tanzania. It is the schools' collective voice in how PRIME-IS is adopted — coordinating onboarding, gathering practical feedback from member schools, and keeping requirements workable in daily school administration.

Representing member schools in platform decisions
Coordinating onboarding across member schools
Channelling school feedback on requirements
Sharing administrative practice between schools

Which one do I contact?

Registration, approval, account and equivalence matters go to the NECTA secretariat. Questions about membership, sector representation or shared practice between international schools go to TISA. Contact details are here.

How the platform is designed to behave

Recorded once, at source

The school that admits a student is the school that records the admission. Regulators read the same record rather than asking for it again in another format.

The record belongs to the student

A student identity persists across schools, curricula and academic years, so a transfer does not restart a child's documented history.

Evidence stays attached

Certificates, permits, ownership documents and approvals are stored with the record they justify, with a visible history of who changed what.

Measured against national standards

International curricula are respected in their own terms and then mapped to Tanzanian levels, so recognition decisions are consistent and explainable.

Delivered in phases, not all at once

Some parts of the platform are in daily use, others are still being extended. The sequence below is the order of work rather than a promise of dates.

Phase 1 — Registration and records

School registration and approval, student enrolment, academic records, staff files and document storage. This is the operating base of the platform.

Phase 2 — Verification and oversight

Transfer validation, certificate equivalence, licence and permit monitoring, compliance dashboards and national analytics for planning.

Phase 3 — External exchange

Structured exchange with international examination bodies and partner systems, so results and qualifications can be confirmed at source.

Questions about scope, access or responsibilities?

Institutions, regulators and partners can reach the secretariat directly for clarification on how PRIME-IS applies to them.