AfricaPress-Tanzania: NCBA Bank Tanzania Limited (NCBA) marked another historic milestone as it launched a new branch in Zanzibar yesterday.
The launch of the new branch comes after the advent of NCBA Bank T, which is a voluntary merger between NIC Bank (T) Limited and CBA Bank (T) Limited, began operations on July this year.
Zanzibar Minister for Finance and Planning Mohamed Ramia Abdiwawa commended NCBA Bank for their effort towards the new merger.
He called upon NCBA Bank to expand services due to its financial strength in banking in line with Zanzibar’s Development Vision of 2050.
“Over the past 20 years, our economy has been growing at the annual rate of over 4 per cent. This has been achieved along with developing healthy, diversified, resilient and competitive agriculture, industry, tourism, services and other productive sectors of the economy.”
“We have also put stringent systems and policies in place to cope with challenges of the changing market and technological conditions in the world economy,” he said.
He added that the presence of NCBA Bank in Zanzibar was timely, implying that Zanzibar economy had received a new player that could inject more vigour to transform the economy into a blue economy as stipulated in the new Zanzibar Vision 2020/50.
The government is working steadfastly to bring tourism sector back on track after being hit hard by the coronavirus pandemic.
“We, therefore, call on NCBA Bank as strong stakeholders to help restore the economic balance,” he added.
NCBA Managing Director and CEO Margaret Karume thanked the minister for stressing how important it was for NCBA Bank to support new and resilient economic reforms. “We affirm our commitment to supporting the government’s effort to strengthen the economy and consolidate our middle-income aspirations,” she said.
“We remain steadfast in our ambitions to support critical sectors for economic development in Zanzibar,” she added.
