Assessing Cargo-Theft Prevention Measures and Their Influence on Trade Performance at Dar es Salaam Port, Tanzania

This study assesses whether cargo-theft-prevention practices strengthen trade performance at Dar es Salaam Port. Adopting a convergent mixed-methods design, we surveyed 80 security officers, customs staff and terminal operators (20 Likert items, α =.83–.89) and conducted semi-structured interviews with 11 senior stakeholders. Quantitatively, descriptive means for CCTV coverage (M = 3.86) and anti-theft protocols (M = 3.58) exceeded the midpoint, and cargo-theft-prevention efficacy correlated strongly with a composite Trade Performance Index (TPI) (r = .62, p < .01). Multiple regression confirmed prevention as a positive predictor of trade performance (β = 0.28, p < .001), explaining 38 % of TPI variance. Qualitative thematic analysis revealed four vulnerabilities technology gaps, corruption and accountability deficits, siloed coordination and skills shortfalls that dilute deterrence during CCTV downtimes or fragmented inter-agency responses. Integrating the strands shows that security hardware boosts throughput only when reliability and governance are assured. The findings advance deterrence and supply-chain-resilience theory in an East-African context and recommend redundant surveillance grids, unified command dashboards, and ethics-plus-analytics training to convert security spending into sustained trade gains.