In Mtwara, where the Indian Ocean meets some of Africa’s richest agricultural potential, leaders from Lindi, Ruvuma, and Mtwara delivered a unified message: the era of cashew dependency is over. Soybeans, avocados, sesame, and value-added processing are the future — and 150,000 smallholder farmers are the vehicle.
For decades, the story of southern coastal Tanzania has been written in one crop: cashew.
Mtwara, Lindi, and Ruvuma — three regions stretching from the Indian Ocean shoreline to the highlands bordering Mozambique and Malawi — have long been defined by their cashew dominance. And for good reason: Tanzania is one of the world’s largest cashew producers, and these three regions are its heartland. But cashew dependency has also meant vulnerability — to global price swings, to processing bottlenecks that see raw nuts exported for a fraction of their processed value, and to the economic fragility that comes when an entire regional economy rises and falls with a single commodity.
On February 20, 2026, in the coastal city of Mtwara, that story began to change.
The Mtwara Corridor consultation — the final regional session of the first phase of the AGCOT nationwide sensitisation tour — brought together Regional Commissioners, District Commissioners, Regional and District Administrative Secretaries, Council Executive Directors, technical experts, private sector representatives, and farmer organisations from Lindi, Ruvuma, and Mtwara. Alongside them: officials from the Ministry of Agriculture, the Ministry of Livestock and Fisheries, the Agriculture Transformation Office (ATO), the AGCOT Centre, AGRA, and technical consultants from PEMANDU Associates.
What emerged was not a continuation of the old cashew narrative. It was the declaration of a new one.
RC RAJAB OPENS THE CORRIDOR: A REGION RICH BEYOND CASHEW February 20, 2026 — Mtwara
Lindi Regional Commissioner Hon. Zainab Rajab opened the Mtwara Corridor consultation with remarks that immediately reframed the conversation — moving from a single-commodity lens to a panoramic view of the corridor’s agricultural wealth.
“Mikoa hii ina fursa kubwa za kimkakati katika utekelezaji wa shoroba za kilimo kutokana na rasilimali zilizopo, mazao ya kipaumbele ambayo ni korosho, ufuta, mbaazi pamoja na choroko yanayozalishwa zaidi katika Mikoa ya Lindi na Mtwara. Vile vile, mazao ya mahindi, maharage, kahawa, soya na tumbaku yanazalishwa zaidi katika Mkoa wa Ruvuma.”
Translation: “These regions have major strategic opportunities for implementing agricultural value chains due to the existing resources and priority crops — cashew nuts, sesame, pigeon peas, and green gram produced predominantly in Lindi and Mtwara. Likewise, maize, beans, coffee, soybeans, and tobacco are predominantly produced in Ruvuma.”
— Hon. Zainab Rajab, Regional Commissioner, Lindi
The significance of this framing cannot be overstated. In a single statement, RC Rajab listed nine priority commodities across three regions — dismantling the perception that the Mtwara Corridor is a one-crop zone and establishing the diversification thesis that would define the entire consultation.
Lindi and Mtwara bring cashew, sesame, pigeon peas, and green gram — crops with strong domestic demand and growing international markets. Ruvuma brings an entirely different agricultural profile: maize, beans, coffee, soybeans, and tobacco — highland crops that thrive in the region’s cooler, wetter climate and connect to different value chains, different markets, and different processing opportunities.
Together, these three regions represent one of the most agriculturally diverse corridors in the entire AGCOT framework. The Mtwara consultation was designed to ensure that diversity is no longer an accident of geography but a deliberate strategy for economic transformation.
THE TRIPLE RESOURCE BASE: LAND, SEA, AND FRESHWATER
RC Rajab’s opening remarks went beyond crops. She emphasised that the Mtwara Corridor’s strategic advantage extends across three resource domains that no other AGCOT corridor combines in the same configuration:
Land: The corridor encompasses vast tracts of arable land — much of it underutilised — spanning the coastal lowlands of Lindi and Mtwara and the fertile highlands of Ruvuma. Soil conditions and rainfall patterns support a remarkably wide range of crops, from tropical cashew and sesame at the coast to temperate-zone soybeans and potatoes in the interior.
Marine resources: Lindi and Mtwara’s Indian Ocean coastline provides access to marine fisheries that represent a significant but underdeveloped component of the corridor’s economic potential. The fisheries sector — spanning artisanal fishing communities and emerging aquaculture operations — was identified at the consultation as a critical area for value addition and livelihood improvement.
Freshwater resources: Inland water bodies across the three regions support freshwater fisheries and irrigation potential that the corridor strategy aims to unlock through targeted infrastructure investment and water management systems.
This triple resource base — land, sea, and freshwater — gives the Mtwara Corridor a distinctive strategic position within the AGCOT national framework. It is not just an agricultural corridor. It is an integrated food systems corridor, spanning crops, livestock, marine fisheries, and freshwater aquaculture.
THE SOYBEAN REVOLUTION: 150,000 FARMERS, 250,000 METRIC TONS
If the Central Corridor’s signature initiative is sunflower import substitution, the Mtwara Corridor’s is the Tanzania Sustainable Soybean Initiative (TSSI).
Managed directly by the AGCOT Centre, TSSI represents one of the most ambitious commodity-specific programmes in the entire national corridor framework. The targets are transformative:
Over 150,000 smallholder farmers engaged in structured soybean production — connected to markets through contract farming models, supported by improved seed varieties and agronomic extension, and integrated into processing value chains that capture maximum value within Tanzania.
250,000 metric tons of soybeans produced annually — a volume that would fundamentally alter Tanzania’s position in the regional and continental soybean market and provide critical feedstock for the country’s livestock and poultry industries, which currently rely heavily on imported soy-based animal feed.
The TSSI is not a pilot programme. It is an industrial-scale agricultural transformation initiative that aims to create an entirely new commodity value chain in southern Tanzania — one that generates farmer income, substitutes imports, feeds the livestock sector, and creates processing employment across the corridor.
Ruvuma Region, with its highland soils and reliable rainfall, is the epicentre of the soybean push. But the initiative’s reach extends across the corridor, linking Ruvuma’s production base to processing and logistics infrastructure in Mtwara and Lindi — and ultimately to domestic and export markets through the Mtwara port.
RUVUMA: WHERE DIVERSIFICATION IS ALREADY VISIBLE
While the TSSI represents the corridor’s future, Ruvuma is already demonstrating that diversification works.
The consultation highlighted two developments that signal the region’s trajectory:
Avocados — 900 hectares and growing: Ruvuma has emerged as an unexpected avocado frontier, with 900 hectares already under cultivation. In a global market where demand for avocados continues to outpace supply — driven by consumption growth in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East — Ruvuma’s highland climate and fertile soils position it as a potential production zone for export-grade fruit. The corridor strategy aims to scale this acreage, establish nurseries for improved varieties, and build the post-harvest infrastructure needed to meet international quality standards.
Potatoes outperforming traditional zones: Perhaps the most striking signal of Ruvuma’s agricultural dynamism is the emergence of potato farming that is outperforming production in Tanzania’s traditional potato-growing regions. This development — driven by favourable agro-ecological conditions and entrepreneurial farmers — demonstrates the corridor’s capacity for crop innovation and suggests that Ruvuma’s agricultural potential has been systematically underestimated.
These are not anecdotes. They are evidence that when farmers have access to markets, information, and basic infrastructure, diversification happens organically. The corridor strategy’s role is to accelerate and structure what is already emerging — turning individual farmer initiatives into coordinated commodity value chains at scale.
CASHEW AND SESAME: CAPTURING VALUE WITHIN TANZANIA
Diversification does not mean abandoning cashew. It means processing it.
Tanzania exports the vast majority of its raw cashew nuts for processing overseas — primarily to India and Vietnam — where they are shelled, graded, and packaged before being sold to end consumers at multiples of the raw commodity price. The value captured within Tanzania represents a fraction of the cashew’s total economic potential.
The Mtwara Corridor strategy prioritises scaling domestic cashew processing capacity — investing in shelling factories, grading facilities, and packaging infrastructure that allow Tanzanian processors to capture the value addition that currently flows offshore. Every percentage point of processing shifted onshore translates directly into employment, tax revenue, and farmer income within the corridor.
The same logic applies to sesame. Lindi and Mtwara are major sesame producers, but the crop is overwhelmingly exported in raw form. The corridor strategy targets the development of sesame processing — oil extraction, tahini production, confectionery-grade preparation — that transforms a low-value bulk export into a portfolio of high-value processed products.
The principle is consistent across both commodities: the Mtwara Corridor’s path to prosperity runs not through producing more raw material, but through processing what it already grows.
THE GOVERNMENT’S COORDINATED APPROACH: TECHNOLOGY, EXTENSION, AND INCLUSION
RC Rajab detailed the multi-ministerial coordination architecture driving the Mtwara Corridor’s implementation — an architecture that reflects the lessons learned from SAGCOT and the operational maturity of the AGCOT framework.
“Serikali kupitia Wizara za Kilimo, Mifugo na Uvuvi kwa kushirikiana na Ofisi ya Mageuzi ya Kilimo (ATO) na Shoroba za Kilimo Tanzania (AGCOT) inaendelea kuratibu utekelezaji wa miradi ya kimkakati nchini kwa kuzingatia matumizi ya teknolojia za kisasa, huduma za Ugani, pembejeo za kilimo, ushiriki wa vijana na wanawake pamoja na kuzingatia mabadiliko ya tabianchi.”
Translation: “The Government, through the Ministries of Agriculture, Livestock, and Fisheries, in collaboration with the Agriculture Transformation Office (ATO) and the Agricultural Growth Corridors of Tanzania (AGCOT), is coordinating the implementation of strategic projects across the country — incorporating modern technologies, extension services, agricultural inputs, youth and women’s participation, and climate change adaptation.”
— Hon. Zainab Rajab, Regional Commissioner, Lindi
Six elements define this coordinated approach for the Mtwara Corridor:
Modern technologies: Precision agriculture tools, digital information systems for market access and weather forecasting, mechanisation appropriate to smallholder scale, and post-harvest technology that reduces the catastrophic losses currently eroding farmer income across the corridor.
Extension services (Ugani): The corridor strategy recognises that technology without knowledge transfer is useless. A strengthened extension service network — reaching into the most remote villages of Lindi, Mtwara, and Ruvuma — is central to translating corridor investments into on-farm productivity gains.
Agricultural inputs (Pembejeo): Access to improved seeds, fertilisers, and crop protection products at affordable prices and at the right time in the planting calendar. The corridor’s contract farming models are designed to solve the perennial input access problem by embedding input supply within structured off-take agreements.
Youth participation: The “Building a Better Tomorrow” (BBT) initiative targets the addition of 10,000 to 50,000 young agri-entrepreneurs across the national corridor framework. For the Mtwara Corridor, where youth unemployment and rural-urban migration drain the region’s productive capacity, this is not a social programme — it is an economic imperative.
Women’s participation: Women constitute the majority of the agricultural labour force across Lindi, Mtwara, and Ruvuma. The corridor strategy explicitly targets women’s inclusion in value chain governance, access to finance, and leadership within farmer organisations and cooperative structures.
Climate change adaptation: The Mtwara Corridor faces specific climate risks — coastal erosion and saltwater intrusion in Lindi and Mtwara, shifting rainfall patterns in Ruvuma — that demand integrated adaptation strategies embedded within every commodity compact and investment blueprint.
THE AMP 2050 ARCHITECTURE: CORRIDORS AS NATIONAL STRATEGY
RC Rajab connected the Mtwara Corridor directly to the highest level of national economic planning:
“Utekelezaji huo ni nyenzo ya kimkakati katika utekelezaji wa Agriculture Master Plan (AMP 2050) — mpango huo umebuniwa ili kuunganisha maeneo yenye uzalishaji mkubwa na miundombinu muhimu ya barabara, reli, bandari, masoko, na viwanda pamoja na huduma za kifedha.”
Translation: “This implementation is a strategic instrument for delivering the Agriculture Master Plan (AMP 2050) — a plan designed to connect high-production areas with critical infrastructure: roads, railways, ports, markets, factories, and financial services.”
— Hon. Zainab Rajab, Regional Commissioner, Lindi
For the Mtwara Corridor, the infrastructure dimension is particularly significant. The Mtwara port — Tanzania’s southern deep-water facility — represents a strategic asset that, if fully developed, could transform the corridor’s export logistics. The Mtwara Development Corridor road and rail links connect the coast to the agricultural hinterland of Ruvuma. And the financial services architecture — anchored by the Tanzania Agricultural Development Bank (TADB) with its USD 203 million cumulative lending portfolio and the newly launched Cooperative Bank of Tanzania (CBT) with TZS 55 billion in starting capital — provides the financing infrastructure that makes corridor investments bankable.
THE KNOWLEDGE IMPERATIVE: TRANSLATING POLICY INTO RESULTS
RC Rajab closed her remarks with a directive that spoke directly to the technical experts and government officials in the room — the men and women who will be responsible for translating national corridor strategy into results on the ground.
“Mkutano huo utawawezesha wataalam kuelewa kwa kina dhana ya shoroba za kilimo, mifugo na uvuvi pamoja na wajibu wao katika utekelezaji wake na namna ya kuzitafsiri Sera na Mipango ya Kitaifa kuwa ni miradi yenye matokeo chanya kwa wananchi na Taifa kwa ujumla.”
Translation: “This meeting will enable technical experts to deeply understand the concept of agricultural growth corridors and their roles in implementation — and how to translate national policies and plans into projects that deliver positive results for citizens and the nation as a whole.”
— Hon. Zainab Rajab, Regional Commissioner, Lindi
This is the critical link in the entire AGCOT chain. National strategies do not transform agriculture. District-level implementation transforms agriculture. The Mtwara consultation was explicitly designed to bridge that gap — to ensure that every regional technical expert, every district agricultural officer, every council director in Lindi, Mtwara, and Ruvuma understands the corridor concept, understands their specific role within it, and understands how to convert national policy frameworks into projects with measurable, positive outcomes.
THE ATO FRAMEWORK: PRODUCTION TO MARKET IN A SINGLE SYSTEM
ATO Director Elizabeth Missokia’s briefing at the Mtwara consultation — consistent with her presentations across all four consultation venues — provided the technical architecture connecting every element of the corridor into a single transformation system.
“Agricultural corridors are strategic zones that integrate production, processing, value addition, storage, transportation, and markets. Their objective is to accelerate the transformation of productive agriculture and support the country’s transition to an upper-middle-income economy by 2050.”
— Elizabeth Missokia, Director, Agriculture Transformation Office (ATO)
For the Mtwara Corridor, this integration framework takes on particular urgency. The corridor’s commodities — cashew, sesame, soybeans, avocados, pigeon peas, green gram, maize, beans, coffee, tobacco — span an extraordinarily wide range of value chains, each with distinct processing requirements, market dynamics, and infrastructure needs. The ATO framework provides the organising logic that prevents this diversity from becoming fragmentation — ensuring that corridor investments in roads, processing facilities, storage, and market access serve multiple commodity value chains simultaneously.
THE SAGCOT FOUNDATION: FROM SOUTHERN SUCCESS TO SOUTHERN COAST EXPANSION
The Mtwara Corridor carries a particular resonance within the SAGCOT-to-AGCOT transition story.
SAGCOT — the Southern Agricultural Growth Corridor of Tanzania — was born at the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2010 and focused its transformative energy on the southern highlands: Iringa, Mbeya, Rukwa, and the Kilombero Valley. Between 2010 and 2024, it mobilised USD 6.34 billion in investment, empowered over one million smallholder farmers, put 1.3 million hectares under climate-smart agriculture, created 253,000 jobs, and grew to account for 65 percent of Tanzania’s national food production.
The Mtwara Corridor’s three regions — sitting adjacent to the SAGCOT zone along Tanzania’s southern flank — have observed that transformation from close proximity without being direct beneficiaries. The February 20 consultation represented the moment when the proven model finally reached the southern coast.
As AGCOT Centre CEO Geoffrey Kirenga framed the national picture:
“These consultations are not simply policy announcements — they represent the beginning of a generational shift. By unifying the Northern, Central, and Mtwara corridors under a single national framework coordinated by the ATO, Tanzania is moving from fragmented interventions to an integrated transformation strategy. The goal is clear: build a $100 billion agricultural economy that positions Tanzania as Africa’s breadbasket.”
— Geoffrey Kirenga, CEO, AGCOT Centre
For Lindi, Mtwara, and Ruvuma, that generational shift is no longer a promise observed from afar. It is a programme with their names on it.
THE FINANCIAL ARCHITECTURE: CAPITAL FOR THE COAST
The Mtwara consultation presented the blended finance framework that will underpin corridor investments:
Tanzania Agricultural Development Bank (TADB): Over USD 203 million in cumulative loans disbursed, representing a 58 percent portfolio increase. TADB’s financing is backed by a USD 66 million sovereign loan from the African Development Bank and a USD 81 million credit line from the French Development Agency (AFD). Critically for the Mtwara Corridor, TADB targets 20 percent of its lending for women and youth — the demographic groups that constitute the backbone of the corridor’s agricultural workforce.
Cooperative Bank of Tanzania (CBT): Launched on April 28, 2025, by President Samia Suluhu Hassan with TZS 55 billion in starting capital and 51 percent ownership by cooperative societies. CBT provides financial services to over 6,500 registered cooperatives with combined assets exceeding TZS 5.1 trillion. For the Mtwara Corridor — where cooperative structures are deeply embedded in the cashew and sesame sectors — CBT represents a transformative financing channel capable of reaching smallholders in the most remote clusters.
The combination of TADB’s development lending and CBT’s cooperative finance creates a financing architecture specifically designed to reach the farmers, processors, and agribusinesses that will drive the Mtwara Corridor’s transformation.
WHAT COMES NEXT: THE MTWARA CORRIDOR’S IMPLEMENTATION RUNWAY
The Mtwara consultation was the final regional session of the first phase of the nationwide sensitisation tour. With its completion, 16 of the 17 AGCOT regions have been formally activated — with only Kigoma remaining, confirmed for completion before March 10, 2026.
For the Mtwara Corridor, the immediate action plan mirrors the national framework with corridor-specific priorities:
Regional Commissioners and Administrative Secretaries across Lindi, Mtwara, and Ruvuma have been tasked with identifying regional technical experts to support the development of corridor implementation plans at regional and district levels.
The Tanzania Sustainable Soybean Initiative (TSSI) — the corridor’s signature commodity programme — moves into operational phase, with farmer registration, seed distribution networks, and off-take agreements to be structured in coordination with the AGCOT Centre.
Corridor Blueprints and Greenprints — developed by PEMANDU Associates in coordination with ATO, AGRA, and the AGCOT Centre — are on track for completion by March 30, 2026. These documents will provide the detailed implementation roadmaps and environmental sustainability frameworks specific to the Mtwara Corridor’s agro-ecological and economic realities.
The private sector mobilisation campaign, led by the AGCOT Centre, launches in the second week of March 2026 — with particular emphasis on attracting processing investment for cashew, sesame, and soybean value chains within the corridor.
A presentation to development partners is scheduled for March 15, 2026, led by the Ministry of Agriculture.
The AGCOT Centre will deploy agile teams across the Mtwara Corridor to engage local stakeholders, mobilise investment, and ensure transformation benefits reach all Tanzanians — with a specific focus on women- and youth-led agribusinesses.
THE MTWARA CORRIDOR’S PROMISE: FROM PERIPHERY TO POWERHOUSE
For too long, the story of Lindi, Mtwara, and Ruvuma has been one of unrealised potential. Rich soils, a strategic coastline, a deep-water port, a diverse crop portfolio, a hardworking farming population — and yet, persistently among the regions with the lowest per capita incomes in Tanzania.
The AGCOT framework is designed to break that cycle.
The Mtwara Corridor will not succeed by doing more of the same. It will succeed by doing what has never been done at this scale in southern coastal Tanzania: connecting 150,000 soybean farmers to structured markets, processing cashew and sesame onshore instead of exporting raw, scaling avocado production for global markets, building cold chains and aggregation systems that eliminate post-harvest waste, and financing it all through a blended architecture that reaches the smallest cooperative in the most remote village.
It is where Tanzania’s Indian Ocean coastline meets the agricultural hinterland. Where marine fisheries and highland soybeans belong to the same economic strategy. Where cashew is no longer a constraint but a platform for diversification. And where, on February 20, 2026, the leaders of three regions stood together and declared that the old story is over.
“With the sub-national architecture now falling into place and corridor Blueprints nearing completion, AGCOT is set to deploy agile teams across these newly activated corridors. Tanzania is building the institutional foundations for a transformation that will quintuple our agricultural GDP, reshape our entire agricultural sector — crops, livestock, and fisheries — and ensure the benefits reach every Tanzanian, especially women and youth. Every stakeholder identified in this plan is called upon to play their part.”
— Geoffrey Kirenga, CEO, AGCOT Centre
The Mtwara Agricultural Growth Corridor is open.
The Mtwara Corridor consultation was conducted under the coordination of the Agriculture Transformation Office (ATO), in partnership with PO-RALG, the Ministry of Agriculture, the Ministry of Livestock and Fisheries, the AGCOT Centre, AGRA, and PEMANDU Associates.