By Elizabeth Shumbusho
Agriculture feeds Tanzania. And Tanzania’s youth — statistically — feed agriculture. Young people aged 15 to 35 make up 62.4 percent of Tanzania’s active workforce. They are already in the fields, in the markets, in the value chains. The question is not whether youth participate in agriculture. It is whether the system is set up to reward and retain them.
The honest answer, according to a new PFADC policy brief, is not yet.
Despite their numbers, young people face layered exclusions. Limited access to productive land, inadequate financing options, the effects of climate change, and a bureaucratic environment not designed with youth agripreneurs in mind all conspire to keep young farmers at the margins of the formal economy. Many young people are excluded from grants, credit, and land leasing schemes, mostly because they operate individually rather than within organised groups or cooperatives — the very models typically required to access such programmes.
There is irony in this: Tanzania needs its youth to lead agricultural transformation, but the pathways into that leadership remain narrow.
The brief does not dwell on problems without pointing to solutions. Tanzania has made meaningful recent commitments — the Building a Better Tomorrow Youth Initiative for Agriculture (BBT-YIA) targets 2,000 profitable agribusinesses across 12,000 villages; Agenda 10/30 sets a youth employment target of one million in agriculture by 2030; and agriculture has been reintroduced as a subject in secondary schools under the new competence-based curriculum. These are genuine foundations.
Global experience shows what becomes possible when foundations are built upon. In India, the Agri-Clinics and Agri-Business Centers scheme had, by 2022, trained 82,673 candidates and supported the establishment of 35,716 agriventures. In Uganda, a youth-led digital advisory hub in Luwero district served around 500 farmers, with tomato farmers reporting yield increases of almost 20 percent using precision tools. Tanzania itself has a success story worth scaling: since 2022, more than 70 young graduates have completed a structured 12-month hands-on internship through the World Vegetable Center’s partnership with TAESA, with several establishing registered youth-led agribusiness enterprises. More than 1,060 youth and women have received TOSCI-certified training in vegetable seedling production.
The brief’s policy recommendations span fiscal incentives, institutional reform, and culture change. It calls for corporate tax reductions for firms that hire or train youth, VAT exemptions for inputs and digital platforms used in youth employment, simplified enterprise registration, and a minimum one-year corporate tax grace period for youth start-ups. Critically, it calls for a national coordination platform that brings government, the private sector, NGOs, youth networks, and financial institutions together around a common agenda — ending the duplication and fragmentation that currently dilutes impact.
And it makes a case that goes beyond policy mechanics: a communication strategy is needed to rebrand agriculture as an opportunity for sustainable livelihood — making it more appealing, more visible, and more aspirational for a generation that currently sees too few role models thriving in the sector.
The talent is there. The ambition is there. What is needed is the architecture to match.
Read the full Policy Brief No. 7, 2025 — “Strategies to Promote and Support Youth Engagement in Agriculture” — attached below.