Dodoma, 27 August 2026 — The Tanzania Dairy Board (TDB) hosted leaders of the Tanzania Society of Animal Production (TSAP) at the Board’s headquarters in Dodoma, in a meeting aimed at strengthening cooperation and exchanging expertise to advance the country’s dairy industry.

The meeting brought together TSAP National Chairman Dr. Zabron Nziku and TDB Registrar Prof. George Msalya, along with members of their respective teams, to discuss a range of issues concerning the development of the dairy industry and the livestock sector more broadly.

Speaking at the meeting, Dr. Nziku underscored the importance of continuing to strengthen cooperation between TSAP and TDB, particularly in the areas of technical expertise, research, innovation and knowledge exchange — collaboration he said would help raise productivity and competitiveness in Tanzania’s dairy industry.

For his part, Prof. Msalya said TDB remains ready to continue working with TSAP and other livestock-sector stakeholders to identify and implement strategies that will drive sustainable growth in the dairy industry. He noted that technical collaboration is essential to addressing the challenges facing the industry and to seizing existing opportunities to increase milk production, quality and availability nationwide.

The meeting laid the groundwork for strengthening relations between the two institutions through joint activities, including research, public sensitisation, technical training, and the exchange of information and experience, alongside cooperation on other matters of shared interest to the development of the dairy industry.

The collaboration is expected to add momentum to ongoing efforts by government and livestock-sector stakeholders to develop the dairy industry, raise productivity for farmers and producers, improve milk quality, and increase the sector’s contribution to the national economy.

Two Institutions, One Value Chain

TDB and TSAP sit at different points of Tanzania’s dairy system. TDB is a statutory regulator established under the Dairy Industry Act, Cap. 262 of 2004, with the mandate to license milk processors and distributors, regulate the import and export of dairy products, and run public campaigns to encourage milk consumption in schools and communities. In recent years the Board has pushed the mandatory registration of value chain actors — from smallholder cooperatives and rural collection points to processing plants — to build a database that can guide sector planning.

TSAP, registered since the late 1970s, is Tanzania’s principal professional body for animal scientists, convening researchers, veterinarians, university academics and extension officers from institutions including Sokoine University of Agriculture (SUA), the Tanzania Livestock Research Institute (TALIRI) and the Livestock Training Agency (LITA). Dr. Nziku’s own position gives the partnership a practical bridge between the two worlds: alongside chairing TSAP, he directs TALIRI’s Eastern Zone and oversees the “Maziwa Faida” dairy development project, work that puts him in regular contact with researchers, government officials and farmers alike.

The Scale of the Gap

The case for closer TDB–TSAP cooperation is backed by the numbers coming out of the sector. In the 2023/2024 financial year, Tanzania produced 3,969,887,235.74 litres of milk worth an estimated TZS 3.17 trillion, according to the Ministry of Livestock and Fisheries. Yet more than 90 percent of that volume still comes from indigenous Tanzania Shorthorn Zebu cattle, which yield only 1 to 3 litres a day, against the 15 to 25 litres a day achievable from improved dairy breeds under proper management.

On the processing side, Tanzania now counts more than 152 registered milk processing plants, led by national names such as Tanga Fresh, ASAS Dairies and Azam Dairies alongside a tier of medium and small cooperative processors. In the 2024/2025 financial year, those plants formally processed roughly 90.4 million litres worth TZS 226 billion — a small share of national output, with more than 95 percent of milk produced in Tanzania still consumed on-farm or traded through informal channels with no cold-chain oversight.

Consumption tells the same story. Tanzanians drink an average of 67.5 litres of milk a year, well below the 200 litres per person recommended by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the World Health Organization (WHO) for adequate nutrition.

Where the Chain Breaks Down

Three linked constraints are widely cited by livestock specialists as the drag on Tanzania’s dairy growth. The first is nutrition: most of the national herd depends on natural pasture that loses quality sharply in the dry season, a shortfall that can cut milk yields by more than half. The second is genetics — indigenous breeds were shaped for survival and disease resistance rather than high milk yield, and expanding artificial insemination to shift that balance is held back by the cost of liquid nitrogen, a shortage of trained technicians in rural wards, and weak record-keeping on herd performance. The third is what happens after milking: raw milk spoils within hours if unchilled, and a shortage of grid- or solar-powered Milk Collection Centres pushes many farmers toward informal, lower-paying buyers or leaves milk to spoil when transport fails.

The Corridor Model: A Decade of Dairy Investment

The TDB–TSAP partnership does not sit in isolation. It plugs into a decade-long national effort to turn dairy into a commercial engine for rural households — work carried out through the corridor model that began as SAGCOT (the Southern Agricultural Growth Corridor of Tanzania) and has since expanded nationally under AGCOT Centre.

Dairy is treated as one of the flagship sub-sectors of that transformation. Framed under the popular saying “Maziwa ni pesa ya kila siku” (milk is daily money) — a nod to the steady cash flow dairy gives households compared with seasonal cash crops — the sub-sector is designated Flagship Number 7 under the Agriculture Master Plan (AMP) 2050, part of the drive toward a USD 100 billion national agricultural economy. Roughly USD 5.02 billion in public investment through the Agricultural Sector Development Programme II (ASDP II) has underpinned the shift, with the Southern Highlands used as a testing ground before scaling nationally: herd productivity that stood at 1 to 3 litres a day in 2010 reached improved-breed targets of 15 to 20 litres a day in parts of the corridor by 2026.

At the centre of that work is what AGCOT Centre calls the “Compact Model” — a structured, “honest broker” approach that brings together regulators, financiers and technical agencies to resolve value chain bottlenecks that had long kept private capital away from dairy. TDB is one of the institutional pillars of that model, standardising quality to build formalisation and consumer trust, alongside the Tanzania Agricultural Development Bank (TADB) and PASS Trust, which provide credit guarantees that have helped move smallholder dairy production toward becoming a “bankable” asset class, and regional secretariats working with the Ministry of Livestock and Fisheries (MLF) to align local extension services with national genetic and health standards. As one AGCOT Centre stakholders,  Dr. Simba Mfaume, has put it, the model works because it uses “the right stakeholders quietly, and problems get resolved… without noise, without conflict, without a fight.”

That governance work has helped underwrite real industrial growth. ASAS Dairies in Iringa has scaled from a processing capacity of 20,000 litres a day in 2015 to around 400,000 litres a day by 2026, now drawing on more than 12,000 smallholder suppliers, and has launched Tanzania’s first domestic powdered milk line — a direct challenge to the country’s historical reliance on imported dairy products. Njombe Milk Factory has grown from 6,000 to 20,000 litres a day over the same period, and Shambani Milk from 1,000 to 3,000 litres a day, while newer entrants such as Shefa and Shafa Milk have added competitive buying pressure that has helped push farm-gate milk prices from around TZS 600 to over TZS 700 per litre.

Fiscal reform has moved in step with that industrial growth. The removal of VAT on milk cans in 2017 helped shift farmers away from unhygienic plastic buckets toward stainless steel, cutting microbial contamination and spoilage. The Finance Bill 2025/26 built on that with duty remissions on UHT packaging materials and further relief on milk cans, aimed at helping domestic processors compete against subsidised imports — reforms that sit alongside a Dairy Business Formalisation White Paper intended to curb informal, unregulated milk vending.

The corridor model has also put deliberate weight behind who benefits from that growth. Initiatives such as the Utambuzi AMCOS heifer programme — which acquired 84 heifers through TADB and PASS Trust financing — and the designation of Ilandutwa Dairy Farm as a genetic bull centre have widened smallholder access to better-performing livestock, while pasture research from TARI Uyole and the Norwegian-backed “Farm for the Future” dairy goat programme have offered lower-barrier entry points for women and youth. In the 2025 financial year, AGCOT-linked dairy partners purchased 14 million litres of milk from 8,320 participating farmers, paying out USD 5.71 million in total — with women making up 42 percent of participating farmers and youth 22 percent. A School Milk Feeding Programme in Iringa has paired that supply-side growth with a guaranteed demand-side market, while also targeting childhood stunting.

The gap that remains is a familiar one: a national fodder shortfall estimated at 37 million tonnes, which drives the same seasonal volatility that keeps processors like those in the TDB–TSAP conversation from running at full capacity. Closing it — through commercial fodder production and solar-powered cooling at Milk Collection Centres — is central to AGCOT’s 2030 targets: doubling national milk output, lifting formal processing from 3 to 15 percent of total production, and replicating the SAGCOT dairy model in full across the Central, Northern and Mtwara corridors under the AGCOT umbrella.

Programmes Already Under Way

Some of the ground this partnership is meant to build on is already being tested in the field. The “Maziwa Faida” project, run by TALIRI under Dr. Nziku’s direction in partnership with LITA and private processors such as Tanga Fresh, has reported productivity gains among dairy farmers in Tanga, Iringa and Mbeya through farmer study tours, electric perimeter fencing to protect cultivated pasture, and the introduction of crossbred dairy heifers.

Separately, the government has been expanding the Kitulo Livestock Multiplication Farm in Njombe Region — 4,875.64 hectares earmarked to grow the farm’s dairy herd from 1,500 to 4,500 head, positioning it as a national breeding reservoir for certified crossbred and purebred dairy heifers for smallholders.

Neither programme was announced at the Dodoma meeting, but both illustrate the kind of research-to-practice link that TDB and TSAP say their partnership is designed to formalise — regulation on one side, science and field delivery on the other, aimed at the same target: closing the distance between what Tanzania’s herd produces today and what its market actually needs. It is also the same target AGCOT Centre has set for the sector nationally by 2030, which makes a working relationship between Tanzania’s dairy regulator and its scientific community less a courtesy call than a piece of infrastructure the wider transformation agenda depends on.

Reporting for Kilimokwanza.org, based on the 27 August 2026 TDB–TSAP dispatch, the Dairy Industry Act (Cap. 262, 2004), production and consumption data from the Ministry of Livestock and Fisheries, and an AGCOT Centre strategic impact assessment of the dairy value chain (SAGCOT to AGCOT, 2010–2026).