African Agriculture and Food Systems
It began with a cardboard box, a Finnish potato enthusiast, and a small Tanzanian company knocking on cold doors in the Netherlands. A decade on, Tanzanian avocados are the backbone of India’s fastest-growing fresh-fruit import trade. This is the story of how a corridor, three institutions and a generation of smallholder farmers built an empire […]
By Kilimokwanza Tanzania’s agricultural export performance has been one of the sector’s genuine success stories in recent years. The value of export crops nearly tripled from USD 1.2 billion in 2019/20 to USD 3.54 billion in 2023/24. Avocado exports surged from 17,000 to 35,000 tonnes in just two years. Meat and leather exports are growing. […]
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 […]
By Charles Mwangi Tanzania achieved food self-sufficiency in 2025. It is a milestone worth celebrating — the country now produces enough food to feed its population and is targeting a 150 percent self-sufficiency ratio by 2030 to enable exports. Public investment in agriculture has quadrupled in four years, from TZS 294 billion in 2021/22 to […]
By Kilimokwanza Thirty-five grams. That is roughly a quarter of a small mango. Half an orange. Two modest slices of papaya. It is the average amount of fruit consumed daily by women of reproductive age in the Arusha and Kilimanjaro regions, according to a new research brief from the CGIAR Science Program on Better Diets […]
By Kilimokwanza Tanzania has a mobile money success story that much of the world envies. Seven in ten adults use mobile money services. Financial access points now sit within five kilometres of 86 percent of the population. The infrastructure, by any measure, is impressive. And yet, something is not adding up — quite literally. Agriculture […]
There is a story we tell ourselves about hunger and body weight in Africa, and it goes roughly like this: poverty causes undernutrition, and wealth brings better diets. It is a tidy narrative, and like many tidy narratives, the evidence is beginning to complicate it considerably. A new CGIAR research brief, titled Diets and Nutrition […]
By Elizabeth Shumbusho In 2010, Tanzania launched an ambitious experiment. The Southern Agricultural Growth Corridor of Tanzania — SAGCOT — set out to bring government, business, development partners, and smallholder farmers together around a shared vision for one of the country’s most productive agricultural zones. Fifteen years later, the results are significant. The SAGCOT Corridor […]
By Kilimokwanza Mama Amina wakes before dawn to prepare breakfast for her family before the long walk to the shamba. She has never felt sick, not in any way she could name. No dizziness that lasted. No chest pains that made her stop. And so she has never seen a reason to visit the clinic […]
By Kilimokwanza There is a convenient assumption buried in conversations about vegetable production and nutrition in Africa: that more vegetables, grown by more farmers, is unambiguously good for dietary health. The July 2025 research brief titled Vegetable, Fruit, and Staple Crop Production and Input Use: Baseline Findings from the FRESH End-to-End Evaluation (Tanzania Evaluation, Research […]