African Agriculture and Food Systems
When the farmer behind the “300 kilos per tree” claim invites you into his orchard, the grass on the ground turns out to be the teacher. By Kilimokwanza Correspondent When Beno Mgaya tells Tanzanians that a single, well-fed avocado tree can yield as much as 300 kilos in a harvest, many listeners reach for their […]
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 […]
A horticulture farmer in Kibiti built something unusual — a quarterly gathering of professionals willing to sleep in tents, eat buffet meals, and reimagine Tanzania’s agricultural future together. This is the story of the SFO movement and the man behind it. By Kilimokwanza.org Editorial Desk | March 2026 | Bungu, Kibiti, Coast Region The road […]
The Netherlands-headquartered World Agriculture Forum has named twenty Country Directors across Africa, Asia, the Gulf, Europe and the Americas. The appointments mark the operational launch of its national Country Council model — and put nine African leaders at the centre of a rising global platform on food, policy and agri-innovation. By Kilimokwanza.org Newsroom A forum […]
It began, as many revolutions do, with something ordinary. Praxeda Melkior, co-founder of Migeto Farm in Kilosa district, had planted lemongrass — mchai chai — between her banana plants for the most practical of reasons: to keep pests away, to discourage snakes from settling near the homestead, and to sell a little on the side […]
By Kilimokwanza Somewhere in a research station in Tanzania, a plant breeder is looking at rows of amaranth. Each row is a slightly different genetic line, tested across two locations for vegetable yield, seed yield, disease resistance, and performance under the increasingly unpredictable conditions that climate change is delivering to northern Tanzania. Twenty-three such breeding […]
A new partnership between an aviation company and a crop protection body signals Kenya’s serious pivot toward precision farming — and raises the question of whether the sky is now the limit for agricultural transformation. By Kilimokwanza.org CORRESPONDENT | Nairobi, 15 April 2026 When a Kenya Airways subsidiary walks into a room with a pesticide […]
By Kilimokwanza Every tomato that rots in a crate before it reaches a market stall is a double loss. It is income that a farmer will not receive, and it is nutrition that a household will not eat. In northern Tanzania, these double losses are happening at a scale that quietly undermines the food system’s […]
By Kilimokwanza There is a persistent assumption in agricultural development circles that reducing chemical inputs means accepting lower yields. It is an assumption rooted in a version of farming history that treats the Green Revolution’s chemical intensification model as the only path to productivity. A new brief from the CGIAR Science Program on Better Diets […]
By Kilimokwanza There is a tendency, when discussing poor nutrition in Africa, to frame the problem as one of individual choice: people eat badly because they do not know better, or because they lack the discipline to eat well. The research does not entirely support this view. A research brief from the CGIAR Science Program […]