African Agriculture and Food Systems
From cotton to cardamom, from sunflower to cocoa, from apples to avocado — the Ministry of Agriculture’s 2026/27 budget speech is, on close reading, an inventory of nearly thirty value chains. Here is what is on the list, what each is targeted to deliver, and what the architecture tells us. Kilimokwanza.org Editorial Desk Read the […]
A Dutch-funded agroforestry project in rural Morogoro is showing how nature-based agriculture, farmer training, and market linkage can work together, one seedling at a time By Kilimokwanza.org | Mkuyuni Ward, Morogoro Region, Tanzania | April 2026 On a Saturday morning in early April, a senior official at one of East Africa’s leading agricultural development organisations […]
Tanzania’s commodity boards have hired 1,434 young agricultural graduates as field extension officers in a single year. It is the most concrete youth-employment data point in the entire FY 2026/2027 Hotuba — and a structural shift in how Tanzanian farmers will be advised. In a country where extension service has been chronically under-resourced for decades, […]
An African Development Bank-backed guarantee is now mobilising more than double its own value in lending to young farmers and women-led agribusinesses. AGITF is lending Tsh 5.5 billion at 7% or below. The youth farming finance gap is being attacked from three directions at once. Young Tanzanians who want to farm have always faced the […]
A career scientist’s 12-year journey to give Kenya’s most popular potato variety a fighting chance against its deadliest enemy Kilimokwanza.org TIGONI, Limuru — In the cool highlands of Kiambu County, where potato plants stretch across terraced slopes like green quilts, Dr. Moses Nyongesa stands in a confined field trial plot that could reshape the future […]
What started as a southern pilot is now a four-corridor national framework. The FY 2026/2027 Hotuba confirms what AGCOT stakeholders have been working toward for two years — and signals where the next wave of agricultural investment will land. Tanzania’s Agriculture Growth Corridor framework has crossed a structural threshold. In the FY 2025/2026 reporting year, […]
In June 2025, Kenya cut its agriculture sector budget. So did Uganda. Ethiopia’s allocation has remained flat at roughly 0.3% of GDP for years. None of the East African Community’s seven mainland economies are anywhere near the 10% benchmark that African heads of state recommitted to a decade ago in Malabo. And then, in April […]
April 2026 In the highland slopes of Rungwe, where mist still clings to the volcanic ridges at sunrise and orchards roll deep into the valleys, a quiet transformation is underway. The avocado—once a backyard fruit traded informally between neighbours—has become one of Tanzania’s most strategically important agricultural commodities. It is a foreign-exchange earner, a rural […]
How AGCOT’s Corridor Development Framework Positions Tanzania as a Regional Agricultural Transformation Hub Tanzania has a $1 trillion aspiration and 25 years to realise it. At the heart of that ambition lies agriculture-a sector that feeds 61 per cent of the nation’s workforce, anchors food security for over 60 million people, and accounts for 25.9 […]
WORLD AGRICULTURE FORUM | EARTH DAY SPECIAL REPORT The Dirt Beneath Our Feet Is Running Out of Time: A landmark global forum convened on Earth Day brought together soil scientists, agronomists and policy experts to deliver a stark verdict: the world’s agricultural soils are critically degraded, the green revolution’s hidden costs are coming due, and […]