From Chalkboard to Fish Cage: How Tanzania’s BBT Fisheries Drive Is Turning Jobless Graduates into Lakeside Entrepreneurs

A forum co-hosted by the Ministry of Livestock and Fisheries and the AGCOT Centre on the Building a Better Tomorrow (BBT) fisheries programme heard how a group of seven unemployed graduates in Mwanza turned a TSh 138 million in-kind loan into more than TSh 409 million in revenue across three seasons — and why scaling that success now depends on cold storage, cheaper cages and a faster loan cycle.

By KilimoKwanza Reporter

Pius Mtenya Makindi still remembers what he and his friends were before the cages arrived: university graduates with degrees and no work. “Many of us had no formal occupation,” he told a recent online forum. Today he speaks the language of cycles and margins. His seven-member youth group in Mwanza’s Nyamagana District has, since early 2024, turned a start-up package worth roughly TSh 138 million into cumulative revenue of about TSh 409 million across three production cycles — a profit, on his account, of more than TSh 271 million. He has since branched out on his own, growing from six cages to ten.

Makindi is, by his own description, “Beneficiary Number One” of the cage fish-farming drive that President Dr Samia Suluhu Hassan launched in Mwanza on 30 January 2024 under the Government’s Building a Better Tomorrow (BBT) youth programme. His testimony anchored a stakeholder session co-hosted by the Ministry of Livestock and Fisheries and the Agricultural Growth Corridors of Tanzania (AGCOT) Centre, held online and streamed live, under the theme “Utekelezaji wa BBT Uvuvi na Fursa Zilizopo” — the implementation of BBT in fisheries, and the opportunities it is opening.

The session, moderated by AGCOT’s Head of Partnerships, Tullah Mloge, and led on the Government side by the Ministry of Livestock and Fisheries, brought together programme beneficiaries, cage and feed manufacturers, fisheries officers and young agripreneurs, with the Lake Zone squarely in focus. Its message was consistent throughout: the State has set out to enable, and a first wave of young Tanzanians has converted that enabling support into production, profit and jobs.

A government that builds the ramp, not the house

AGCOT framed the programme within its own role as an honest broker between government and the private sector. Government, the convenors argued, cannot employ every graduate; what it can do is create the conditions — access to capital, training, market linkages — and let young entrepreneurs take up the opportunity. The BBT fisheries roll-out is offered as a working example of exactly that.

The architecture was set out by Dr Nazael Madala, Director of Aquaculture Development at the Ministry of Livestock and Fisheries, who joined remotely while travelling. The Ministry’s mandate, he explained, runs across the whole fisheries sector and, within it, the fast-growing aquaculture (ukuzaji viumbe maji) sub-sector — which reaches beyond fish to sea cucumbers, crabs, prawns and seaweed. He situated the entire effort within President Samia’s emphasis on the blue economy: a sector that, properly organised, touches the livelihoods of a very large number of citizens.

The binding constraint the Ministry set out to solve was the oldest one in smallholder agriculture: capital. Young people and women, in particular, could see the lakes and the markets but could not finance the leap. So the Ministry designed a concessional loan programme for cage aquaculture, delivered in partnership with the Tanzania Agricultural Development Bank (TADB), mapped suitable sites, and paired the money with structured training — classroom instruction followed by hands-on attachment on working farms before beneficiaries took on cages of their own.

Crucially, the loans were not handed over as cash. They arrived as equipment. Makindi’s group received nine cages, 9,000 fingerlings and 27 tonnes of feed, structured as two facilities: a short-term loan for feed and fingerlings, repaid in full at harvest, and a long-term loan for the cages — about TSh 37 million, repaid at TSh 4 million a cycle over ten cycles, running to 2029. The in-kind design, beneficiaries agreed, was decisive. Without the Ministry’s guidance, Makindi said, they would not have known where to buy a single fingerling, and would likely have been swallowed by brokers.

The numbers that are bringing banks to the lake

What has changed the conversation is the results. Dr Madala reported that the programme’s visible returns have triggered a wave of investment appetite — and, tellingly, that commercial banks including NMB and CRDB have begun creating dedicated relationship-manager posts for aquaculture. In other words, finance is starting to flow beyond the Ministry’s own window into mainstream commercial lending. Makindi is living proof: his individual expansion to ten cages was financed not by the State but by a bank that had seen the numbers and decided youth in the sector were now bankable.

A second beneficiary, Elisha Abeli Igayo, told a similar story from another group. A TSh 117 million in-kind facility produced TSh 101 million in the first season alone, enough to repay the group’s roughly TSh 82 million debt before moving into a second cycle. Elisha used his moment to map the jobs strewn along the chain: beyond farming itself, he said, there is viable business in supplying nets, fabricating steel for cages, supplying feed and supplying the drums used in cage construction — “a large chain in which, if each person plays their part well, we can move forward as a nation.”

That chain was visible in the room. Makindi, it turned out, is not only a fish farmer but a co-founder of MarkFish Solution Co. Ltd, which, with Aquafresh Tanzania Ltd, fabricates and imports cages. Stepping in when a scheduled cage-manufacturer lost his connection, he delivered a brisk tutorial: steel cages, locally made, versus HDPE plastic cages, mostly imported from China; round six-metre cages holding ten to twelve thousand fish, larger steel units up to twenty thousand, and the biggest taking thirty thousand fingerlings. The trade-offs are real — steel corrodes within five to ten years and cannot take heavy waves, so it belongs in sheltered water; the more expensive plastic cages, at TSh 26–30 million for the largest, ride deep-water swells and last far longer, which is why foreign investors favour them. From Geita to Mwanza, and now Lake Tanganyika, the entrepreneurs are spreading. Among the participants was a Mwanza feed manufacturer working with the firm Alaako, and a young supplier of fingerlings and training who is helping to convene a National Youth Agripreneurs Business Summit and launch a Tanzania Young Agripreneurs Network.

The honest list of what still does not work

For all the success, the forum was strikingly candid about the constraints now capping growth — and the beneficiaries, not the officials, led that conversation.

The first is knowledge. Makindi, a former teacher who “went from chalk to a paddle,” argued that the training that got the first cohort started is not enough to take them further. Beneficiaries need deeper instruction in husbandry, in choosing the best fingerlings and feeds, in business registration and commercialisation — and exposure to how producers elsewhere do it.

The second is the cold chain. Watwego Daniel put it most sharply: capital is concentrated at the primary-production stage, while cold storage, the cold-chain supply system and logistics remain thin — which forces rural farmers to sell at the farm gate and surrender the better prices available in inland towns. The third is inputs and import dependence: nets are taxed and hard to come by, fingerlings fall short of demand, and too much cage-building material is bought from neighbouring countries even though Tanzania holds the larger share of the lake.

There were pointed operational complaints, too. Tofiki Wilson Ruvumba, a tax investigator at the Tanzania Revenue Authority who is himself a BBT beneficiary, raised four. He pressed for VAT relief on fisheries inputs — feed, cages and the like — first proposed back in 2023, noting that road and mining contractors already enjoy such exemptions. He reported that feed is delivered in tranches and often in the wrong pellet sizes for the fish on hand, disrupting growth. He flagged late payment of beneficiary stipends, which strains those with families. And he criticised a loan cycle that requires groups to deposit all sales proceeds, have 15 per cent deducted, and then write a fresh letter to request the next tranche — leaving some sitting idle, still waiting. His fix: let beneficiaries deduct and remit the repayment at the point of sale and keep producing, without re-applying each time.

Underlying several of these was a structural worry voiced by Philipo Mrutu and others — that the entry requirements of commercial financiers, however willing, remain a bottleneck for early-stage youth, and that youth-led SMEs need a deliberate route into the wider value chain through extension services, digital tools, processing, marketing and public–private partnerships.

What the Ministry promised in return

Dr Madala met the issues head-on. Aquaculture, he insisted, is private-sector-led: regulations already recognise private providers of technical and advisory services, who need only register through the Ministry’s online system to operate, complementing government extension. On the cold-chain gap, he floated the idea of “common-use facilities” — shared sites within beneficiary clusters equipped with ice-making, cold storage and a standard, quality-compliant processing room, paid for through reasonable user fees — to avoid the waste of single-owner facilities that sit idle between harvests. He acknowledged the VAT exemption is not being honoured fully at the border, and that it needs resolving.

On pond aquaculture — raised in connection with water-rich districts such as Rungwe — he pointed to the ruling party’s manifesto commitment to a demonstration farm in every council, with around ten now under construction against a national total of 184, and urged councils to deploy their statutory 10 per cent loan windows for fish farming, citing Nyamagana, Ilemela and Rudewa as examples already doing so. On the loan delays, he clarified that the worst affected were beneficiaries who had fallen short of repayment thresholds; others had been restructured, and the Ministry has since delegated restructuring decisions to TADB to cut idle time. He committed to bringing bank representatives to a future session to walk beneficiaries through credit procedures, and described the whole roll-out, with disarming honesty, as a first-of-its-kind pilot “we launched and learned from as we went” — with the beneficiaries themselves as the Ministry’s best teachers.

The bigger picture

The session closed less as a conclusion than as an opening. AGCOT, with the Ministry’s backing, undertook to convene a longer, more structured follow-up — with separate, focused sessions on cages, ponds, finance and feed — to invite banks and technical experts, and to build a comprehensive database tracking who is doing what across the chain. The convenors signalled an intent to apply AGCOT’s “lead farmer” method — peer-to-peer extension, the same approach that helped plant 600 acres of avocado in Ruvuma — to carry cage-aquaculture know-how from the established Lake Zone groups to the Southern lakes, including Lake Nyasa, where fish farming could also help tackle malnutrition, and eventually to Zanzibar’s larger blue economy.

It is an agenda that maps neatly onto the national ambition the Ministry invoked. Within five years, before 2030, the Minister, Dr Bashiro Ali Kakurwa, wants farmed fish to reach village markets across the country. On the evidence of this forum, the proof of concept already exists — in a group of Mwanza graduates who turned nine cages into a business worth hundreds of millions of shillings. The harder, more interesting work now is the one the beneficiaries themselves named: financing not just the fish, but the cold rooms, the cages, the fingerlings and the markets that will let the next thousand do the same.