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 today accounts for over 65 percent of Tanzania’s food production, has attracted USD 6.34 billion in investments, reached 1 million farmers, and created 253,000 jobs. Farmers who adopted agricultural lime reportedly increased maize yields from 2 tonnes per hectare to between 7 and 8 tonnes. Climate-smart agriculture became a defining feature of the model.

But SAGCOT also encountered persistent challenges: limited smallholder participation, missed opportunities in the livestock sector, land governance disputes, and an enabling environment that remained complex for many private investors to navigate. The model worked — but it did not work for everyone, and it did not spread easily.

Now, Tanzania is raising the stakes. In 2023, President Dr. Samia Suluhu Hassan instructed SAGCOT to broaden its mandate to include agricultural corridors across the entire country. SAGCOT is now transforming into the Agricultural Growth Corridors of Tanzania (AGCOT), with a focus on the Mtwara, Central, and Northern Corridors. The reorganized AGCOT Centre is expected to align with Tanzania’s DIRA 2050 vision and the new Agriculture Master Plan, maintaining the core principles of inclusivity, sustainability, and commercialization that defined its predecessor.

The ambition is clear. The pathways to deliver it are what a new PFADC policy brief now examines in detail.

The brief argues that scaling corridor-based public-private partnerships requires more than replicating structures — it requires rewriting some of the rules. It calls on the PPP Centre, together with AGCOT, to revisit the 2010 PPP Policy and 2011 PPP Act to remove bottlenecks, build capacity for inclusive PPP design, and enhance awareness of partnership opportunities across both public and private sector players. Critically, it calls for a fundamental shift in how the private sector is perceived: it should not be viewed as a threat, but as a partner in national development.

Infrastructure is identified as a lever of outsized importance. Investing in last-mile infrastructure — including feeder roads, aggregation centres, and distribution systems — would reduce logistics costs, improve market connectivity, and enhance corridor competitiveness. The brief also calls for complementary infrastructure aligned with the Standard Gauge Railway, major ports, and the Julius Nyerere Hydropower Station, as well as revitalization of the TAZARA transport corridor to open regional trade routes.

One recent development illustrates exactly the kind of partnership the brief envisions: in March 2025, AGCOT and TADB signed a strategic MoU to boost agribusiness financing and identify investable opportunities in the soybean value chain.

Whether partnerships like this can be multiplied across corridors — and whether policy predictability can be guaranteed long enough to attract serious private capital — will determine whether AGCOT fulfils what SAGCOT only partially achieved.

Read the full Policy Brief No. 2, 2025 — “Best Approaches to Enhance Public-Private Partnership Frameworks for Effective and Sustainable Implementation of Food and Agriculture Transformation” — attached below.