Ihemi Cluster The Ihemi Cluster Board Field Visit of March 2026 produced a ministerial meeting, six strategic recommendations, and a stack of field-verified evidence that the AGCOT board carried to Dodoma on 13 March. What it also produced, invisibly, was a logistical achievement that anyone who has organised a multi-day, multi-site board delegation through two regions of Tanzania’s Southern Highlands in the rainy season will recognise as quietly extraordinary.

Khalid Mgaramo is the Ihemi Cluster Manager for AGCOT. The Ihemi Cluster spans Iringa and Njombe regions and covers avocado, potato, apple, dairy, tomato, and tea value chains across a geographic area of several thousand square kilometres, served by road networks that the March rains had been working on for six weeks. Managing the cluster is a complex operational role. Organising a four-day board visit on top of it, while also running an AGRA-funded Youth Entrepreneurship for Future of Food and Agriculture (YEFFA) programme across six regions, is something else entirely.

Nine years into his tenure at the institution, Mgaramo describes what the work has produced above all else: “When we started working in this cluster, there was not that level of trust. There was not that level of closeness. But now, as I speak, if you go to the Regional Commissioner’s office, to the District Commissioner’s office, they can tell you exactly which private sector investors are operating in their area, what their challenges are, what opportunities exist. Equally, a private investor in our cluster can now pick up the phone, call the RC, call the DC, and say — I have this challenge, or there is this opportunity. Can you help me?” That shift — from institutional distance to working relationship — is, in his own assessment, the most significant thing AGCOT has produced in Ihemi. More than any individual investment. More than any yield figure.

Mgaramo’s nine years at the institution have been three distinct roles, each building directly on the one before. When he joined in February 2017, he was an infrastructure specialist in the policy department, working from Dar es Salaam. The work was translational: taking the road access complaints that packhouse owners raised — a road that destroyed refrigerated lorries, a bridge that closed in the rains, an electricity supply that made cold storage unreliable — and converting them into structured government dialogue. His interlocutors were TANROADS, TARURA, TAMISEMI, and the Ministry of Infrastructure. He was, in the organisation’s language, an infrastructure specialist. In practice, he was the person who took a complaint from a farmer cooperative about a road that was destroying the economics of tea, dairy, and potato transport and turned it into a formal government dialogue. The conversation had to be technical enough to be credible and political enough to move. He learned both registers simultaneously.

In 2018, a different kind of structural work began. The government was moving to Dodoma. SAGCOT’s policy engagement depended on institutional relationships with ministries and agencies that were relocating to a new city, rebuilding contact points in unfamiliar buildings, managing their own transitions alongside everyone else’s. SAGCOT needed someone in Dodoma. Mgaramo established the office, rebuilt the relationships from scratch in the new capital, and ran the policy coordination from there through the transition period. It was during these Dodoma years that he handled a fight that mattered to every dairy farmer in the corridor: the 18 percent value added tax applied to finished animal feed products was making compound feed too expensive for the smallholder integration model that ASAS Dairies and others depended on. Mgaramo helped to bring that case through the right channels. The levy was eventually addressed. These are the invisible battles inside policy work — the ones that never appear in a newsletter or a field visit itinerary but determine whether a value chain is viable at all.

By 2021, the Dodoma engagement was stable and his predecessor in the Ihemi Cluster had moved on to another institution. Iringa is a four-hour drive from Dodoma. Mgaramo took the Ihemi role and continued running his Dodoma policy coordination from the field — travelling to the capital when institutional presence was required, managing everything else from Iringa and Njombe. He arrived in the cluster knowing every compact commitment made since 2015, every investor in the portfolio, every cooperative in the network, and every government counterpart from the Regional Commissioner down. That is not a profile that can be recruited from a job posting. It is built over years. It cannot be briefed.

The system Mgaramo manages reflects AGCOT’s broader prioritisation logic, but Ihemi is where it has been tested longest and refined most deeply. Within the SAGCOT corridor, which prioritised Tanzania’s south as its first operating zone, there were six clusters: Rufiji, Kilombero, Ihemi, Ludewa, Mbalali, and Sumbawanga. Ihemi — named for a small locality between Iringa town and Mafinga — covers Iringa and Njombe and is the oldest of them all. It is, as Mgaramo puts it, the mother cluster: the place where the model was tested, proved, and refined before being taken to the Northern, Central, and Mtwara corridors that AGCOT is now activating.

Within Ihemi, a Cluster Development Framework identified the value chains that held the greatest combined opportunity for smallholder poverty reduction and private investment return. Ihemi originally had five priority chains: soya, tomatoes, potatoes, dairy, and tea. Avocado was added as the sixth after Tanzanice and the Lusitu Agribusiness Group demonstrated that the Southern Highlands climate could support commercial Hass production and export at scale — a case that was not obvious in 2015 and required evidence to establish. Each of the six value chains now has a Strategic Value Chain Partnership: a structured collaboration of investors, government agencies, cooperatives, and development partners that meets, reviews, and acts around that specific chain. Below each partnership sit individual actors — the HZPCs, the Silverlands, the Darsh Industries, the Farm for the Futures — each occupying a defined role. The architecture is what makes the ecosystem legible. Mgaramo maintains the architecture.

The compact that sits above all of it is signed by the cluster’s highest-level stakeholders: both Regional Commissioners, the leading private investors in the portfolio, the senior NGO and development partner representatives. Every year, the signatories return to account for what they committed the year before. Government is asked: was the road repaired? Was the electricity connection completed? Was the land regularisation done? Private sector is asked: was the investment made? Were the farmers integrated? Were the employment targets met? Non-state actors are asked: were the farmers trained? Was the soil monitoring conducted? Was the market linkage delivered? Mgaramo is the person who asks the questions and records the answers. The compact works because that accountability is real. The first Ihemi Compact was signed in 2015. Every year since, there has been a review. That consistency is itself an achievement in a policy environment where multi-stakeholder platforms frequently begin with ambition and end with silence.

Mgaramo names two specific transformations from the Ihemi value chains as illustrations of what the compact system produces when it functions as designed. In the potato sector, yields across the cluster shifted from five tonnes per hectare to twenty tonnes per hectare over the period of AGCOT’s engagement — a fourfold improvement he attributes directly to the availability of certified seed varieties, which only entered the cluster through the strategic partnership that brought TOSCI, HZPC, Farm for the Future, Silverlands, and ISOWELU AMCOS into the same coordinated space. The seed supply did not arrive automatically. It arrived because the partnership structure identified the gap, named it publicly, and organised the collaboration needed to fill it. Without AGCOT holding that platform together, each partner would have continued working in isolation and the gap would have remained.

In the dairy sector, ASAS Dairies came into the partnership with a factory installed capacity of 50,000 litres per day but was processing fewer than 20,000 because the raw milk supply could not reach the plant consistently. The strategic partnership for dairy — which brought together ASAS, Ministry of Livestock, TALIRI, Dairy Board, and other private sector and Non-State Actors partners including inputs suppliers like pasture seed and cattle genetics programmes under one coordinated conversation — built the supply chain incrementally and then at scale. The factory now processes 400,000 litres at a level that has made powdered milk production viable. It did not get there by accident or by individual ambition alone. It got there because the right parties were in the same room, accountable to the same compact, over a period of years.

He could have continued listing. The Darsh Industries tomato paste factory in Iringa — which processes Red Gold tomatoes grown by Ihemi smallholders into paste packaged in Arusha for restaurants and supermarkets across Tanzania — is another product of the strategic partnership architecture. So is the apple value chain that Tamu Tamu Tanzania anchors, building outgrower networks and processing cider, juice, and dried fruit from 2,500 smallholder farms that did not exist as commercial operations before the cluster created the enabling conditions. In each case, the formula is the same: a willing private investor, an organised smallholder network, a government counterpart who understands the value, and a coordinator who keeps the whole system moving forward. Mgaramo is the coordinator.

Planning for the March 2026 board visit began in January. Mgaramo started with sequencing: in what order should the board visit the six sites, given travel times between them, the road conditions expected in early March, each site’s own scheduling constraints, and the narrative logic of what the board needed to understand? The answer he arrived at was: Lusitu and the Njombe Regional Secretariat first, on Day 1, to anchor the avocado story at its most mature point and give the board a courtesy call that contextualised everything to follow. The Tanzanice packhouse, ISOWELU, and Tamu Tamu second, on Day 2, to show the cooperative finance model and the private sector depth in the horticultural value chains. Farm for the Future and Fair Agro third, on Day 3, to present the seed supply and input access solutions that underpin the whole productive base. The board meeting on Day 3 afternoon, where all field evidence would be synthesised into strategic recommendations. Day 4 for departure and the journey to Dodoma.

Each site required a pre-visit: confirming the host’s availability, establishing the specific questions the board wanted to address at that location, ensuring that the right people would be present, and checking the physical access routes in the days before the delegation arrived. The rainy season had made two of the planned road routes impassable. Mgaramo rerouted both before the delegation landed at Nduli Airport. The board members, several of whom had not visited Ihemi before, moved through the visit without encountering a single logistical failure. That outcome was the result of weeks of preparation that the visit itself made invisible.

The visit had a secondary purpose beyond the board’s own learning. Mgaramo designed the itinerary so that the board would arrive at each site already holding the questions that the site was positioned to answer. Lusitu was chosen for Day 1 not only because it represents mature avocado transformation but because the income figures — from TZS 200,000 per season to TZS 15–20 million for many farmers — establish an emotional baseline against which everything else is measured. ISOWELU was placed on Day 2 specifically because the cooperative’s TZS 1 billion loan, repaid without defaults, answers the board’s standing question about whether smallholder finance is viable at scale. Farm for the Future on Day 3 answers the question about seed supply infrastructure that the board had been carrying since ISOWELU’s manager confirmed that certified seed meets less than 2 percent of regional demand. The narrative arc of a four-day visit does not build itself. Mgaramo built it.

One dimension of Mgaramo’s role that is entirely invisible in a field visit is the compact coordination work that runs continuously between visits. The Ihemi Cluster Compact — the multi-stakeholder agreement that commits government, private sector, and development partners to specific contributions to the cluster’s value chain development — was signed in its first version in 2015. Every year since, there has been a review meeting at which each signatory accounts for what they committed and what they delivered.

Mgaramo convenes those meetings. He tracks the commitments across all parties throughout the year. He follows up on delays before they become defaults. He mediates between parties when a government commitment has not been delivered and a private sector investment that depended on it is at risk. He manages the expectation gap that opens when a road that was supposed to be graded before the harvest season is still ungraded when the lorries need to move. This is not conflict management in any dramatic sense. It is system maintenance: the unglamorous, continuous work of keeping a multi-stakeholder agreement alive through the friction of institutional reality. The compact works because someone ensures that it is taken seriously year after year, in public, in writing, with signatures. That someone is the Cluster Manager.

In addition to the Ihemi Cluster management role and the ongoing policy coordination from the Dodoma relationship, Mgaramo coordinates AGCOT’s implementation of the Youth Entrepreneurship for Future of Food and Agriculture programme — known as YEFFA — an AGRA-funded initiative running across six regions: Morogoro, Iringa, Njombe, Ruvuma, Mbeya, and Songwe. The programme focuses on the maize and rice value chains and operates on the premise that agricultural employment is not synonymous with farming. Along every value chain, there are service roles that young people can occupy and formalise as enterprises: crop spraying contractors, transport and logistics operators, agro-dealer networks, processing and value addition businesses, quality grading services. YEFFA is creating those jobs deliberately, mapping the service gaps in each value chain and connecting young people to them with training, market linkages, and early capital support.

One model the programme has promoted and that Mgaramo describes with visible enthusiasm is what he calls “boda boda farming”: youth entrepreneurs equipped with motorised sprayers who sell crop protection services to smallholders on contract, moving between farms the way boda boda riders move between passengers. It is a model that makes crop spraying accessible to farmers who could not afford to own and maintain equipment individually, and that creates a sustainable income stream for the young people who operate the service. It is an image that captures something important about how agricultural employment is shifting in the corridor: away from subsistence participation in a single crop, toward structured service delivery within organised value chains where skilled labour has a market price.

Among the individual success cases he has watched grow through the cluster’s enabling work is EatFresh, a horticulture logistics and cold-chain enterprise that began as a small transport operation and has grown into a recognised brand in the Southern Highlands export chain. It is exactly the kind of business that grows when the infrastructure is present, the market connections are in place, and someone is holding the coordination environment together so that private initiative can find traction and compound. Mgaramo coordinates that environment. He would not describe it in those terms. He would tell you the story of the business and say nothing about himself.

The YEFFA programme, the Ihemi compact, the six strategic value chain partnerships, the board visit, and the Dodoma policy work are all, formally speaking, separate responsibilities assigned to different roles. In practice, they are all running through the same office, the same phone, and the same individual. Mgaramo mentioned the YEFFA programme once during the entire four-day field visit, briefly, at the end of a board meeting session. Then he moved on to the next agenda item. He had a 6 a.m. departure to organise.