Potato Council of Tanzania and National Potato Council of Kenya to formalise cooperation on technology, standards, trade and capacity building on 28 October in Naivasha
NAIVASHA, Kenya, 26 October 2026 — The Potato Council of Tanzania (PCT) and the National Potato Council of Kenya (NPCK) will sign a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) on Wednesday, 28 October 2026, on the sidelines of the 13th World Potato Congress (WPC 2026), which opens today in Naivasha.
The agreement brings the two leading industry bodies of East Africa’s foremost potato-producing neighbours under a single cooperation framework built on four pillars. The councils will exchange knowledge and technology, sharing improved varieties, production practices and post-harvest innovations among farmers, researchers and processors. They will work towards closer alignment of standards, quality assurance and regulation for seed and ware potatoes. They will strengthen trade linkages and market access across the border, and they will pursue joint capacity building, collaborative research and structured exchange visits between the two sectors.
The signing takes place at a landmark event. WPC 2026, running from 26 to 30 October at Sawela Lodge, is the first World Potato Congress held in Sub-Saharan Africa in the congress’s more than 30-year history. NPCK is an official host alongside FreshCrop Limited, with the Kenya Agricultural and Livestock Research Organization (KALRO) also part of the organising team. More than 1,000 international delegates and over 1,500 local farmers are expected, with the congress agenda covering production and trade policy, variety development and seed systems, private-sector investment, and climate-smart technologies — themes that closely mirror the scope of the PCT–NPCK agreement.
A young council with deep roots
For Tanzania, the pact rests on a decade of institutional building, yield expansion and market formalisation across the country’s agricultural growth corridors. PCT itself is a young institution. It was registered with the Business Registration and Licensing Agency (BRELA) in 2024, with the Avocado Society of Tanzania (ASTA), AGCOT Centre Limited (ACL) and the Agriculture Council of Tanzania (ACT) as its founding subscribers. The Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands (EKN) provided the initial grant funding to establish its secretariat.
The council’s creation answered directives from the East African Community (EAC) Seed Potato Trade Strategy and the Jumuiya Potato Platform, the regional umbrella body for EAC partner states launched in Kampala in 2022. The MoU with NPCK is therefore a natural next step: a bilateral agreement that gives practical effect to a regional agenda both countries have already endorsed.
From seven to 28 tonnes per hectare
The partnership arrives on the back of a remarkable productivity story in Tanzania’s Southern Highlands. Through public-private partnerships facilitated by AGCOT (formerly SAGCOT) in Njombe, Iringa, Mbeya and Songwe, potato yields rose from a baseline of 7 tonnes per hectare in 2016 to 28 tonnes per hectare in 2025 — a fourfold increase in under a decade.
That transformation was driven by the adoption of TOSCI-certified seed of improved varieties such as Sagitta, developed by the Dutch seed company HZPC, together with soil testing, agricultural lime to correct soil acidity, and Good Agricultural Practices. The Ministry of Agriculture and AGCOT are now completing the drafting and validation of a National Potato Development Strategy designed to scale these gains nationwide.
Cooperatives, credit and honest scales
Behind the yield figures are farmer organisations that have reshaped how potatoes are grown, financed and sold. In Njombe, ISOWELU AMCOS, a cooperative of 629 members of whom 49 per cent are women, has moved from subsistence farming to bankable enterprise. It secured a TZS 1 billion commercial crop loan from CRDB Bank without personal collateral and has maintained a 100 per cent repayment record.
ISOWELU and its partner groups have also eliminated the lumbesa — the exploitative, oversized sacks that long allowed middlemen to take more produce than they paid for — replacing them with standardised 50kg bags and transparent pricing by the kilogram. Nearby, the LuPoMa (Lusitu Potato Marketing) facility, established by lead farmer Beno Mgaya, has introduced professional cleaning, grading and packaging, enabling smallholders to sell directly into Dar es Salaam, Zanzibar and regional export markets.
These models are spreading through peer learning. Under the Mkulima kwa Mkulima (farmer-to-farmer) approach, master growers from Njombe’s Tajirika na Isowelu and Tajirika na Lusitu groups have trained farmer groups across Mbeya, Ruvuma, Rukwa, Morogoro, Dodoma and Kigoma.
The seed gap the pact must close
Despite these gains, a critical constraint remains. Certified seed potato production in Tanzania meets less than 2 per cent of demand in key hubs such as Njombe, forcing many smallholders to replant uncertified tubers that carry disease and depress yields. Cross-border trade has meanwhile been held back by non-tariff barriers, unaligned seed regulations and unequal access to clean planting material.
This is where the PCT–NPCK agreement is expected to make its greatest difference. A formal bilateral framework creates a structured pathway to harmonise certified seed and quarantine protocols, simplify phytosanitary clearance at One-Stop Border Posts such as Namanga and Horohoro, and build predictable regional supply chains under the EAC Jumuiya Potato Platform. For farmers on both sides of the border, that could mean wider access to clean seed, fewer delays at the frontier and more reliable markets for their harvests.
Signing the MoU at the first World Potato Congress hosted in Africa also sends a wider message: that East Africa intends to be an active shaper of the global potato industry, not merely its host.