Dodoma, 1 August 2026 — Prime Minister Dr Mwigulu Nchemba opened this year’s International Nane Nane exhibition in Dodoma by launching Tanzania’s Poultry Sector Development Strategy 2026–2036, before touring the show’s youth pavilion, the stand of headline sponsor Tanzania Agricultural Development Bank (TADB), Prime Minister’s Office and Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock and Fisheries exhibits, and a fish-feed demonstration area. Later the same day, AGCOT Centre Limited convened a stakeholder panel — “Majadiliano na Wadau wa Kilimo” — bringing together government, private-sector poultry investors, a strategy consultant and AGCOT’s own corridor management team to unpack what the newly launched strategy actually contains, and what remains unresolved even after its launch.
The strategy was signed off under Minister for Livestock and Fisheries Balozi Dr. Bashiru Ally Kakurwa, and is explicitly framed as a delivery mechanism for Vision 2050 — timed roughly a month after the Vision’s 1 July 2026 launch, and echoing this year’s Nane Nane slogan, “Tambua Soko, Ongeza Tija” (“Recognise the Market, Increase Productivity”).
The case for the strategy: a widening gap between supply and demand
Stephen Michael, Director of Production and Market Development at the Ministry of Livestock and Fisheries, opened the panel by explaining the strategy’s origin in a 2015 government assessment projecting that, absent significant new investment, Tanzania would face a meat supply shortfall of roughly 2 million tonnes by 2030 — a substantial share of it attributable specifically to poultry meat. He identified three structural constraints the strategy is designed to address: feed costs, given that Tanzania imports more than 90 percent of the maize and soya inputs used in commercial poultry feed; disease control and biosecurity; and an inconsistent supply of quality day-old chicks. Government’s role, he said, is to build an enabling business environment around these three constraints — coordinating stakeholders, expanding training, research and extension services, promoting value addition, embedding youth and women’s participation, addressing environmental considerations, and improving access to investment finance.
He confirmed the strategy’s headline financing figure: an estimated TZS 3.5 trillion over ten years, with more than TZS 2.6 trillion of that — roughly three-quarters — expected to come from the private sector rather than government directly, alongside development partners, semi-public institutions including AGCOT, and financial institutions such as TADB. He announced a near-zero-interest youth and women’s lending window through TADB launching this month specifically for poultry projects, with a planned allocation he put at over TZS 4 billion, framing poultry farming — given its comparatively low land and capital requirements relative to cattle keeping — as particularly well suited to peri-urban youth and women entrepreneurs across the full value chain, from input supply (chicks, vaccines, feed) through production, processing, cold-chain logistics and digital market platforms.
The private-sector chair: a strategy two and a half years in the making
Elizabeth Christopher Swai, Director of poultry company AKM Glitters Company Limited and chair of the joint committee overseeing the formal agreement between the Ministry of Livestock and Fisheries and the private sector on poultry, walked the panel through the strategy’s actual drafting process. A 19-member technical team, appointed by the Ministry’s Permanent Secretary, began work roughly two and a half years ago, following an agreement reached in Mbeya between the private sector and government. AGCOT — then still operating as SAGCOT — was asked by the private-sector side to mentor and facilitate the process throughout: funding the drafting work, convening farmer and association meetings, and brokering the government engagements that produced today’s launch.
She was candid that a strategy document is only the starting point: the committee’s next task is securing funding both to write a detailed implementation and budgeting plan and to actually execute the strategy itself, and she appealed directly to development partners in the audience for support on both fronts. She linked the strategy’s ambitions directly to the Prime Minister’s own remarks earlier in the day on quality-driven production for export markets, and to consumption growth already under way domestically.
The strategy consultant: four structural pillars
Steve Kisake, founder of the pan-African advisory firm Aksum — which has nine offices across the continent, including in Dar es Salaam, Dodoma and Zanzibar — set out the technical framework his team used in drafting the strategy, organised around four pillars. First, input quality: principally feed formulation, balancing maize (the starch/energy component) against soya (the protein component) to reach nutritionally consistent, well-formulated feed rather than inconsistent mixes. Second, production: ensuring a reliable supply of quality day-old chicks genuinely matched to market demand — he noted hatcheries have sometimes struggled to confirm their output actually aligns with what the market needs — alongside biosecurity, hygiene and spacing standards for poultry housing. Third, processing: slaughterhouse capacity, which he said remains inadequate nationally, alongside cold-chain infrastructure to prevent spoilage in transport, both of which he flagged as significant investment opportunities, particularly for young entrepreneurs, given that modern small-scale slaughter technology is now available at relatively low cost. Fourth, the enabling environment: policy and legal reform — including Tanzania’s Breeding Act — and, repeatedly raised by farmers during the strategy’s consultation process, sustained access to training, given how quickly poultry breeds and production technology continue to change.
He cited current per-capita consumption figures to illustrate the scale of the opportunity the strategy targets: roughly 107 eggs and around 3 kilograms of chicken meat consumed per person annually — both figures he characterised as very low — against a strategy target of roughly 210 eggs per capita, alongside a parallel increase in chicken meat consumption. He argued poultry is increasingly “bankable” in the literal sense, with banks including TADB now willing to lend against a solid poultry business plan, and urged young entrepreneurs entering the sector to prioritise business training and a genuine business plan alongside technical production skills.
An investor’s account: real progress, and a live, unresolved bottleneck
Dr. Simba Mfaume, of Silverlands Tanzania Limited (headquartered in Iringa), was part of the strategy’s drafting process and praised its transparency — specifically its explicit mapping of the full poultry value chain, which he said makes it easier to identify exactly where a given challenge sits and which institution is responsible for resolving it, rather than leaving producers to navigate opaque, disconnected government processes.
He used his platform to raise a specific, currently unresolved problem directly with the panel and audience: the Tanzania Revenue Authority (TRA) requires large-scale poultry-feed processors to document maize purchases with Electronic Fiscal Device (EFD) receipts in order to count them as legitimate production costs, but many of the smallholder farmers, aggregators and small traders processors buy maize from do not have EFD machines. He said this had directly constrained Silverlands’ own 2026 maize procurement target — citing purchases running well below the company’s target for the September–December buying period — because sellers without EFD receipts cannot always be used as a documented input source. He confirmed the issue has already been escalated as a formal policy matter to the Ministry, and expressed confidence it would be resolved in time, consistent with how earlier value-chain bottlenecks have been addressed. He credited AGCOT specifically as the right channel for resolving this kind of cross-ministerial policy friction — arguing that issues requiring coordination across multiple government bodies are far better resolved through a convening institution that understands the relevant policies and mandates than through public media pressure, which he argued rarely produces durable fixes.
AGCOT’s own account: from corridor priorities to a formal compact
Khalid Mgaramo, AGCOT’s cluster manager for the Ihemi corridor (covering Iringa and Njombe, with oversight extending to Ruvuma under the Mtwara corridor), closed the panel by tracing AGCOT’s institutional role in the strategy back to its earlier identity as SAGCOT’s Southern Corridor programme, when poultry was prioritised as a value chain in the Mbarali cluster and dairy and soya were prioritised in the Ihemi cluster — soya promotion there, he noted, helped supply the poultry and fish-feed industries with a more consistent, better-quality protein input than the fishmeal (dagaa) processors had previously relied on, which carried both cost and food-safety inconsistencies.
He described AGCOT’s standing practice of convening “value chain strategic partnership” forums, bringing stakeholders together per value chain to surface challenges and opportunities — a process that, for poultry, identified problems significant enough that stakeholders agreed a formal strategy was the right response. Before reaching that point, AGCOT helped stakeholders draft what he called a “Compact” — a formal, signed agreement among public-sector representatives (the Ministry) and private-sector poultry associations, feed processors and hatcheries, under which government specifically committed to developing the strategy launched today. He was direct that this year’s launch represents government fulfilling that earlier compact commitment, and equally direct that new challenges continue to surface even as older ones are resolved — citing the same EFD/tax-documentation bottleneck Dr. Mfaume had just raised as a live example the compact process would now need to work through.
What this means going forward
Between the Ministry’s own account of the strategy’s rationale and financing, the private sector’s account of a two-and-a-half-year drafting process AGCOT helped broker and fund, and two investors’ candid acknowledgement that a genuine, unresolved tax-administration bottleneck is currently constraining maize procurement for poultry feed, the panel offered a more complete picture than the launch ceremony alone: a strategy with real financial backing and stakeholder buy-in, alongside an honest acknowledgement that a formally signed document is a starting point rather than a finished solution. AGCOT’s own framing — that cross-government problems are best resolved through a convening institution working the issue through official channels rather than through public pressure — positions the same compact process that produced today’s strategy as the mechanism through which its implementation gaps, including the EFD issue, are meant to be worked through next.
Reporting based on the AGCOT Centre livestream, “LIVE | AGCOT: Majadiliano na Wadau wa Kilimo | Nane Nane 2026,” recorded 1 August 2026 in Dodoma, corroborated by Prime Minister’s Office and Tanzanian press coverage of the same day’s exhibition opening and strategy launch.