A fifteen-year experiment in public-private partnership, once confined to a single corridor in southern Tanzania, is now being scaled across the nation — and its early results suggest a model the continent should be watching closely.
For fifteen years, a quiet revolution unfolded along the fertile stretch of southern Tanzania that runs from the Indian Ocean coast through the rice paddies and sugarcane fields of Morogoro, past the highland tea estates of Iringa and Njombe, across the breadbasket plains of Mbeya, and all the way to the shores of Lake Tanganyika. This was the territory of SAGCOT — the Southern Agricultural Growth Corridor of Tanzania — a public-private partnership established to prove a hypothesis that many had debated but few had tested at scale: that African smallholder farming could be systematically transformed into a commercially viable enterprise, not by replacing farmers, but by equipping them.
The results were compelling enough that on April 27, 2025, Prime Minister Kassim Majaliwa stood before a gathering of stakeholders at the Jakaya Kikwete Convention Centre (JKCC) in Dodoma to officially launch the national expansion. The following day, April 28, President Samia Suluhu Hassan affirmed the directive: the corridor model would no longer be confined to the south. It would go national.
With that mandate, SAGCOT officially evolved into AGCOT — the Agricultural Growth Corridors of Tanzania — transforming a proven regional initiative into a whole-of-nation strategy for agricultural modernization.
“The successes of fifteen years in the southern corridor demonstrated what is possible,” said John Banga, AGCOT’s Manager for the Kilombero Cluster, during a recent interview on SUA FM Radio in Morogoro. “The question was no longer whether the model works, but how quickly we could bring it to the rest of the country.”
A country mapped into four corridors
Tanzania’s agricultural landscape is as diverse as it is vast. From the volcanic soils beneath Mount Kilimanjaro to the semi-arid plains of Dodoma, from the lakeside fishing communities of Mwanza to the cashew groves of the southern coast, each region presents its own ecology, its own crops, and its own challenges. The expansion of AGCOT acknowledges this diversity by organising the country into four distinct growth corridors.
The original Southern Corridor remains the anchor — the proving ground where methods were tested, partnerships forged, and lessons accumulated over a decade and a half. Alongside it, three new corridors have been activated. The Central Corridor runs from Dodoma and Singida through Morogoro to the Lake Zone, connecting the country’s political capital to one of its most productive agricultural hinterlands. The Northern Corridor brings together the regions of Tanga, Kilimanjaro, Arusha, and Manyara — an area already known for horticulture exports, coffee, and tourism-adjacent agribusiness. And the Mtwara Corridor encompasses the southeastern regions of Lindi, Mtwara, and Ruvuma, where cashew nuts, sesame, and groundnuts have long formed the backbone of rural livelihoods but have struggled to reach their commercial potential.
Together, these four corridors represent a comprehensive geographic framework for what Tanzania’s Agriculture Master Plan 2050 envisions: a nationwide shift toward value addition, improved productivity, and technology-driven farming systems.
From strategy to soil — the February rollout
What makes AGCOT’s expansion notable is the speed of execution. Within months of the presidential directive, the organisation launched a corridor-by-corridor stakeholder activation process designed to translate national strategy into regional action plans.
In February 2025 alone, AGCOT convened major stakeholder forums in four cities in rapid succession. The Northern Corridor was inaugurated in Arusha on February 10, followed by Singida on February 12 for the Central Corridor. On February 17, regional leaders, district commissioners, and council directors from across the Lake Zone gathered in Mwanza. And on February 20, the Mtwara Corridor held its founding convening, completing the national circuit in just ten days.
At each forum, the format was deliberately consistent. AGCOT teams shared the institutional knowledge accumulated through fifteen years of SAGCOT operations, engaged regional leadership structures, and began identifying the specific value chains and partnership opportunities unique to each corridor. The message, as Banga described it, was both a transfer of experience and an invitation to co-create: “We are not arriving with a blueprint from the south. We are arriving with lessons, and we are asking each region to help us shape what works here.”
The youth equation
Africa’s demographic trajectory gives urgency to the question of agricultural employment. With a median age of roughly eighteen years, Tanzania — like much of the continent — needs to generate millions of livelihoods for young people entering the workforce each year. AGCOT’s proposition is that agriculture, reimagined as a modern commercial enterprise, can absorb a significant share of this demand.
Banga offered a striking illustration from the tomato fields of Morogoro, a region where young farmers have increasingly turned to vegetable production as a route to economic independence. Under traditional farming methods — inherited seed varieties, minimal inputs, no soil testing — a young farmer working one acre of tomatoes could expect to earn between 600,000 and 700,000 Tanzanian shillings over a three-month growing cycle. It was an income that sustained survival, but little more.
Through AGCOT-supported interventions — soil analysis at institutions like Sokoine University of Agriculture, adoption of certified hybrid seedlings, precision application of modern fertilisers, and integrated pest management — the same farmers, working the same land, in the same timeframe, have seen their earnings rise to between two and three million shillings per acre. That represents an income of roughly one million shillings per month from a single acre — a fourfold increase achieved not through expansion of landholdings, but through a fundamental upgrade in farming practice.
“The land did not change,” Banga observed. “The mindset did. And once the mindset changes, everything else follows.”
The Morogoro tomato story is illustrative, but it is not unique. Across Tanzania, young farmers are gravitating toward high-turnover horticultural crops — tomatoes, onions, cabbages, leafy greens, mangoes — precisely because these value chains offer short production cycles, strong market demand from growing urban centres like Dar es Salaam and Dodoma, and the potential for rapid returns that make farming feel less like a generational inheritance and more like a viable business choice.
Science at the root of everything
Central to AGCOT’s philosophy is that agricultural transformation is, at its core, a scientific undertaking. Banga laid out the progression with clarity: it begins with soil health testing, moves to the selection of crop varieties suited to specific agro-ecological conditions, incorporates targeted nutrient management and modern crop protection, and extends through harvest, post-harvest handling, and value addition all the way to market access.
Each step in this chain depends on knowledge — and AGCOT’s model is designed to bridge the gap between where that knowledge exists and where it is needed. Sokoine University of Agriculture, Tanzania’s premier agricultural research institution based in Morogoro, plays a critical role as a science provider. But Banga was candid about a reality that development discourse sometimes overlooks: a significant share of practical agricultural technology and applied know-how resides not in universities or government agencies, but within the private sector — in the seed companies, agrochemical distributors, processing firms, and export houses that interact with farming communities every day.
AGCOT’s public-private partnership architecture is specifically designed to harness this dispersed expertise. By convening government, research institutions, and commercial actors around shared corridor strategies, the model seeks to create a marketplace of knowledge where farmers can access the inputs, advice, and market linkages they need to farm commercially.
Technology is also reshaping the information landscape for Tanzanian farmers in ways that were unimaginable a generation ago. Banga described a new type of farmer who checks weather forecasts before planting, monitors commodity prices in Arusha, Nairobi, and even international markets like India’s pigeon pea exchanges, and experiments with new varieties season by season — conducting what amounts to on-farm research driven by commercial instinct rather than academic methodology.
“Our farmers have always been curious,” Banga said. “What has changed is that technology now allows that curiosity to become productive. A farmer can test a new variety for two or three seasons and know, from their own data, what works best for their land and their market.”
A model worth watching
Tanzania is not the first country to adopt a corridor approach to agricultural development. Similar frameworks have been attempted in Mozambique, Zambia, and elsewhere on the continent, with varying degrees of success. What distinguishes AGCOT’s trajectory is the combination of longevity — fifteen years of operational learning in the southern corridor — and the political commitment to scale nationally, backed by a presidential mandate.
The challenges ahead are formidable. Coordinating across four corridors with distinct agro-ecologies, institutional landscapes, and market dynamics will test the organisation’s capacity. Financing the transition from subsistence to commercial farming at scale requires sustained public and private investment. And the ultimate measure of success will not be the number of forums convened, but the number of farming families whose livelihoods demonstrably improve.
Yet the early signals are encouraging. The corridor activation is complete. The stakeholder networks are forming. And on the ground — in Morogoro’s tomato fields, in the emerging horticultural enterprises of young farmers across the country — the evidence is accumulating that when science meets ambition, and when public purpose aligns with private enterprise, African agriculture can deliver returns that change lives.
As Tanzania’s corridors open, the rest of the continent would do well to watch what happens next.
This article draws on a radio interview with Mr. John Banga, AGCOT Manager for the Kilombero Cluster, broadcast on SUA FM Radio, Morogoro, Tanzania, on February 24, 2025.