By Kilimokwanza

Tanzania has a mobile money success story that much of the world envies. Seven in ten adults use mobile money services. Financial access points now sit within five kilometres of 86 percent of the population. The infrastructure, by any measure, is impressive.

And yet, something is not adding up — quite literally.

Agriculture employs over 61 percent of Tanzania’s population and contributes 26.3 percent of GDP. But out of a national credit portfolio worth TZS 10 trillion, agriculture receives less than TZS 2 trillion — under 10 percent of the total. That is a structural mismatch of enormous proportions, one that leaves smallholder farmers, traders, processors, and transporters trapped between a booming digital economy and a financial system that has not quite reached them.

While 72 percent of Tanzanian adults use mobile money, agriculture-specific usage remains minimal, with 65 percent of farmers reporting infrequent use. The barriers are not mysterious: poor digital literacy, patchy rural infrastructure, inadequate farmer data, and financial institutions that remain wary of the perceived risks of agricultural lending. Gender gaps deepen the exclusion further, with women disproportionately left out.

The result is that most rural producers continue to rely on informal financial mechanisms — rotating savings groups, trader credit, and family borrowing — that are simply too small and too fragile to power a modernising agri-food economy.

Tanzania’s government has not been idle. The Agricultural Sector Development Programme II introduced e-extension, e-subsidies, and ICT-enabled services, while the Bank of Tanzania’s Fintech Regulatory Finance Act 2023 reforms and the rollout of digital farmer registries show promise for scaling access and enhancing transparency. Development partners have also stepped in: the UNCDF Kigoma Joint Programme linked more than 18,000 savings group members — 68 percent of them women — with digital finance and agri-tech between 2017 and 2022.

But pilots, however promising, are not yet policy at scale.

A new policy brief from Tanzania’s Presidential Food and Agriculture Delivery Council (PFADC), produced through the ASPIRES Tanzania programme, sets out a comprehensive agenda for change. Among its most consequential proposals is a call to scale up Tanzania Agricultural Development Bank (TADB) into a full-fledged agricultural investment bank — with increased capitalization, blended finance windows, and wholesale lending facilities designed to crowd in commercial banks and fintechs. Alongside this, the brief calls for agriculture-sensitive loan classification rules, the operationalization of a Personal Property Registry that would allow farmers to use livestock, warehouse receipts, and digital transaction histories as collateral, and the expansion of financial literacy programmes delivered through cooperatives and extension systems.

The underlying argument is straightforward: Tanzania’s digital revolution and its agricultural ambitions are currently running on parallel tracks. Connecting them — through smarter regulation, inclusive product design, and well-capitalized anchor institutions — could transform what is possible for smallholders across every corridor of the country.

Read the full Policy Brief No. 1, 2025 — “Appropriate Methods of Scaling Up Access to Financial Services and Digitalization to Reach More People in Rural Settings” — attached below.