DODOMA INTERNATIONAL NANE NANE

At the Dr. John Samuel Malecela Grounds in Nzuguni, Dodoma, Vice President Balozi Dr. Emmanuel John Nchimbi presided over the 10th anniversary celebrations of the Tanzania Agricultural Research Institute (TARI), held as part of the International Nane Nane exhibition — a separate event from the Eastern Zone show running the same week in Morogoro. The commemoration combined a retrospective on TARI’s first decade with a forward-looking research agenda for Tanzania’s Vision 2050, presented through a keynote address and a moderated panel discussion before closing remarks from Agriculture Minister Daniel Chongolo and the Vice President himself.

The Vice President was received by Agriculture Ministry leadership, TARI’s Board and management, Deputy Minister for Livestock and Fisheries Ng’wasi Damasi Kamani, regional and district commissioners including Halima Dendego and Godwin Gondwe, TARI Board Chairman Andrew Masawe, and the Ambassador of Nigeria to Tanzania, among other dignitaries. The previous day, organisers noted, Prime Minister Dr Mwigulu Nchemba had laid the foundation stone for TARI’s new administration building as part of the same anniversary programme, ahead of travelling to Morogoro for the Eastern Zone show the following day.

A decade in numbers: from TARI’s own account

TARI Director General Dr. Thomas Bwana opened with a ten-minute account of the institute’s first decade. TARI was established in 2016, emerging from the Ministry of Agriculture’s own research department, with a mandate to coordinate agricultural research and generate answers to farmers’ practical challenges. In 2025, he said, the institute absorbed three further specialised research bodies — including Tanzania’s tobacco and coffee research institutes — bringing all major crop research under one roof.

He cited the institute’s budget growth as the clearest marker of government commitment: from roughly TZS 3 billion at TARI’s founding to approximately TZS 124 billion currently. Over the decade, he said, TARI has produced roughly 343 technologies, the majority of them crop varieties now in use across the country. He was direct in crediting TARI as the ultimate source of planting material behind several of Tanzania’s signature agricultural exports: cashew and cotton seed, oil palm planting material, and — closer to home in Dodoma — the “Makutupora Red” grape variety underpinning the region’s viticulture sector, alongside a widely used rice variety he referred to by name during the presentation. He also pointed to a TARI-led cassava variety recovery programme that reversed a period when the crop was at risk of disappearing from some growing areas, and cited a biofortified bean variety, rich in iron and zinc, now being adopted by the Ministry of Health for school feeding programmes. Roughly 40 companies nationally, he said, now use TARI-developed vegetable seed varieties in their own production.

Beyond crop breeding, Dr. Bwana pointed to work in soil mapping, biopesticides, disease-free planting material, digital agriculture tools, and early-stage value-added products (juices and oils derived from cashew and potato among them) as areas TARI has expanded into. He confirmed government investment of roughly TZS 208 billion aimed at modernising the institute’s infrastructure — laboratories, a seed gene bank, and the new administration building whose foundation stone was laid the previous day — alongside a planned bioscience research centre, budgeted at roughly TZS 86 billion with a contractor already engaged. He also noted two newer, specialised TARI centres: one in Dodoma focused on climate change adaptation and semi-arid crop research, and one in Tabora focused on agroforestry and medicinal plants.

Prof. Nuhu Hatibu’s research roadmap for Vision 2050

Following Dr. Bwana’s retrospective, Prof. Nuhu Hatibu delivered a keynote on agricultural research’s role in delivering Vision 2050’s targets, which he summarised concisely: 10 percent annual growth in the agriculture sector; an agricultural GDP of roughly USD 100 billion by 2050; agricultural exports exceeding USD 1 billion net; 100 percent mechanisation across farm and primary-processing operations; an expansion of irrigated farmland by roughly 1.2 million hectares; and a reduction in post-harvest losses from a current estimate of 30–35 percent down to just 5 percent.

He argued research must close two structural gaps to deliver these targets. First, a persistent weakness in processing and value-addition research relative to investment already made in production-side inputs and technology — illustrating the stakes with maize starch: raw maize sold as flour returns a low margin to farmers, doubling only modestly when processed into ordinary industrial starch, but rises dramatically in value when refined to pharmaceutical-grade starch (the inert base material making up the bulk of a medicine tablet) — a shift he said could multiply the value returned to farmers many times over per kilogram. Second, he pressed researchers not to be constrained by current technology ceilings, using an analogy from railway engineering — standard rail, Japan’s magnetic-levitation trains, and China’s newer vacuum-tube rail concept — to argue Tanzanian agricultural research should aim past incremental gains toward genuinely next-generation approaches, including precision agriculture capable of varying fertiliser application metre by metre according to real-time soil conditions.

His most pointed recommendation concerned data and artificial intelligence. He argued Tanzania’s research institutions have historically under-published their data internationally — a habit he said should now be treated as a strategic asset rather than a weakness, since it leaves Tanzania holding a large body of unpublished agricultural research and extension data that could underpin a home-grown AI system for precision agriculture, rather than data freely published abroad and then, in effect, bought back in the form of imported technology. He recommended incentive reform at universities and research institutions — rewarding researchers for contributing to Tanzania’s own AI infrastructure rather than solely for international publication — alongside government investment in computing infrastructure, since AI systems of this kind require substantial power and processing capacity that sit outside agriculture’s own budget but remain essential to it.

The panel: government, academia, research and industry

A moderated panel followed, chaired by Prof. Alexander Bonifas Makulilo, bringing together Prof. Peter Msofe (Deputy Permanent Secretary, Ministry of Agriculture), Prof. Raphael Chibunda (Vice Chancellor, Sokoine University of Agriculture), Dr. Emmanuel Mnene (representing senior researchers), Dr. Regina Kapinga (representing international institutions and development partners) and Azam Mfaume Jula Jula (representing farmers and the private sector), with each panellist given only brief time given the schedule.

Prof. Msofe reiterated the government’s budget commitment — the roughly fortyfold increase from 2018 to the present — as evidence of serious intent rather than rhetoric, and credited TARI research directly with shaping fertiliser subsidy policy reforms that he said have contributed to Tanzania’s current food self-sufficiency position.

Prof. Chibunda, speaking for SUA, made a broader argument about the historical cost of underinvesting in science and technology, noting that German colonial administrators built Tanzania’s Tanga–Moshi and Dar es Salaam–Kigoma railways between 1893 and 1914 — and that, more than a century later, Tanzania’s new standard-gauge railway is still being built by foreign contractors rather than domestic engineering capacity, a gap he argued reflects insufficient sustained investment in training and research infrastructure. He said SUA has strengthened its curriculum and teaching resources accordingly, and cited SUA’s reputation as evidence of progress: the university is set to receive 47 students from Burundi and Benin this year, funded by the African Development Bank, which selected SUA over other regional institutions.

Dr. Mnene, speaking as a veteran researcher, credited TARI with three specific strengths — orienting research toward climate resilience, sustained focus on productivity, and a genuinely collaborative rather than insular research culture — while naming three areas needing further work: value addition and market linkages (a point he said remains discussed more than delivered), funding constraints (which he argued smart partnerships could meaningfully offset), and Tanzania’s still-low crop productivity relative to comparable countries, citing rice yields of around 4 tonnes per hectare domestically against roughly 10 tonnes achieved elsewhere, and maize yields of around 6 tonnes against a benchmark of up to 15. He closed by urging continued investment specifically in young researchers.

Minister Chongolo and TARI’s requests to the Vice President

Ahead of the Vice President’s closing remarks, Minister Chongolo used his own address to make a specific institutional argument: that researchers themselves — not only those who deliver a finished product to farmers or consumers — deserve to share directly in the value their work generates. He described a new internal policy under which a share of revenue from commercialised research outputs, such as a newly bred seed variety, will flow back directly to the researcher who developed it, rather than accruing only to those managing distribution. He also raised a request to extend the working tenure of senior researchers with continuing capacity to contribute, citing a TARI scientist in his mid-seventies who had run a 10-kilometre leg of an anniversary marathon the previous day. On behalf of TARI, Dr. Bwana had earlier asked the Vice President to formally launch two institutional publications — a compendium of TARI’s research technologies and a ten-year results report — and to publicly recognise individual researchers and staff for their contributions.

The Vice President’s closing remarks

Vice President Nchimbi closed the programme by congratulating the Ministry of Agriculture, TARI and its stakeholders for the decade’s work, and argued that genuine, sustainable national development is built not on natural resources alone but on investment in human capital through education, science, technology and innovation — framing this directly against Vision 2050’s own identification of research and innovation as a core pillar of Tanzania’s economic strategy. He reaffirmed government’s commitment to continued investment and an enabling environment for research, while explicitly calling on the private sector, research institutions, and development partners to increase their own investment alongside government’s, arguing that stronger research and innovation would in turn increase productivity, competitiveness and the value of Tanzania’s agricultural output, and ultimately improve citizens’ welfare.

What this means going forward

Between Dr. Bwana’s ten-year account, Prof. Hatibu’s research agenda for Vision 2050, and a panel spanning government, academia, senior research staff and industry, the day’s programme set out both what TARI has delivered since 2016 and a specific, numbered set of targets — a tenfold increase in the pace of agricultural growth, mechanisation, irrigation expansion, and a sharp cut in post-harvest losses — against which its next decade will be measured. The recurring theme across every speaker, from the Director General to the Vice President, was that research funding and infrastructure investment, while now substantial by TARI’s own historical standard, remain a starting point rather than a finished job, particularly in the value-addition, market-linkage and data-infrastructure gaps several speakers identified as still open.