| March 2026
Source data: Tanzania Dairy Board — Viwanda TDB 2025 (tdb.go.tz)
Read the recent media coverage of Tanzania’s dairy industry and you could be forgiven for pouring your morning maziwa down the drain in despair.
“Tanzania’s dairy sector lacks nine billion litres of milk to meet self-sufficiency,” declared one headline. “Only 2.7 percent of milk is processed,” lamented another. The Chanzo reported that Azam and Njombe milk factories “seem to have fallen out of business.” The Citizen noted that processors spend Sh1,623 on every litre they buy at Sh860 — a loss built into every packet. A McKinsey industry report reminded us that Tanzania’s per capita milk consumption of 62 litres per year sits nowhere near the 200 litres recommended by the World Health Organisation.
The narrative has been consistent, and largely grim: Tanzania, a nation of 33.9 million cattle — the third-largest herd in Africa — cannot feed itself milk. A country where nearly half of all households own a dairy cow, yet the formal industry stumbles along at the margins.
It is a compelling story. It is also incomplete.
Because quietly, methodically, and with considerably less drama than the headlines of collapse, something significant has been happening in Tanzania’s dairy sector. And this year, the Tanzania Dairy Board (TDB) published a register that, read carefully, tells a very different story.
What the TDB Register Actually Shows
The Tanzania Dairy Board’s 2025 factory register — Viwanda TDB 2025, published at tdb.go.tz — lists every licensed and operational dairy processor in Tanzania as of this year. It is the most comprehensive official picture of the formal sector in recent memory.
The number that jumps out first: 187 factories, all listed as Kinafanya Kazi — operational — spread across 26 of Tanzania’s 31 regions. Not 22 factories (the count in 2001). Not 83 (the 2017 count). One hundred and eighty-seven.
This is a sector that has grown its formal processing infrastructure eightfold in two decades. A sector that, far from dying, has been multiplying — quietly, in cooperatives and farm dairies and small-batch creameries — across the length and breadth of the country.
The installed processing capacity across these 187 facilities stands at just over 1.059 million litres per day. Tanzania has, on paper, the infrastructure to process a million litres of milk every single day.
The challenge — and here is where the headlines are not wrong — is that actual daily output is currently 287,282 litres, a utilisation rate of 27.1 percent. Three-quarters of Tanzania’s dairy infrastructure sits idle each day.
But here is the question that the gloomy headlines rarely ask: is that idle capacity a sign of failure, or is it the most compelling investment opportunity in East African agriculture?
The Southern Highlands Powerhouse
Before answering that question, consider what the TDB data reveals about where Tanzania’s dairy industry has actually taken root.
Iringa region alone accounts for six of the country’s most significant processors, anchored by giants that would hold their own on any continental scale. ASAS Dairy, headquartered in Iringa, carries an installed capacity of 150,000 litres per day and is currently processing 55,000 — already the second-highest actual output of any facility in the country. Next to it stands AUM Dairies (50,000 litres installed, 13,000 actual) and Shafa Agro Limited (96,000 litres installed, 18,000 actual). The Southern Highlands milk belt — Iringa, Njombe, Mbeya, Songwe — has quietly become Tanzania’s dairy heartland.
The Njombe Milk Factory, which recent media reports declared “fallen out of business,” appears very much alive in the TDB register, listed with 20,000 litres of installed capacity and 6,000 litres of daily actual output. Njombe did not die. It contracted, yes — but it is processing.
The Tanga corridor tells a similar story. Tanga Fresh Ltd, the country’s most storied cooperative dairy, leads the register with 150,000 litres of installed capacity and 49,000 litres of daily actual output — the highest actual volume of any single processor in Tanzania. Founded in 1996 by a group of Dutch dairy farmers and now majority-owned by the Tanga Dairy Cooperative Union representing 25 primary cooperative societies, Tanga Fresh is proof that the Tanzania dairy model can work at scale when supply chains are organised and investment is sustained.
187 Factories, 26 Regions — The Geography of Hope
Perhaps the most underreported story in the TDB register is its geographic breadth.
Kilimanjaro hosts 12 processors. Several are women-led cooperatives that have been quietly building dairy enterprises for years — Nronga Women Dairy (2,500 litres installed), Kalali Women (1,000 litres), Mboreni Women (1,000 litres), and Ng’uni Women (1,000 litres). These are not hobbyists. These are organised producer groups that have formalised, licensed, and registered — the foundational infrastructure of a proper dairy economy.
Kagera has nine processors. Mara has thirteen. Mwanza has nine. The Lake Zone — long underserved in formal dairy — is seeing a new generation of small processors emerge. In Mbeya, Mbogo Dairy and Mbeya Milk are each handling 3,000 litres a day of actual output, modest by global standards, transformative by local ones.
Even Lindi — the deep south, perpetually peripheral in Tanzania’s economic story — has two licensed dairy processors. Ruvuma has four. The point is not that these are large operations. The point is that they exist, they are licensed, and they are operating. The formal dairy sector has reached parts of Tanzania that many policy discussions have written off.
In Dar es Salaam, the country’s largest city, 32 processors are registered. The city’s formal dairy economy is diversifying rapidly into small-batch artisanal operations — Manow Dairy, SADO Farm Dairy, Gonza Milk, Kigamboni Milk Point — serving the urban premium market that is growing as incomes rise and consumers become more quality-conscious.
The Real Story: Factories Are Ready. Milk Supply Is Not.
The 27.1 percent utilisation rate is not primarily a failure of the processors. It is a failure of the supply chain that should be feeding them.
Tanzania produces an estimated 3.6 to 4 billion litres of milk per year. But of that, 95 percent is traded informally — sold raw, directly from farmer to consumer or through small milk vendors, outside the formal chain. The formal processors are not getting the milk. Not because farmers are not producing it, but because the infrastructure to collect, cool, and transport it from scattered smallholder farms to licensed processing facilities has simply not existed at the scale needed.
This is the structural problem. And it is the problem that is now, finally, being directly addressed.
The Investment Wave Nobody Is Writing About
In March 2022, Tanzania’s Prime Minister presided over the signing ceremony for the Tanzania Inclusive Processor-Producer Partnership in Dairy Project — TI3P — a four-year, US$47 million initiative co-funded by the Tanzania Agricultural Development Bank (TADB) and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The project’s explicit goal was to address the exact problem the TDB register reveals: low capacity utilisation caused by inadequate milk collection infrastructure and fragmented farmer-to-processor linkages.
Four years later, the results are coming in.
TADB has disbursed over TZS 41 billion in loans across the dairy value chain. The project has financed the purchase of 3,254 improved dairy cows — the genetic foundation of higher milk yields. Fifteen dairy processing factories have been co-financed with TZS 22 billion in investment. Formal registration within the dairy value chain — the single most important indicator of sector formalisation — has doubled, from 4 percent to 8 percent of value chain actors. Milk output grew from 3.9 billion litres in 2023/24 to 4 billion litres in 2024/25.
Critically, 888 Dairy Interest Groups and 45 Farmer Producer Organisations have been formed, collectively gathering over 15,000 litres of milk per day that was previously outside the formal market.
Then, just weeks ago — in March 2026 — the Minister for Livestock and Fisheries, Bashiru Ally Kakurwa, launched 23 new milk collection centres built under TI3P, at a combined cost of over TZS 1.157 billion. The centres, located across the Lake Zone, Southern Highlands, and Zanzibar, have the capacity to collect 45,500 litres of milk per day, serving 4,016 livestock keepers across eight regions and 18 districts.
Standing at the Nshamba Milk Collection Centre in Muleba, Kagera, the minister said what the TDB register’s data already suggests: “These milk collection centres are not just buildings. They are strategic infrastructure that supports farmers, strengthens the dairy value chain and creates opportunities for economic growth in rural areas.”
He was not speaking in hope. He was describing something already built and handed over.
And TI3P is not even the largest of the current interventions. In March 2025, Tanzania launched a further US$174.3 million dairy transformation project, funded by a coalition including the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), Agence Française de Développement (AFD), the OPEC Fund, the Green Climate Fund, Heifer International, and TADB. This project targets the distribution of over 17,500 improved dairy cattle — nearly five times the TI3P herd — alongside farmer training, climate-smart dairy practices, and greenhouse gas reduction in the sector.
The “Borrow a Cow, Pay with Milk” Model — And Why It Matters
One of the quieter innovations embedded in the TI3P project deserves particular attention: the “Borrow a Cow, Pay with Milk” programme.
Rather than expecting smallholder farmers to purchase improved dairy heifers outright — an amount that can reach TZS 1 to 2 million per animal, unaffordable for most — TADB provides the animal as a structured loan. The farmer repays not in cash, but in milk deliveries deducted at the collection point before payment. The processor collects and remits. The farmer builds equity through production.
It is a model elegantly suited to a sector where cash-poor farmers have idle land, existing herd management skills, and access to pasture — but no access to the improved genetics that would transform their dairy yields from under 3.5 litres per cow per day to the 15-20 litres that crossbred animals can achieve.
At the Nshamba Milk Collection Centre alone, 143 farmers are enrolled to receive 45 in-calf dairy cows under the programme. In Kayanga, Karagwe District, 76 members of the UWAWAMA cooperative have already received 110 in-calf dairy cows, alongside a TZS 85 million grant to ease early loan repayments.
This is dairy finance meeting dairy farming at the farm gate. It is not a grand theory. It is a cow, a contract, and a collection centre.
The Unutilised Million: Tanzania’s Greatest Opportunity
Return to that headline number: Tanzania has over one million litres per day of licensed dairy processing capacity, of which it is currently using 287,000 litres.
That gap — more than 772,000 litres per day of unused capacity — is not a liability. It is an invitation.
Every litre of raw milk currently sold informally by the roadside, every bucket of maziwa traded without temperature control or quality testing, every farmer’s surplus that spoils before it reaches a buyer — that is milk that could be flowing through the 187 factories now on the TDB register. No new factories need to be built. No new licences need to be issued. The infrastructure already exists. It simply needs to be fed.
Kenya processes 40 percent of its milk formally. Uganda has built a dairy export economy on organised collection systems. Tanzania, with a larger cattle herd than either, processes less than 8 percent formally. The gap between those numbers is not a verdict on Tanzania’s farmers or its dairy entrepreneurs. It is a measure of how much market share remains to be captured — by Tanzanian businesses, Tanzanian cooperatives, and Tanzanian women’s dairy groups — before a single new factory needs to be built.
Women at the Centre of the Formal Dairy Economy
The TDB register carries a detail that deserves celebration rather than footnoting.
Women are not at the edges of Tanzania’s formal dairy sector. They are running licensed dairy factories. The Nronga Women Dairy and Nronga Creameries Dairy in Kilimanjaro — organisations that began as grassroots women’s cooperatives and built themselves into licensed processors handling 1,500 and 2,000 litres daily, respectively — appear on the TDB register as fully operational entities. So do Kalali Women, Mboreni Women, Ng’uni Women, Baraki Sisters in Mara, and Narunyu Sisters in Lindi.
These are not token entries. These are women who organised, secured licences, acquired equipment, built supply chains, and are processing milk every day, in the formal economy, in regions where the formal economy has been hard to access. Tanager’s 2025 IGNITE research confirmed what dairy development practitioners have long observed: when women are loan holders in dairy value chains, the gender gap in participation in dairy activities nearly disappears, and food security improves for both women and children.
The formal dairy economy that the TDB register is mapping is, in significant part, a women’s economy.
What the Data Is Asking Us to Do
The 2025 TDB register is not a progress report written in triumphant prose. It is a cold table of numbers — factory names, regions, installed capacities, actual outputs. But read as a document about Tanzania’s future rather than a verdict on its past, it says something important.
Tanzania has built the processing architecture for a serious dairy industry. One hundred and eighty-seven factories. One million litres of daily capacity. Geographic reach from Lindi to Kagera to Manyara. A women’s cooperative dairy sector that is operational and licensed. Anchor institutions — ASAS, Tanga Fresh, Shafa Agro, Kahama Fresh, MilkCom — with the scale to anchor regional supply chains.
What it does not yet have, in sufficient measure, is the bridge between the farm and the factory: the milk collection centres, the chilling infrastructure, the improved genetics, the organised farmer groups, and the patient financing that connects smallholder milk production to the formal processing chain.
That bridge is now being built — at a pace and with an investment volume that the gloomy headlines have largely overlooked. A US$174.3 million commitment. A US$47 million project already delivering results. Twenty-three new collection centres launched in March 2026. Formal sector registration doubling in three years. Milk output growing — slowly, yes, but growing — from 3.9 to 4 billion litres in a single year.
The milk has not spoiled. It is just waiting for the road from the farm to the factory to be paved.
The Conclusion the Data Supports
Tanzania’s dairy sector has a utilisation problem, not an ambition problem. It has a supply chain problem, not an infrastructure problem. It has a formalisation problem, not a production problem.
Those are solvable problems. They are being solved — with investment, with finance innovation, with women’s cooperatives, with government and development partner alignment, and with the patient, unglamorous work of building collection centres in Muleba and Karagwe and Kagera.
The question is not whether Tanzania can build a serious dairy industry. The 187 factories on the TDB register prove it already has one. The question is whether the investment, the policy coherence, and the public narrative can catch up with the quiet reality of what dairy farmers and processors across 26 regions of this country are already doing.
The milk is there. The factories are there. The people are there.
It is time for the story to catch up.
Data source: Tanzania Dairy Board, Viwanda TDB 2025 — https://www.tdb.go.tz/uploads/text-editor/files/VIWANDA%20TDB%202025_1760087419.pdf
Additional sources: The Respondents (March 2026), Dairy Business Africa (2024–2025), TADB TI3P Project Reports, Tanager/IGNITE (2025), Solidaridad Network Tanzania Dairy 2025, The Guardian Tanzania (May 2025), AgResults Tanzania Dairy Productivity Challenge (2020–2024).