The Alliance of Bioversity and CIAT has been operating in Tanzania since the mid-1980s, hosted by the Tanzania Agriculture Research Institute (TARI) under the Ministry of Agriculture at the Selian station outside of Arusha.
To-date, our activities in Tanzania have principally aligned around common bean breeding, seed systems, forages, soil, value chains and digital phenotyping. We are also doing significant work in building resilience to climate change.
A major goal of our work through the Tanzania office is around the production of novel climate-resilient varieties of beans. The Bean Programme is one of our notable achievements in Tanzania. The common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris) plays a key role in the livelihoods of smallholder farmers in Tanzania as a food and nutrition security crop and as a source of income. It is the leading leguminous crop, accounting for 78% of cultivated legumes, with close to 6 million households from rural areas depending on beans for daily subsistence. Per capita bean consumption is estimated at 19.3 kg per person per year.
It is estimated that 1.2 million tons of beans are produced in the country per year, making Tanzania the top bean producer in Africa and seventh globally.
Over the past two decades, demand for common beans from Tanzania has increased for both domestic and export markets particularly Burundi, DRC, Kenya, Malawi, Rwanda, South Africa, Uganda, and Zambia. The bean production area has also increased significantly between 2007 - 2022 (from 750,000 ha to over 1 million ha). Productivity has increased from 762 kg/ha to 1335 kg/ha (over 300 kg/ha increase).
In the 2020/2021 season alone, bean harvest amounted to 1,100,000 tons, equivalent to TZS 180,000,000,000 (approximately US$79,646,000). Seed production (Certified and Quality Declared classes) has increased from 542.7MT in 2015 to 8627.9 MT in 2020. The number of seed companies producing bean seed has increased from 1 in 2015 to 15 in 2022.
Lushoto, Tanzania. Credit: Georgina Smith / Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT
These achievements are attributed to various stakeholders, including scientists from public and private institutions, policymakers, farmers, and other bean stakeholders. Our role in these achievements include:
Soil health is a second major thematic area for the Alliance in Tanzania. From 2009 to 2016 the Africa Soil Information Service (AFSIS, a major BMGF-funded project) was housed out of the Tanzania offices. AFSIS resulted in some of the first continental-scale digital soil maps.
The Alliance office in Tanzania has built a robust and diverse partnership network that consists of public and private sector research and development organizations as well as several regional universities. TARI is the principal partner throughout most of our activities geared toward research and development. Other strategic partnerships include:
Different grain traders, agro-input suppliers and farmer groups including:
For decades we have been able to procure significant funding for Tanzania. Significant new project funding has come to Tanzania, through the Alliance, as the donors see the confluence of need, research innovation capacity, effective corporate structures, and competent management.
The current donor investment portfolio in Tanzania is unique in that there are in-built synergies and collaborations across research levers and domain expertise. Conversations with donors have indicated that this may be a new model for further investment and have already begun discussions on new follow-on investment opportunities via the Tanzania office.
Our Tanzania office scientists have been solicited to lead new non-competitive project proposals and are in the early stages of additional non-competitive project ideation directly with donors.
Over the past twelve months there has been tremendous growth in the portfolio or projects operating within the Tanzania office. These include;
c/o Selian Agricultural Research Institute
Dodoma Road
P. O. Box 2704
Arusha, Tanzania
Phone: +255 769 539470
Contact person: Teshale Assefa Mamo ( [email protected] )
Would you like to reach out to our team of scientists working in Tanzania?
These cross-disciplinary themes are common to all main research areas
Methods and breakthrough achievements.
