Featured Work > Tanzania

Tomato Farmers Reach New Markets in Tanzania

Martha Mtenda once struggled to make a living through her half-acre farm in the village of Mbigili in Iringa, a region in Tanzania’s Southern Highlands.

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Featured Work > Tanzania

Feeding Economic Growth in Tanzania

Navyn Salem is running Industrial Revelation, a company based in her family's homeland of Tanzania that is dedicated to selling economically and socially viable treatments for malnutrition. TechnoServe is providing key support in several areas.

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Developing Entrepreneurs

Business plan competitions
TechnoServe's Believe Begin Become national business plan competition is helping entrepreneurs start and expand growth-oriented small and medium enterprises (SMEs) that generate jobs and incomes across many sectors of the economy. The program is also building a local market for business development services to support them. Watch interviews with BPC finalists.
Key supporters: Google.org and other private, academic and governmental organizations

Building Businesses and Industries

Agriculture & Agribusiness › Artemisia
Malaria continues to be a scourge across large areas of Africa, causing the deaths of approximately one million people each year. The most effective treatment for the disease, ACTs (Artemisinin-based Combination Therapies, which use an extract of the herb Artemisia), has traditionally been produced in Asia. TechnoServe determined that increasing ACT demand presented an opportunity for Africans to fight malaria while also enhancing incomes for small-scale farmers: African enterprise helping to produce the solution to one of Africa's most pressing health problems. The initiative (begun with support from the U.S. Agency for International Development and the World Health Organization) is helping 4,000 Tanzanian farmers to produce and market Artemisia crops and linking them to a regional extraction plant. Millions of doses of ACTs are being produced from their annual harvests.
Key supporters: International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD)

Agriculture & Agribusiness › Cashew
TechnoServe is working with a range of partners – including global cashew industry leader Olam International Limited – to develop a competitive cashew industry in Tanzania. The program is organizing farmers into business groups, helping them produce more high-quality nuts and linking them to premium markets. The yields of the first 1,000 farmers organized into groups have already increased by more than one-third. Fiscal reforms have already allowed one cashew processing plant to reopen, preserving more than 1,000 jobs and a market for 14,000 small farmers. TechnoServe is also championing policies that create opportunities for small-scale farmers and promote domestic processing of raw cashew nuts.
Key supporters: U.S. Agency for International Development, Olam International Limited, Swiss State Secretariat for Economic Affairs (seco), International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and the World Bank's Business Environment Strengthening for Tanzania - Advocacy Component (BEST-AC)

Agriculture & Agribusiness › Coffee
As part of its regional Coffee Initiative, TechnoServe is helping small-scale farmers increase their incomes by producing higher-quality coffee for the lucrative specialty coffee market. TechnoServe helps farmers to organize themselves into business groups, obtain credit and install processing equipment. We also train them to use the equipment and improve their farming practices. Our Tanzanian coffee work to date has helped put an additional $1 million a year in farmers' pockets by enabling them to, among other things, sell directly to overseas buyers such as Starbucks and Peet's Coffee & Tea.
Key supporters: Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, U.S. Agency for International Development, the Swiss State Secretariat for Economic Affairs (seco) and the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation

Agriculture & Agribusiness › Tea
TechnoServe is helping nearly 2,000 smallholder tea farmers to turn their main cash crop into a business, tripling their productivity and improving the quality of tea being produced. Farmers are organized into business groups so they can benefit from economies of scale when selling their products and buying supplies. The program is also helping farmers to acquire business financing and to register with Fair Trade, which offers price premiums to support community investment.
Key supporters: West Foundation and the U.S. Agency for International Development

Agriculture & Agribusiness › Other
Cashew farmers in the southern coastal regions of Tanzania are among the poorest in the country. To increase their incomes and minimize the risks they face by over-reliance on one commodity crop, given global market volatility, TechnoServe has begun helping them to diversify into other profitable crops such as sesame. Through this initiative, producers have access to higher-quality seeds and lucrative export markets. Farmers participating in this program are expected to increase their incomes by 50 percent after the first harvest season.
Key supporters: The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Finland