| Sumario: | Mbamba MTE Company Limited, established in 2019 in Dodoma, Tanzania, works with over 81,000 smallholder farmers across Dodoma, Manyara, and Singida regions, primarily in grain trading and seed multiplication. Despite its strong farmer network, the company faces persistent challenges in sourcing adequate volumes of clean, high-quality grain—largely due to farmers’ reliance on poor-quality seed and use of rudimentary post-harvest technologies. These limitations result in mixed, broken, and poorly cleaned grains, while also placing a heavy labor burden on women and youth through manual threshing and shelling.
Across Tanzania, most farmers producing open-pollinated crops such as sorghum, groundnut, and common bean rely overwhelmingly (97%) on informal seed systems, accessing seed from neighbors, local markets, or recycled grain, with only minimal use of formal or semi-formal seed systems. This has contributed to continued cultivation of old, low-yielding, climate-vulnerable varieties. As a result, national productivity remains low, grain quality is inconsistent, and market competitiveness is weakened—with negative impacts on pricing, export potential, and nutrition.
These challenges are reinforced by systemic bottlenecks in the seed sector, including weak coordination among value chain actors, poor demand signaling between farmers and seed producers, limited last-mile distribution, inadequate extension services, inconsistent supply, and lack of finance tailored to seed and grain actors. Improved varieties developed by researchers often fail to reach farmers due to poor promotion and fragmented value chain linkages.
The ACCELERATE Project aims to address these bottlenecks by strengthening access to improved, climate-resilient, and market-responsive varieties across the seed and grain value chains. As major buyers and aggregators, grain traders like Mbamba MTE Ltd play a central role in connecting farmers to domestic and international markets. Their position enables them to serve as key drivers of demand for improved varieties and as natural conveners of multi-stakeholder platforms that support faster varietal turnover and adoption, ultimately enhancing productivity, grain quality, and competitiveness within Tanzania’s agricultural sector.
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