The Sunday Mail
Moses Magadza
THE Tanzanian government is extensively investing in the promotion of agri-businesses to entice more youths into agriculture under a flagship programme aimed at growing the sector.
President Samia Suluhu Hassan said this here in Arusha, Tanzania while officially opening the Southern African Development Community (SADC) Parliamentary Forum’s 53rd Plenary Assembly Session here last Monday.
Twelve of the 15 SADC national parliaments that are members of the SADC Parliamentary Forum attended the meeting, which ended yesterday.
The session was held under the theme “Modernising Agriculture for Food Security and Youth Employment in SADC: Role of Parliaments”.
President Hassan told the plenary that her country’s initiative, called Building a Better Tomorrow (BBT), seeks to optimise the use of untapped potential in the agricultural value chain.
She said agriculture was the main source of employment and income in her country.
“The tourism sector, of which our government should afford appropriate attention in order to realise the SADC Vision 2050, the AU (African Union) Agenda 2063 and the UN (United Nations) 2030 Agenda, also has potential,” she said.
SADC, she added, was among the regions with the youngest population in the world, hence the need for the region to create up to 12 million jobs every year over the next 20 years to absorb new entrants to the labour market.
She said recent statistics show that youths in Tanzania aged between 18 and 35 years constitute 60 percent of the country’s population.
“It is, therefore, imperative that we invest in our youth, and to this end, we have devised a number of strategies to attract the youth into the agriculture sector.
“For us, agriculture comprises crop farming, aqua farming, fisheries, livestock keeping and also honey production,” she said.
President Hassan said her government was investing in the promotion of agri-businesses for youths under its BBT programme.
“It is a flagship programme to attract the youth to indulge and invest in working in agriculture. As a government, we are facilitating access to land as the youths will be given their own land. We are facilitating financial support, technology, market opportunity and capacity enhancement,” she said.
When this initiative was announced, she continued, there was an overwhelming response from young people.
She said 812 were recruited and are undergoing training.
“When they finish this training, they will be enrolled in 13 incubation centres for hands-on skills and go into agri-business under block systems,” she said, adding that after including the youths, the sector was expected to grow by 10 percent and create 1,5 million job opportunities in eight years.
She revealed that her country had increased the agriculture sector budget four-fold.
Her government, said president Hassan, had established an Agricultural Advisory Council to advise the presidency on best practices and the most effective approaches to expedite transformation.
The council comprises personalities with requisite skills and experience in agriculture and other sectors relevant to agricultural development, she said.
Therefore, it was expected to contribute significantly towards the development of the agriculture sector.
She noted that the SADC region, with a total population of about 380 million people, has about 51,3 million food-insecure people, representing an increase of 25,7 percent from those of 2019-2020.
“Just in one year, there has been an increase of food-insecure people by 25,7 percent in the SADC region. This is unacceptable,” she said.
The situation, she added, had been worsened by global conflicts and climate change.
President Hassan challenged the region’s lawmakers to walk the talk on strengthening the agriculture sector.
“MPs have a vital role to play in agricultural transformation.”
She said Tanzania will host the 2024 Africa Food Systems Forum, under the theme “Recover, Regenerate, Act”, in the first week of September 2023 in Dar es Salaam as a strategy for food systems transformation.
“We hope it will be another platform for us to come up with practical contextualisation of the agricultural and food security issues,” she stated.
