The women feeding Tanzania
Despite their central role in farming, women in rural Tanzania continue to face constraints in land ownership, income, and risk.
By the time Fidea Lukas planted her first sunflower seeds in 2020, she already knew something was wrong with the way farming worked for women like her. She had a two-acre plot in Chipunda village, in Tanzania’s southern Mtwara region, and the determination to make the land work. What she lacked—quality seeds, farming knowledge, market connections, and inputs—were resources that remained out of reach for most smallholder farmers in her community.
Her first harvest was 30 kilograms. She didn't sell it. She processed it into oil for her family.
It is a detail easy to overlook, but it captures something essential about the situation of women in the agri-food system. The labour is real. The contribution is indispensable. The reward, too often, falls short.
A workforce the system underserves
Women make up 41% of the global agri-food workforce—almost equal to men. Across much of Africa, the share is often higher. In Tanzania, agriculture is not just something women do; for many, it is the entirety of their economic life. They plant, weed, harvest, process, cook, and feed. They also carry water, care for children, tend to the sick, and manage households on incomes that are erratic at best.
The data on women in farming points less to recognition and more to persistent inequality. Women farmers typically work smaller plots than men. Even when they manage farms of equal size, the gender gap in land productivity stands at 24%—a gap driven not by capability, but by unequal access to seeds, fertilisers, credit, and extension services. Women in wage employment in agri-food systems earn 78 cents for every dollar their male counterparts take home.
The consequences of this inequality run far beyond individual households. The prevalence of food insecurity is consistently higher among women than men, globally and across regions. Reducing gender disparities in employment, education, and income could eliminate 52% of that gap—more than half of a problem that now affects hundreds of millions of people.
What changes when support systems are in place
In 2021 the CRAFT project (Climate Resilient Agribusiness for Tomorrow) reached Fidea’s village in Tanzania. The team worked with local extension services to provide training and practical support to smallholder farmers, with a focus on strengthening the role and opportunities of women in agriculture.
The training covered spacing, fertiliser use, pest management, and seed selection. A staff member from the Tanzania Meteorology Authority taught farmers to read weather forecasts and plan their planting around them. For Fidea, this last piece was revelatory. Climate unpredictability is one of the most brutal forces bearing down on smallholder farmers, and evidence shows women bear a disproportionate share of its costs. Each day of extreme high temperatures reduces the value of crops produced by women farmers by 3% relative to men—a compounding hardship for those already farming with fewer resources and less margin for failure.
Fidea joined a farmer group, learned alongside her peers on a demonstration plot, and began applying the techniques on her own land.
The results were significant. In the 2021/2022 season, from a single acre, she harvested 480 kilograms of sunflowers. The following season, she expanded to two acres and brought in 1,080 kilograms.
"The money I earned from selling sunflowers last year was used to pay for my son's school fees," she said. "He is studying at a boarding secondary school."
In Tanzania, agriculture is not just something women do; for many, it is the entirety of their economic life.
The heavier burden
Three hundred kilometres to the north, in the highland Njombe region, Grace Sanga has been farming potatoes for fifteen years. She is a practical, deliberate person—the kind of farmer who talks about soil health with the same matter-of-factness others use for weather. Since joining the CRAFT project's training programme, she has adopted sprinkler irrigation, nature-friendly soil treatments, and improved post-harvest handling. Her produce has attracted new customers. Her farm's long-term productivity has improved.
But Grace is also frank about the structural forces that still constrain her. "Financial institutions are reluctant to lend to women because we often lack collateral," she said. "This makes it difficult to invest in necessary resources and technologies."
The barriers she identifies are well-documented. Women farmers throughout value chains face persistent gaps in access to land, finance, markets, education, and technology. They have lower decision-making power over agricultural production and less access to extension services. And they carry a domestic burden that has no equivalent in men's working lives.
The unpaid care work performed by women and girls contributes at least $10.8 trillion to the global economy annually. It is also the reason many rural women cannot attend training sessions, travel to markets, or take on additional work even when opportunities arise. Greater unpaid and care responsibilities are a leading reason why young women in particular are kept out of education, employment, and training.
This is not simply a social problem. It is an economic one with enormous consequences. Closing the gender gaps in farm productivity and wages could raise global GDP by $1 trillion and reduce food insecurity for 45 million people.
Underlying many of these constraints is the question of land. Women in Tanzania, as across much of Africa, remain behind men in access to, management of, and ownership of land. Legal frameworks may offer nominal protections, but customary norms, social pressures, and institutional barriers mean those protections are unevenly applied.
Land is not merely a production resource. It is collateral for credit, security in old age, a basis for investment, and a form of power within households and communities. Women without secure land rights are more vulnerable to displacement when marriages break down. They have less leverage to resist poor working conditions. They are less able to make long-term investments in their farms.
Securing women's land rights strengthens agri-food systems and rural development more broadly. It boosts investment capacity, improves access to services, reduces gender-based violence, and strengthens women's bargaining power—inside and outside the home.
What targeted support makes possible
The CRAFT project, implemented across multiple regions of Tanzania, is not alone in this work, but it illustrates what targeted, well-designed support can achieve. Fidea now understands her soil. She plans her planting around weather forecasts. She has access to a market. Grace has a bank account, access to weather data on her phone, and a demonstration plot that has made her a resource for other farmers in her community.
These are not small gains. Evidence from across Africa shows that empowering rural women through targeted development interventions could raise incomes for 58 million more people and boost resilience for 235 million. That potential remains largely untapped.
“Together we can,” Grace Sanga often says. She means it as a call for women to work collectively, to demand greater involvement in food production decisions, and to resist marginalisation in a sector that depends on them.
But it is also, perhaps inadvertently, a description of the challenge. The changes that would most benefit women farmers in Tanzania—secure land rights, access to finance, reduced care burdens, fair wages, and equal access to inputs and training—require action at every level: from village extension offices to national policy, from financial institutions to development partners.