Agriculture and Agribusiness in Tanzania: Jennifer Bash Presents Alaska Tanzania Industries

Interview with Jennifer Bash, Founder and CEO of Alaska Tanzania Industries Ltd

What is the scope of your business and your competitive advantage?

Alaska Tanzania is an innovative and impact-driven agribusiness company with the focus to support the works of smallholder farmers in Tanzania. The agriculture sector in Tanzania, similar to any other country in Africa, is very segmented. The competitive advantage that we have is that we have managed to work in the entire value chain to bring value chain actors to work together. The number of Tanzanians engaging in farming is more than 65% of the Tanzanian workforce. This is a sector that has very big potential to the development of the country’s economy. But it is still underdeveloped. The sector’s contribution to the country’s GDP is about 27%. If we as private sector and government invest in developing the agriculture sector in Tanzania, we can increase the sector’s potential not only in its contribution to the country’s economy, but also in reducing the rural urban migration. When you have the underdeveloped agriculture sector, it pushes people out of the rural areas to look for opportunities in urban areas. But, if the agriculture sector is well developed, then many people will see opportunities in the rural areas. The competitive advantage that we have is to be able to build consumer’s confidence in understanding of how the food is grown and where the food is coming from (traceability). Most people just shop for food without understanding how the food is grown, how it is processed, and how it is transported. Working directly with smallholder farmers has given us an added advantage of giving that confidence to the consumer to trace the agricultural products from farm to market. It also helps us manage the quality of our products well. We have worked with a number of farmers and at the moment we have 8,000 farmers in the rice value chain. Mama Alaska Jamii, a non-for-profit organization provides capacity building for the farmers’ communities to increase their yields, quality and profitability. Most farmers lack knowledge to follow good agricultural practices, as a result, they face low productivity and poor quality of produce. Alaska Tanzania links them with inputs suppliers, financial institutions, and markets. Through the capacity building conducted by the NGO, farmers are trained on good agricultural practices which improves their competitiveness in the market.

What products does Alaska Tanzania offer?

When I started in 2012, the aim was and still is to support the farming communities through value addition. Working directly with smallholder farmers has a cost which can be a challenge when you are starting a business due to lack of resources. Alaska Tanzania eggs is the first product we introduced to the market, mainly modern trade. The main focus was to build a competitive local brand because most of the well packaged and branded foods were imported, there were very few local competitive brands in modern trade. When we started selling eggs, most of our competitors in the market were actually importers. We have a lot of eggs producers, but the supply remains in general trade where eggs are offered unbranded. Packaging and branding of eggs introduced us to the market. The eggs’ brand did very well in the market and that made us bring other products to the market under the same brand. We then started working with paddy farmers in Mbeya region supporting them with capacity building and linking them to markets. With this support, we started off-taking rice from our farmers, packaging, branding, and supplying it to our market networks. Alaska Tanzania rice is also doing very well in the market and now we have managed to introduce Alaska Tanzania peanut butter which is a new product in the market. We source our peanuts from local farmers in Tanzania. We have also managed to grow a network of peanut farmers and provide them with a sustainable market.

What are the challenges that you face as a businesswoman doing agribusiness?

The highest achievement for me is the increased number of farmers that we are supporting directly. I know every farmer has dependents. Indirectly, it is a big number of people that we are touching and changing their lives.

The agriculture sector has not been considered as a descent profession. You talk of agriculture and the mindset goes straight to the poor farming communities. When I started, it was not something that young people had shown interest in. But we took the approach of showing a different way of engaging in the agriculture, we demonstrated to the young people that every profession can engage in the agriculture sector. You can be a lawyer and bring your legal background into agriculture. You can bring your tech background into agriculture. You can be a marketeer and bring your marketing experience into agriculture. It is a sector that can attract any profession. But we are very limited when we think of it as just going to the farms and doing the actual farming. It has not been a challenge for me as a businesswoman but a blessing to empower other women to see opportunities in the agriculture sector and participate in it. Business challenges in the agriculture sector are not different from any other business sector; access to finance, access to information and having to manage the entire value chain due to lack of proper structures. The main challenge we face is that our agriculture sector is not fully developed, you have to establish your quality control mechanisms. These controls can’t be achieved without engaging in the entire value chain.

Are you trying to open up to getting investors either within the country or externally?

We have attained our focus of building a viable business. Now, we are at a point where for us to scale quickly, we need to bring investors onboard. If we remain working with limited resources it will take us longer to scale. We are ready to work with investors, whether from outside of Tanzania or from Tanzania. Our market is not limited to the Tanzanian market, we have now managed to export our products to the EAC market and are looking to tap into the SADC market. Our expansion plan is to get into the 1.3B African market, starting with EAC and SADC. With the right investors, we will be able to achieve our expansion plan.

What are some of your success stories?

The highest achievement for me is the increased number of farmers that we are supporting directly. I know every farmer has dependents. Indirectly, it is a big number of people that we are touching and changing lives. For other achievements, I was awarded Young Business Leader of the Year – East Africa in 2017. I got another award in agriculture sector category from the local media company in Tanzania. We were also awarded by the Tanzania Private Sector Foundation and Tanzania Bureau of Standards as one of the top 50 Tanzanian brands for our Alaska Tanzania rice. But, the big achievement is the impact that we are creating through empowering farming communities.

Has climate change had an effect on the sector?

Yes, it has. Agriculture in Tanzania is mainly dependent on rainfall, reduction of rains results in reduced agricultural productivity. Climate change can disrupt food availability, reduce access to food, and affect the quality of food. Crop drying depends on natural sun, change of climate affects drying of crops which results in post-harvest losses.

What is the Mama Alaska Jamii NGO doing to support this?

Smallholder farmers in Tanzania often lack high quality inputs, equipment, and knowledge to follow Good Agriculture Practices and Climate Smart Agriculture. As a result, farmers struggle with low productivity and high costs of production, leading to lower profitability. Mama Alaska Jamii (MAJ) is a company limited by guarantee, focused on empowering women in agriculture through business and nutrition. Together with Alaska Tanzania, it has engaged 8,000 smallholder paddy farmers in Mbeya region through training on GAP, and good post-harvest handling techniques. Mama Alaska Jamii promotes the use of sustainable production technologies to increase paddy production and improve the quality. To promote gender equality, MAJ is working with the Tanzania Women Chamber of Commerce and has facilitated the training of 300 women in Kagera region on cross-border trade. Further, MAJ has engaged with Tanzania Food and Nutrition Centre to adapt curriculum and train women on nutritious food production and consumption. MAJ is implementing an innovative program in Dar es Salaam that is training 3,330 women food vendors (Mama Lishe in Kiswahili) on gender, health, environment, financial literacy, business, record keeping and nutrition. The objective of this program is to empower and enable Mama Lishe to gain access to food supplies at competitive prices, markets, financial products and services. MAJ has experience in conducting deep dive assessments and designing training curriculum according to the user needs. Donors of MAJ include Financial Sector Deepening Trust (FSDT) and AGRA.

What is your vision for the next three years, the medium term?

The vision for the next three years is to scale the domestic business, trade more with neighboring countries and create more partnerships across Africa. We are currently trading with EAC countries and are creating partnerships with companies in EAC and SADC. We also want to invest more in storage infrastructures to increase our storage capacity and be able to trade more. We will continue to engage in the entire value chain by creating a sustainable farmer support program (consortium model). The consortium model will be applied to all farmers in Tanzania who are growing crops for commercial purposes. These farmers will experience a 3-5x increase in their net earnings, allowing them to save and invest for the long term. In addition, the increase in produce will allow the off-takers to rapidly increase exports to regional and global markets. Lastly, is the introduction of the technology platform to digitize all processes and consortium partners because without technology, managing the consortium and farm activities is going to be a big challenge. The platform will also facilitate payments between stakeholders, map out the farms so that we are able to know how many acres of land each individual farmer owns, what seedlings are being used, and the output per acre. Based on the collected data, we can improve the farm activities and be able to measure and monitor the performance of our farmers. The data collected will also enable us to continue developing the agriculture sector and create value to consortium partners.

What is your inspiration and your drive to do what you do?

I grew up helping my father in his commodity trading business. I remember every time I would leave school and go straight to his shop to help him with the selling. I did not have any vision that I would want to venture into commodity trading. I was doing it out of passion, but also being close to my dad who used to spend more of his time attending to his business. When I went to the university in the US, I developed an interest in food packaging and branding every time I went shopping in supermarkets. I majored in international marketing, it was inspiring to see how food items were marketed in developed countries. I decided that when I go back home, this is how I want to see products displayed on supermarket shelves. When I came back, I visited most supermarkets and the packaging and branding of local products then was not appealing to the customers. My aim was to improve the packaging and branding of the Tanzanian food products. When I started packaging and branding eggs, it appeared different and attracted most consumers. Alaska Tanzania eggs caught a lot of people’s attention and that’s how we quickly grew our customer base. We also gained a lot of local competitors, and managed to kick out the imported eggs in modern trade, because they would not compete in the same space now that the local brands were growing significantly.

ABOUT ALASKA TANZANIA: AKTZ Industries Ltd is a value-added business that sources, packs, brands and supplies agricultural produce to supermarkets, high-end hotels, restaurants, catering companies, and oil and gas companies. The company is Tanzanian-owned and started its business operations in January 2013. AKTZ was founded on the principles of deep understanding of the local business content, experience in product supply-chain management, hard work and dedication to support local farmers in Tanzania.

For more information, please visit: https://alaskatanzania.com.

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