Meet the women growing your food

Ask anyone at TanzPro Greens where the company's organic story really began, and they will point to six women in Mkuranga District who started farming greenhouses and open fields in 2016. That was the beginning of the Mitaranda Organic Project, and it set the pattern for almost everything TanzPro has built since.

Today, the picture looks very different in scale but not in spirit. TanzPro's workforce is predominantly rural women, who make up around 70 percent of the more than 50 farmers now contracted to grow for the company's farms and its wider supply network across Mkuranga.

TanzPro itself was founded in 2014 in Dar es Salaam, but it was those six women at Mitaranda, working coastal soils in Mkuranga District, who turned the company's organic ambitions into a working farm. Their early seasons of trial and adjustment became the template every farmer who joined later was trained against.

Two years after Mitaranda began, the Kisele Organic Project started along Mtwara Road, eventually growing to three greenhouses. Between the two projects, a model took shape: recruit local women, train them properly, and build the farms' growth around their success rather than around them fitting into someone else's system.

Kisele, in particular, is where much of TanzPro's organic vision was properly tested - a second site where the lessons learned at Mitaranda could be applied at greater scale, across three greenhouses instead of one. Many of the women who now farm for TanzPro came into the network through Kisele's expansion rather than Mitaranda's original six.

Training is not a one-time orientation. Farmers are taught organic cultivation methods from the ground up - crop rotation, composting, biological pest control - so that the produce they grow meets the same standard whether it comes from a long-established plot or a smallholder just joining the network.

Each farmer is supplied with certified seeds rather than being left to source planting material wherever they can. That single detail removes one of the biggest sources of uncertainty in smallholder farming: never quite knowing whether this season's seed will perform like last season's did.

The crops these women grow span the breadth of TanzPro's catalogue: tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, peppers and chillies, cucumbers, cabbage, carrots, onions, beans, avocado, pineapple, passion fruit, ginger, garlic, herbs and spices, moringa powder, roselle powder, organic honey, and sunflower oil. That range means a single farmer's season rarely depends on one crop succeeding or failing alone.

Just as important is what happens after the harvest. Every farmer in the network is guaranteed a market for what they grow, rather than being sent out to negotiate buyers on their own. For growers who have often absorbed all of the risk of farming and little of the certainty, that guarantee changes the calculation entirely.

The terms behind that guaranteed market follow Fair Trade principles, an approach that shapes how TanzPro negotiates with every farmer in the network rather than treating fair pricing as a one-off gesture. For women who had previously farmed without any formal buyer relationship at all, having those terms set out consistently, season after season, is itself part of what changed.

The training itself goes beyond planting schedules. Farmers learn to work with certified, GMO-free seed and to rely on bio-pesticides and natural fertilisers rather than synthetic chemicals, so that a woman farming her own plot for the first time produces crops that meet the same organic standard as one of TanzPro's original greenhouses. That consistency is what a guaranteed market is ultimately built on.

The combination of training, certified seed, and a guaranteed market has produced something more durable than a single good season: stable incomes for women who, in many cases, had never had steady earnings from farming before. That stability ripples outward into households and into food security across the wider Mkuranga community.

In 2021, TanzPro's Passion Fruit Drive expanded this contract-farming model further, bringing more than 20 additional smallholders into the network. It was a sign that the approach built with six women in 2016 could scale without losing what made it work in the first place.

The produce these women grow now reaches five export markets - the Seychelles, the UAE, Oman, Russia, and East Africa's own local demand - alongside more than 200 tons sold each year. It is easy to lose sight of the fact that a shipment landing in the Gulf or the Seychelles started as a decision, back in 2016, to train six women properly rather than treat them as a temporary labour source.

None of this has required treating women farmers as a special project layered on top of the business. It has simply meant building the business around the people already doing the work - and recognising that consistent training and fair terms produce more reliable harvests than either could alone.

The produce that eventually reaches restaurants in Dar es Salaam or resort kitchens in the Seychelles starts here, in fields worked mostly by women who were farming long before TanzPro existed and who now do it with better seed, better training, and a buyer who shows up every season.

It is also, increasingly, a model that others look to. A women-led contract-farming network that has grown from six people to more than fifty in under a decade is not a small achievement in a region where women farmers have often struggled for recognition, let alone a guaranteed market.

TanzPro Greens Ltd is always open to conversations with partners, buyers, and organisations interested in this model of women-led organic farming. Reach the community team by phone at +255 713 398 485 or by email at om@tanzpro.co.tz.