Tanzania, June '22: A whirlwind tour, high-iron beans, Kilimanjaro, grasshoppers, and making lasting change

The agenda I set myself for my first trip to Tanzania may have been a little ambitious.

Saturday-Sunday: London to Nairobi. Nairobi to Dar.

Monday: Dar to Zanzibar. Zanzibar to Arusha.

Tuesday: Arusha to Kilimanjaro. Kilimanjaro to Zanzibar. Zanzibar to Dar.

Wednesday: Dar to Bukoba.

Thursday: Bukoba to Mwanza*.

Friday: Mwanza to Dar.

Friday-Saturday: Dar to Nairobi. Nairobi to London.

Five different beds in eight days. No bed at all on two, although my ability to sleep on flights seems to be improving. No sleep longer than five hours all week.

But here's the thing: it’s a big, exciting, lively country, and there's a huge richness of things to see. Spending the week in a Best Western would've been a waste! (No disrespect meant to Best Western, of course…) And so my mission to cover as many miles as possible began.

Before anything else, maybe I take the opportunity to express massive thanks to everyone who took the time to meet with me. I enjoyed such a friendly welcome - from GAIN colleagues, our farmer-partners for multiplication of biofortified seeds, our friends in the milling associations, our colleagues across the maize flour mills of Tanzania, our distinguished supporters in government (at all levels), and the communities that opened their arms to this first-time visitor. It was truly humbling and very, very much appreciated.

A few short reflections following my visit:

1. Farmers are my heroes. The work they do is intensely physical, it requires huge knowledge and skill, it's at the whim of external threats, and it is 24/7/365. I've said it before and I'll say it again: we, as a global nutrition community, must be at their service. Every ounce of support they need should be theirs to have - whether finance, equipment, inputs, access to markets or pretty much anything else.
2. Biofortification has massive potential. We all know about the nutrition benefits, but I would add two really key points in its favour. Firstly, it really does look like these crops (high-iron beans in Tanzania, for example) may be more drought-resilient, require less water, fend off pests, and possibly even need less fertiliser. (We're looking into that latter point now.) They also cook fast. If so, these are environmental benefits, resilience benefits, and commercial benefits all rolled into one. Secondly, it looks totally feasible to displace standard crops (beans) with biofortified crops (HIB) without really changing much about in the existing systems aside from the seed input. I was absolutely amazed by the speed of the scale. From 1.5MT of biofortified seed, spread over 50,000 acres, you can multiply up to 1MT of seed per acre. That flood of supply can only be a good thing for the regions.
3. Dietary diversity is a fantastic goal, but fortification will continue to play an enormous role now and into the future. The reliance on staples may not be desirable to nutritionists but it is a fact of life and a habit that will take time to shift. The quantities of maize flour being produced, sold and consumed are enormous. We saw bikes laden with up to 175kg in sacks of flour chugging to and fro from mill to market all week long. Fortifying this flour means better public health, fewer illnesses, fewer birth defects, lower prevalence of anaemia… Let's double down on this proven, high-impact intervention.
4. We need to make the business case. If we want to transform food systems in a sustainable way then we are operating through the private sector and we are, for better or worse, at the whim of the all the associated market dynamics and forces of capitalism. So, we can't expect the more expensive, less profitable, more labour- and resource-intensive solutions to bear fruit. What can we do? We need to make sure that the nutrition-positive, environment-positive, socially-positive choices are also good for business - and, by extension, livelihoods, economic development, and poverty alleviation. Tangibly, I think that means starting with three questions: 1) how do we minimise the doing-good premium, 2) how do we open up new revenues or profits, and 3) how do we offset the cost of doing good elsewhere in business operations. Our fortification business modelling work in Tanzania seeks to do just that.
5. The links from global agendas to local implementation are becoming stronger and clearer, but we need more. The great thing about my role is that I'll spend a week with colleagues in Sweden for Stockholm+50, talking about all that we need to do at a high level, and in that same month I'll find myself in rural Tanzania, focusing on the project-level, on-the-ground implementation. Here's the great news: the global agendas (top of our minds at COPs, the UNFSS, N4G, Stockholm+50 and others) are being channelled through national governments to regional governments to districts and even to villages. Those lofty, abstract goals aren't so abstract any more. The Food Systems Transformation Plans, NDCs, and national coordination mechanisms - unique to every country, no doubt - are starting to create change at grass-roots level. This can only be a good thing.

I could go on but this is already long enough so just a few personal notes on my trip:

I didn't see much extraordinary wildlife (just one monkey and a large eagle) but I did manage some decent views of Kilimanjaro. I certainly enjoyed fruit fresh straight from the tree, sugar cane, kuku makange, fresh samaki and ugali, and even a few nsenene. After all, business travel should always be liberally interspersed with gastro-tourism, right? Oh - and I was even there to witness my new second team, Yanga FC, be crowned champions of the Tanzania Premier League. Fiston Mayele the hero. The crowd went wild. And so did I.

What a week. See you again soon, Tanzania.

*By the way, the trip from Bukoba to Mwanza wasn't intentional. We had booked a flight from Bukoba at 16:20 to take us back to Dar, only to turn up at the suspiciously deserted airport to be told that no flights were taking off that day. At all. Cancelled without warning. All flights from Bukoba the next day were fully booked. Needing to get back to Dar to catch my flight back home, we took the difficult decision to jump into a car (kindly provided by one of the regional government bodies) and to drive 500km to the nearest airport: Mwanza. 7hrs, plus a ferry across the Mwanza Strait. We arrived exhausted at 2am. I left to Mwanza Airport at 6am the next morning to head back to Dar. An epic adventure.