Related Keywords: Africa, cotton, cotton sector, Cotton Sector Development Programme, farming, Mills, Tanzania, Tanzania cotton board, Textile, Textile mills
While cotton growing and ginning is a top agricultural export industry in Tanzania, the sector has been struggling for the past 50 years. As a result, Tanzania’s half a million smallholder cotton farmers in the Lake Zone, the region southeast of Lake Victoria where most cotton is produced, remain impoverished. The poverty rate in Tanzania was 26.8 percent in 2016. Improving the Tanzanian economy, which relies on the cotton sector, is essential to further reduce the poverty rate and improving livelihoods.
