| Overview : Tanzania aspires to become a middle income country by 2025, as stated in the Tanzania Development Vision 2015 and outlined in its Five Year Development Plan II. The plan aims to foster economic growth and industrialization through key interventions, such as ICT investment in agriculture. UNDP as a key and trusted partner of the government supports that aspiration. In the quest to contribute towards realization of the stated aspiration, the current UNDP Country programme that runs from 2106 to 2021, has three thematic pillars, these are; Inclusive Growth & Sustainable Livelihoods, Democratic Governance and Environment Sustainability, Resilience and Climate Change. UNDP Inclusive Growth and Sustainable Livelihoods pillar is aligned with the priorities set out in the National Five Year Development Plan II (2016/17-2020/2021), Zanzibar Strategy for Economic and Social Transformation (2016-2020), The Tanzania Development Vision 2025, Global Sustainable Development Goals and United Nations Development Assistance Plan (2016-2021). Generally, it is agreed that Tanzania’s industrialization will be agro-base and therefore a robust agriculture sector will be key. However, for quite some time now the sector has before performing poorly with an average growth rate of no more than 4 percent compared with the Gross Domestic Product which has been posting growth rate of 7 percent on the average for the past decade. One of the key challenges that agriculture sector faces is lack of interest and/or disengagement of youth in agriculture. While advancement in innovation and Information Communication and Technology (ICT) have brought changes and positively impacted on service delivery in a number of sectors in the economy, its application in agriculture sector seems to lag behind. As result, there is slow transformation of the sector and thus making the sector uninteresting and less attractive employment option for majority of youth in Tanzania. With its experience in the agriculture sector and job creation interventions in Tanzania, UNDP sees the opportunity for collaboration and partnership with key players in the private sector to drive inclusive economic growth in agriculture. Increasing the use of ICT has been identified as a lever to creating access to markets for youth, women and SMEs in agriculture. Therefore, UNDP recognizes that leveraging technology is instrumental not only to achieving job creation for youth in the agriculture sector but also to strengthening value chain therein. |
