Tanzanian economic growth is commonly known to be an urban phenomenon, or derived from sectors like mining, tourism and infrastructure. It is not associated with change and dynamism in rural areas and the agricultural sector. Tanzanian farmers are typically known to be unproductive, farming small areas inefficiently, with only a minority responsible for the vast majority of sales. Rural places are concentrations of poverty – 84% of poor people live there, but only 70% of the population.
However the metrics and data which produce accounts such as these are problematic. They are based on sources which are not good at surveying rural populations who dislike close oversight, and economies where much exchange and activity is informal. Moreover they are based on measurements of variables and attributes which may not be the right things to measure if you are trying to track changes which are meaningful to the rural poor.
In this paper we present findings from a restudy of Mtowisa village in Rukwa region, a place that was classically poor by many measurements in 2000, but which has now experienced a transformation that is driven by local agricultural activity. We examine how those transformations can be captured, and what has driven them. All of this suggests more dynamism and activity in the agricultural sector than is commonly recognised in statistics and policy.