UAE, Dubai: PRESIDENT Samia Suluhu Hassan on Sunday invited stakeholders across the world to come and invest on tremendous agro-opportunities available as Tanzania rolls out the Building a Better Tomorrow (BBT) programme.
Dr Samia said BBT is built for realising inclusive economic development and environment protection.
"Welcome one, welcome all. Tanzania is ready to work with everybody who is ready to work with us," Dr Samia said at the on-going Conference of the Parties (COP28) in Dubai, United Arab Emirates (UAE) when she chaired a side-line high level meeting on agricultural opportunities for green growth transformation in Tanzania.
She said Tanzania intends to be a hub for food production in Eastern and Central Africa in line with the nation's agriculture agenda that aims at making the sector grow by 10 per cent by 2030 whereby there will be eight million full irrigated hectares.
Dr Samia said to achieve the target a total of 1.8 billion US dollar (over 4.52tri/-) is needed to be raised in the next seven years.
Speaking about the BBT which kicked off last year, Dr Samia said the programme has been fostering youth and women engagement in farming in effort to upscale jobs creation in the country with over 61 million people of whom 70 per cent are youths.
He said the programme embraces agro-green revolution by operating alongside irrigation systems which increase working hours per year to secure all workforces in sustainable production whereby some of them could get into unsustainable activities including charcoal burning causing deforestation.
He said BBT not only targets on beating the Sustainable Development Goals (SGDs) two which advocates for zero hunger but also the goal 13 which alerts UN members including Tanzania to take urgent actions to combat climate change and its impacts.
She said COP 28 offers a pitch for Tanzania to realise its green agricultural transformative vision by utilising presence of key stakeholders including heads of states, international agencies such as World Bank, World Food Programme (WFP), Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and African Development Bank Group (AfDB) who have been supporting holistic development approach in the country.
Dr Samia called potential private sectors from all over the world to cooperate with Tanzania in facilitating green agricultural revolution through among others partnership in entire agro-value chains.
For his part, World Bank's Global Director of Agriculture and Food Global Practice, Mr Martien van Nieuwkoop commended Tanzania for initiating the BBT which creates conducive atmosphere for the youth and women involvement in production to cater for per capital Income, economic growth and climate change mitigation.
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"Tanzania is already doing, congratulation. The World Bank is interested to replicate this approach of Tanzania to other countries" he said.
He said Tanzania by using her domestic resources and multilateral finance including from the World Bank can smoothly run the BBT which have impactful meaning for citizen livelihoods and the country.
This year's Dubai global conference on climate change (COP 28) kicked off on November 30 and is expected to conclude on December 12 this year.
It is expected to speed up transition to clean energy, catalysing climate financing by environment stakeholders delivering on old promises and setting the framework for a new climate financing approach.
