Strengthening gender-responsive agricultural extension training in Tanzania

In Tanzania, AgriFoSe2030 supports the project Gender-sensitive village extension training (GenSens), which aims to strengthen gender responsiveness within Tanzania’s agricultural training system. The project is led by Dr. Merezia Wilson and builds the capacity of vocational college tutors and future extension agents to better understand and address gender dynamics in agricultural development. By improving how gender is mainstreamed in extension training, the project aims to enhance advisory services to smallholder farmers, particularly women, who produce a significant share of the country’s food. The project is implemented primarily in Tanzania with regional collaboration from Kenya and Zimbabwe between June 2025 and December 2026.

The project is currently training tutors from all 16 Ministry of Agriculture Training Institutes (MATIs), 14 public and 2 private colleges, to mainstream gender perspectives across their curricula and teaching practice. The focus is on equipping tutors to prepare extension students to deliver advisory services that effectively address gendered skill and power gaps without increasing women’s labour burden. This work is expected to support improved uptake of agricultural innovations and contribute to national food and income security.

Learning from the past

In the previous phase, the GenSens project highlighted three critical gaps:

1. Limited depth of tutors’ conceptual understanding of gender despite familiarity with terminology
2. A persistent theory-practice gap in applying gender concepts to extension and farming realities where tutors knew gender concepts abstractly but struggled to apply them in teaching and real farming contexts
3. The siloing of gender within a single module rather than integrating it across curricula.

These constraints reduced the effectiveness of gender-sensitive extension delivery. The extended phase of the GenSens responds by scaling and deepening capacity strengthening across all MATIs. Notably, previous phase also demonstrated promising mindset shifts among participated farmer groups and tutors.

How to move forward

The project expects to contribute to more gender-responsive extension services delivered by public and private actors to women and men smallholder farmers in Tanzania. A key anticipated outcome is a shift from viewing gender as merely numerical balance toward understanding it as embedded social relations, power dynamics and roles that shape agricultural production. This transformation is expected to support improved household food security, productivity, and income, aligned with national policy priorities.

By the end of the phase, the extended GenSens project aims to institutionalize gender mainstreaming across MATI curricula. Tutors and future extension agents will be better equipped to conduct practical gender analyses and design context-responsive advisory services. This will help ensure that extension support responds to the real needs of both women and men farmers, improving the effectiveness and sustainability of agricultural interventions. In addition, the project will strengthen regional knowledge exchange through collaboration with partners in Zimbabwe and Kenya contributing to more inclusive and resilient agricultural extension systems.

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