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woman receiving certificate from man in cassava field

Muhogo Bora

Helping rural communities in Tanzania thrive through inclusive, gender-responsive seed entrepreneurship.

Muhogo Bora in action

From cassava farmer to seed entrepreneur

In 2022, Asha Nasoro Luvila was earning a modest living growing cassava on five acres in rural Tanzania, facing many of the barriers that limit economic opportunities for women farmers.

Through Muhogo Bora, she received training, starter seed and support to become a Community Seed Entrepreneur, transforming her farm into a thriving business.

Today, Asha supplies more than 35,000 certified cassava cuttings to hundreds of farmers through a guaranteed market. The income helps pay her children's school fees, expand her farm and position her to invest in cassava processing technology that could create jobs in her community.

Asha's success demonstrates how Muhogo Bora helps women farmers build stronger livelihoods while strengthening local agricultural economies.

asha holding up cassava roots

Muhogo Bora basics

Launched in 2021, Muhogo Bora is a partnership between Cornell University, the Tanzania Agricultural Research Institute (TARI), and the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA). 

Together, we recognized the potential of the community seed entrepreneur concept, created to expand access to better planting material in rural communities. We also saw an opportunity to make this concept work for more people. 

Our model, now being deployed in rural Tanzania, addresses societal barriers women and youth face in building businesses of their own. Our work is now expanding and deepening, as we seek to examine, and eventually shift, the restrictive norms creating those barriers.

muhogo bora logo

What is a Community Seed Entrepreneur (CSE)?

Community Seed Entrepreneurs (CSEs) are trained farmers who produce and sell certified cassava planting materials. As trusted community leaders, CSEs help ensure that improved varieties—those with higher yields, better disease resistance, and traits consumers value—reach the farmers who need them most. 

By building networks of well-supported CSEs, Muhogo Bora is helping strengthen local seed systems, boost cassava production, and create new economic opportunities for women and youth in rural areas.

 

famers with advisor

Why are Community Seed Entrepreneurs important?

A big challenge in cassava production is access to clean, high-quality planting material. While improved varieties exist, getting them to small-scale farmers remains a bottleneck—especially in more remote or underserved areas.

Muhogo Bora helps address this gap by supporting Community Seed Entrepreneurs (CSEs), who are local farmers trained to multiply and share improved seed. This approach helps solve two problems at once—expanding access to better varieties, while also creating economic and social opportunities for farmers, particularly women and youth, to grow cassava for both seed and food. It’s a practical way to strengthen local seed systems and support resilience in rural communities.

 

group in casava field

Why focus on women and youth?

Muhogo Bora takes what's called a "gender responsive and transformative" approach in our community seed entrepreneur program. Our approach is gender responsive in that our methods are designed to help women and youth overcome barriers to becoming CSEs; for example, we hold our trainings in and near farmers' communities, and provide childcare and meals for the participants. 

A gender transformative intervention goes deeper, seeking to shift the norms and conditions that created those barriers in the first place. Both matter, because an initiative meant to strengthen food security and rural livelihoods, like the CSE program, can't afford to leave anyone out.

 

women with cards

Expanding our work

School nutrition pilot

Muhogo Bora is piloting a new effort to bring nutrient-rich, climate-resilient crops—primarily vitamin-A fortified sweet potato and iron and zinc-rich beans—into communities we already work with, improving child nutrition through school feeding while giving families another potential source of income.

Collaborating with teachers already in place, and guided by education and nutrition specialists, the pilot includes:

  • Demonstration plots on school grounds, with the harvest feeding directly into school meals and creating a new local market for CSEs
  • Seeds distributed to students to grow at home, connecting families to CSEs in their community
  • Nutrition education for teachers and students, in hopes that what's learned travels home too
school children with hands held high
Deepening gender-transformative work

Gender specialist Dr. Millicent Liani is leading new work to directly shift the social and legal inequality, land insecurity, gender-based violence, and restrictive norms that hold women and youth back more broadly--not just as seed entrepreneurs, but in their communities as a whole. The pilot runs in five wards of Urambo District, in partnership with the Land Rights Research and Resources Institute (LARRRI), the Legal Services Facility (LSF) Tanzania, and the Urambo Legal Availment and Charity (ULAC). (More about our partners below.)

Building on LSF's existing community-based paralegal model, which is trusted locally and equipped to support legal education and dispute resolution, the pilot includes:

  • Village and ward dialogues, local radio, and community theater, reaching entire communities, not just CSEs
  • Supporting women to obtain a Certificate of Customary Right of Occupancy, a document confirming their right to use village land; aiding in land disputes
  • Working through existing school clubs to teach students about land rights and respectful relationships

 

woman with newsprint
More about our partners

Legal Services Facility (LSF) - Established in 2011, LSF pools funding from multiple donors into a single fund that supports access to justice work across Tanzania and Zanzibar.

Urambo Legal Availment and Charity (ULAC) - A community-based organization of paralegals officially recognized by the Urambo District Council since 2017. Members work directly in their own communities on land rights, health, and legal literacy.

Land Rights Research and Resources Institute (LARRRI) - Also known as HakiArdhi (“Land Rights”), LARRRI is a Tanzanian NGO whose mission is to research into, train, advocate for, and promote the land rights of the rural-based and peri-urban small producers who constitute the majority of the Tanzanian population.

two men with cllpboard truck with tari logo bags in background
truck and motorcycle on rough muddy road

Images above: Tanzania’s national agricultural research institute, TARI, is responsible for a crucial function of Muhogo Bora: growing clean cassava cuttings and doing the difficult work of delivering them to rural CSEs for planting.

Our reach

433 rural farmers engaged as CSEs, including:

  • 43% women
  • 39% youth (under age 35)

Plus:

  • 2.8 million stakes of improved cassava varieties produced by the Tanzania Agricultural Research Institute (TARI) and distributed to CSEs
  • 648 acres of CSE land dedicated to producing high-quality cassava planting material to sell to other farmers in their communities

 
map of project territory
Play Muhogo Bora Project

Participating institutions

Project built on previous work by

Recent research

Uneven ground? Intersectional gender inequalities in the commercialized cassava seed system in Tanzania

From peer-reviewed journal article in Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems:

Development efforts should consider combining social change innovations with seed system interventions to address the inequitable norms and power relations that create unique constraints for women to operate effectively as seed entrepreneurs.

Citation: Liani, M. L., Cole, S. M., Mwakanyamale, D. F., Baumung, L., Saleh, N., Webber, A., Tufan, H. A., & Kapinga, R. (2023). Uneven ground? Intersectional gender inequalities in the commercialized cassava seed system in Tanzania. Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems, 7, Article 1155769. https://doi.org/10.3389/fsufs.2023.115576

Our team

Chiedozie Egesi
Chiedozie Egesi, Co-Principal Investigator
Hale Ann Tufan headshot
Hale Tufan, Co-Principal Investigator
kiddo mtundav headshot
Kiddo Mtunda, Technical Lead
heneriko kulembeka
Heneriko Kulembeka, Lead Scientist
canaan boyer
Canaan Boyer, Project Manager
Millicent L. Liani headshot
Millicent Liani, Gender Researcher
Regina Kapinga headshot
Regina Kapinga, Advocacy specialist
lembris lazier with cassava roots
Lembris Laizer, Agricultural economist
Ally N'gadoa
Ally N'gadoa, Zonal project manager
gloriana ndibalema headshot
Gloriana Ndibalema, Communications specialist
Habai Rafael Masunga
Habai Rafael Masunga, Lead scientist
Emmanuel Mrema
Emmanuel Mrema, Centre Director
Francisca Gwandu headshot
Francisca Gwandu, Cassava research officer
Issa Shemonge
Issa Shemahonge, Field officer
Erick Changa
Erick Chang'a, Field officer
cross-section of a cassava

News

Cornell-led initiative boosts access to healthy cassava seed in Tanzania

A $4.8  million gift will allow Cornell and partners to expand a project to improve Tanzania’s cassava seed system.

  • School of Integrative Plant Science
  • Agriculture
  • Food
Group draws on poster during a workshop

News

“We call for recognition of gender-based violence in agrifood systems”
Many obstacles prevent women from participating as seed entrepreneurs in the commercialized formal seed system delivery models, despite the fact that they are essential to informal seed exchanges, crop diversity maintenance, production...
  • Global Development Section
  • Global Development
Group poses at workshop

News

Muhogo Bora project validates a modified socially inclusive model
The Muhogo Bora is a three-year project executed by Cornell University College of Agriculture and Life Sciences , and implemented by the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) and Tanzania Agricultural Research Institute (TARI)...
  • Global Development Section
  • Global Development
Woman stands in field

News

Muhogo Bora celebrates the 2022 International Day of Rural Women
The United Nations General Assembly declared every October 15, as the International Day of Rural Women. This day is dedicated to celebrating the achievements and contributions of millions of women living in remote, rural places towards rural...
  • Global Development Section
  • Agriculture
  • Global Development