Story 07 Jan, 2026

SUSTAIN/Stories: Catalysing Investment: Three shifts to drive resilience in Tanzania and Mozambique’s Growth Corridors

The Southern Highlands corridor in Tanzania (formerly known as SAGCOT) and the Beira corridor in Mozambique were conceived as engines to accelerate development. The goal for these areas was two-fold: enhancing opportunities for local communities and creating a competitive agricultural sector able to increase market share in the international stage.

Agriculture accounts for roughly one quarter of GDP in both countries and employs around two-thirds of the workforce but is increasingly vulnerable to hazards and risks due to the climate crisis. When droughts, floods or cyclones hit these landscapes, it is not only smallholders who feel the shock; banks, processors, utilities, logistics firms and investors see it on their balance sheets.

Yet the investment potential is immense: the Southern Highlands corridor alone was designed to catalyse more than USD 3 billion in public–private investment, bringing 350,000 hectares into profitable production and generating more than USD 1.2 billion in annual farming revenues by 2030. Similar ambitions underpin Mozambique’s growth corridors, where infrastructure and value chain investments are intended to transform the country into a regional food and commodity hub.

The question for businesses, financiers and governments is no longer whether to invest in these corridors, but how to do so in ways that foster sustainability and resilience.

This is the lens that SUSTAIN applies to its work in Tanzania and Mozambique. Rather than treating environmental and social issues as compliance boxes to tick, SUSTAIN approaches growth corridors as integrated landscapes where economic, ecological and social systems are tightly intertwined.

In practice, this means driving three shifts:

SHIFT 1: Embed sustainability into commodity value chains through targeted investments

For investors, banks and agribusinesses, identifying credible, risk-aware deals is the main priority. SUSTAIN has been making these opportunities visible and investible. Working with partners in Tanzania and Mozambique, SUSTAIN has developed a series of value chain investment factsheets — spotlighting established commodities like rice and maize, and emerging ones — that translate complex landscape realities into concrete business cases. A product of joint dialogue between producers, cooperatives, processors, corridor authorities, local government, national regulators and financiers, each factsheet sets out the commercial opportunity, climate and land-health risks, capital needs, expected returns and the actions required to keep ecosystems and communities functioning.

The dialogue underpinning these factsheets matters: it aligns what is technically possible on the ground with what communities see as fair, and what banks and investors regard as bankable.

As Adam Ndatulu, Cluster & Partnerships Specialist at the Agricultural Growth Corridors of Tanzania, explains, economic resilience “is about creating diversified, fair and environmentally responsible value chains that allow both people and ecosystems to thrive over the long term”.

By grounding the factsheets in this broader notion of resilience, SUSTAIN is contributing to developing a pipeline of corridor investments that can diversify local economies, strengthen land and water stewardship and stabilise supply chains – outcomes that matter as much to credit committees as they do to communities.