From hard labor to higher profits: Tanzania’s smallholders win big through mechanized threshing power

For years, smallholder farmers across Tanzania toiled under the sun from dawn to dusk, their hands calloused, their backs bent, and their hopes dimmed by the weight of hard labor. Despite all their effort, profits remained painfully small. Without access to affordable machinery, manual threshing of common beans, maize, or sunflower was an exhausting and days-long task. Grains spoiled easily, post-harvest losses mounted, and dreams of financial progress were left scattered like chaff in the wind.

For Amina Nyange, a mother and farmer from Tanzania’s Dodoma Region, each harvest season was a test of endurance.

“I used to depend entirely on manual labor,” she recalls. “It took me days to finish threshing, and I would lose much of my harvest to spoilage.”

Then, one day, things changed. Local youth technicians introduced Amina to a Multi-Crop Thresher (MCT) – a portable machine that can thresh, shell, and clean more than nine crops, from maize and beans to sunflower and sorghum. Developed by Imara Technology Ltd, a Tanzanian company supported by the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT through the Pan-Africa Bean Research Alliance (PABRA), this simple piece of technology would prove revolutionary.