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DAR ES SALAAM, Dec. 15 (Xinhua) -- The African Development Fund (ADF), the concessional window of the African Development Bank (AfDB), has approved a 93.51-million-US-dollars loan to Tanzania to support the country's agricultural sector, a statement released by ADF said on Thursday.
The statement said the money will be channeled to the Tanzania Agricultural Development Bank (TADB).
"The funding will contribute to supporting Tanzania's agriculture sector and achieving the country's development goals," said the statement issued in the east African country's commercial capital Dar es Salaam.
TADB is a national development finance institution with its mission of developing the agriculture sector in Tanzania, which provides employment for about 67 per cent of the population and has a very big potential for expansion given the abundance of arable land and the availability of inland water resources.
The ADF statement said the sector needs to be developed if Tanzania is to achieve sustainable economic development and poverty reduction.
The statement also said in order for the country to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals and its Tanzania Development Vision 2025, the agriculture sector must sustainably grow at over 10 per cent annually.
Unfortunately, over the past ten years, the sector has grown at an average of 4.4 per cent annually and contributed an average of 29.3 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP), said the statement.
"These rates have recently declined to 3.2 per cent per year and 26 per cent of GDP, respectively," said the statement.
The statement said a major problem facing the country's agriculture sector is the unavailability of medium to long-term finance to support, among other things, agricultural production, processing and marketing.
It said TADB is designed to address this through the provision of much-needed funding to a sector that is key to the country's development.
Akinwumi Adesina, the AfDB President, said: "The TADB is expected to play a key role in facilitating attainment of sustainable food self-sufficiency and food security in Tanzania."
He added that TADB is expected to promote and support the transformation of agriculture from subsistence to commercial farming in order to effectively and sustainably contribute to inclusive economic growth and poverty reduction. Enditem
