Tanzania’s fish export earnings rose 11.3% to $181.6m, around £136m, in the year to August 2026, up from $163.1m. That rise was reported in the Bank of Tanzania’s September economic review and corroborated separately by the Ministry of Livestock and Fisheries. The increase, worth about $18.5m, or roughly £14m, was driven largely by improvements in how catches are processed and preserved before export. Having two separate official sources confirm similar figures lends weight to the finding that the rise reflects a genuine shift in the trade.
National fish export volumes run between 57,000 and 60,000 tonnes a year. That estimate comes from Professor Mohamed Sheikh, deputy permanent secretary at the Ministry of Livestock and Fisheries. Lake Victoria supplies an estimated 80% to 85% of that volume. Nile perch fillets, shipped on to Europe, the Americas and Asia, form the backbone of the trade. Sardines harvested from Lake Victoria and Lake Tanganyika, along with fish maws sold to buyers in China and Hong Kong, round out the freshwater catch.
Marine products add a smaller but growing share
Marine exports, chiefly crabs and lobsters caught off Tanzania’s Indian Ocean coast, account for roughly 15% of national fish export volumes, Sheikh said. Buyers span China, Hong Kong, the United States, the European Union and several neighbouring African countries. That geographically diverse customer base gives Tanzania’s fisheries sector some protection against demand swings in any single market. These marine catches make up a smaller share of total export volumes than freshwater fish. Even so, the range of buyers underlines the sector’s reach well beyond East Africa’s lakes.
Cold-chain investment underpins the processing gains
Much of the recent improvement in export value traces back to cold-chain infrastructure rather than bigger catches. Hashim Mumin, coordinator of the Fish4ACP project, pointed to new smoking kilns and stoves and to solar-powered freezers installed around Lake Tanganyika. He also cited ice plants built in the towns of Kigoma and Uvinza, with a third plant planned for Tanganyika District in Katavi Region. Each plant produces around 15 tonnes of ice a day, and switching to solar power has cut production costs at these facilities by half. Kigoma and Uvinza sit close to the Lake Tanganyika fishing grounds that the new equipment is meant to serve.
“Better cold chains can convert Tanzania’s fisheries growth into higher export value,” Mumin said. He framed the investment as a way to capture more value from fish. That fish might otherwise spoil or be sold at lower grades before reaching processors. Fishing communities around Lake Tanganyika have long struggled with limited refrigeration. That meant a share of each catch was lost or downgraded before it could reach export-quality buyers. Solar ice plants and better smoking equipment address that bottleneck directly, letting more of the harvest reach higher-value markets intact.
The improvement comes as competition for freshwater fish stocks across the Great Lakes region remains intense. Kenya and Uganda both draw on the same Lake Victoria Nile perch populations that supply the bulk of Tanzania’s export trade. Regional fisheries managers have periodically warned that overfishing could threaten the long-term sustainability of those stocks even as export earnings climb. That shared reliance means Tanzania’s gains are not happening in isolation. Any regional decline in Nile perch stocks could ripple across all three countries’ export sectors.
For now, Tanzania’s figures point to a sector converting modest catch growth into meaningfully higher export earnings through infrastructure rather than expanded fishing effort. Whether that balance holds will depend on how quickly the planned Katavi ice plant and further cold-chain investment reach fishing communities. Those communities lie beyond the areas already covered by the Fish4ACP project. That timeline matters because fishing communities outside Kigoma and Uvinza still lack the solar ice plants already operating in those two towns. This gap leaves part of the catch exposed to the same losses the new infrastructure was built to prevent.
Tanzania’s gains add to a broader pattern of export growth this week, alongside Ecuador’s 5.5% rise in banana shipments, as exporters across different continents find new buyers for their staple commodities.
