Efforts to modernise agriculture in sub-Saharan Africa have increasingly relied on collaborative arrangements between public institutions and private actors. Yet evidence on how these agricultural public–private partnerships (PPPs) affect smallholder farmers’ ability to cope with climate risks remains limited. Using the case of Tanzania’s Southern Agricultural Growth
Corridor agricultural strategic partnerships, this article examines the implications of partnership interventions for enhancing smallholders’ absorptive, adaptive, and transformative capacities for climate resilience. Based on in-depth interviews and focus group discussions with partnership actors, the study shows that interventions are centred on the production and marketing nodes of the value chains. The partnerships contributed moderately to farmers’ absorptive capacity, but adaptive gains remained weak due to intermittent seed supply systems, unaffordable input prices, unstable markets, and a lack of irrigation infrastructure and technologies. Moreover, partnerships’ potential to enhance transformative capacity remains questionable, as they often fall short of tackling structural constraints.