Ethiopia has enacted an ambitious home grown economic reform agenda since 2018 and concurrently revised her agricultural and rural development policy to meet the following key objective:
- Inclusive and accelerated growth in production and productivity (providing benefits to all members of society)
- Increased competitiveness of smallholder and pastoralist agriculture
- Improved use of natural resources by enhancing development, protection and conservation of the natural resource base
- Increasing rural (non-farm) employment opportunities
- Improving resilience to natural and other causes of vulnerability
In-line with the above, the Ethiopian Ministry of Agriculture has designed the Agriculture Sector 10 Years Perspective Plan (2020-2030) with the objective of overall structural transformation in the country’s agriculture. In support of implementations of the ten years` perspective plans, the Ministry of Agricultural (MoA) has launched Food System Resilience Program (FSRP) as the national flagship project with the aim to contribute to food-system-transformation, enhanced competitiveness, rural job creation, and improved resilience. The project focuses on three main pillars including rural job creation, improving competitiveness of the agri-food system, and enhancing the overall resilience of the country’s agricultural sector towards ensuring food and nutrition security. Overall, the project aims to improve resilience of food systems and increase preparedness against food insecurity in Ethiopia, which is also in-line with the NESTLER project initiatives within EU-Africa.
Three members of the NESTLER team at EIAR have participated in the launching workshop of the project held on 9th March 2023 and 6th April 2023 at MoA and EIAR, respectively and gained useful experiences of practical relevance to the NESTLER project initiatives. Moreover, as the NESTLER team at EIAR is also engaged in the implementation of the research component of FSRP, it is anticipated that some of the results emanating from the ongoing pilot demonstrations under the NESTLER project will be potential inputs for integration into FSRP initiatives and further promotion to end users at reasonable scale.