Making a Difference
CGIAR IMPACT AREAS:
Poverty reduction, livelihoods, and jobs
Environmental health and biodiversity
Gender equality, youth, and social inclusion
For more than three decades,
This blog post is part of a special monthly series entitled “Making a Difference,” documenting the impact of IFPRI's projects and initiatives. These stories reflect the wide breadth of the Institute's research, communications, and capacity-strengthening activities around the world, in fulfillment of its mission. The blog series has been peer-reviewed by IFPRI's Impact Committee members.
This review of research outcomes was written by Tamsin Zandstra, Research Analyst, Director General's Office, IFPRI; Gashaw T. Abate, Research Fellow, Markets, Trade, and Institutions Unit, IFPRI; Shahidur Rashid, Director, South Asia Office, Development Strategies and Governance Unit, IFPRI; and Nicholas Minot, Deputy Division Director, Markets, Trade, and Institutions Unit, IFPRI.
About IFPRI The International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), a research center of CGIAR, provides research-based policy solutions to sustainably reduce poverty and end hunger and malnutrition in low- and middle-income countries. IFPRI was established in 1975 to identify and analyze alternative national and international strategies and policies for meeting the food needs of the developing world, with particular emphasis on low-income countries and on the poorer groups in those countries. Partnerships, communications, capacity strengthening, and data and knowledge management are essential components for translating IFPRI’s research to action and impact. The Institute’s regional and country programs play a critical role in responding to demand for food policy research and in delivering holistic support to country-led development. IFPRI collaborates with partners around the world.
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IFPRI is reaching the lives of millions of people through its contribution to policies and programs that reduce poverty, hunger, and malnutrition. This blog series highlights how IFPRI’s research is contributing to policy decisions and investments made by governments, development organizations, and other partners, and making a difference for food and nutrition security in developing countries around the world.
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IFPRI has worked with the government of Ethiopia to provide evidence-based advice on the development of the country’s agricultural sector.
IFPRI’s research and policy recommendations led to the establishment of Ethiopia’s Agricultural Transformation Agency (ATA) in 2010, which continues to play a critical role in guiding the country’s agricultural development and sustainability.
IFPRI has provided both short- and long-term strategic research and analytical support to the ATA, now known as the Agricultural Transformation Institute (ATI).
As part of the collaboration with the ATA, IFPRI has hosted
in Ethiopia on gender mainstreaming, program monitoring and evaluation, survey design, and data collection and analysis tools.
more than 20 formal capacity building workshops and training events
In 2009, IFPRI partnered with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) to establish the Research for Ethiopia’s Agricultural Policy Program (REAP). In a related review of Ethiopia’s agricultural sector, IFPRI worked with the government to select a range of priority research topics, and conducted eight studies over two years to analyze the strengths and weaknesses of the country’s agricultural production. These studies led to a comprehensive review and recommendations for national strategies to achieve agricultural growth, which were then consolidated in a synthesis report. After the report was delivered in 2010, the Agricultural Transformation Agency (ATA) was created in December of the same year.
The ATA collaborates with partners, including the Ministry of Agriculture (MoA) and regional bureaus of agriculture, to identify systemic bottlenecks and to test and implement new policies to address structural issues in Ethiopia’s agricultural sector. It also works to sustain the growth achieved in the sector over the past decade. The ATA works across the entire food system to ensure that farmers can access high-quality inputs like seeds, provide research on the most effective ways to improve soil quality, and support farmers’ access to critical inputs and output markets for key crops.
Since the ATA was founded, its work has led to a more efficient and productive agricultural sector, contributing to productivity gains for farmers, economic growth, and a reduction in poverty and gender inequality in rural Ethiopia.
The Importance of the Agricultural Transformation Agency in Ethiopia
IFPRI's history of collaboration with the ATA
IFPRI’s long-term strategic research support to the ATA has led to several tangible government policy outcomes. Studies that contributed to concrete impacts focused on the following areas:
Research impacts
The relationship between IFPRI and the ATA predates the creation of the ATA itself. IFPRI was a primary partner in the diagnostic study that was initially done at the request of the prime minister… to the Gates Foundation… which led to the creation of the ATA.
Our role as a problem-solving organization is only one part of the solution we provide to Ethiopia’s agricultural system. This problem-solving function, which is undertaken with organizations such as IFPRI, other development partners, NGOs, and even the private sector, allows us to identify these systematic bottlenecks.
– Khalid Bomba
ATA’s founding CEO
Capacity building
Longitudinal data
What is IFPRI’s current work with the ATI?
Agriculture is integral to the Ethiopian economy. In recent years, the sector contributed about 35 percent of GDP, employed an estimated 65 percent of the working population, and generated about 75 percent of foreign currency from exports. When Ethiopia’s government established its Growth and Transformation Plan in 2010, it prioritized investments in the agricultural sector to help achieve its goal of becoming a middle-income country by 2025.
Technology adoption
Input markets
Commodity value chains
Gender
Macroeconomic policy
Technology adoption
IFPRI conducted a rigorous evaluation of the teff and wheat technology packages introduced by the ATA. Results from these studies informed the scaling-up of key components of the packages. For example, results from an evaluation of a wheat technology package, which examined the experiences of 2,000 smallholder farmers, were used as key inputs to design and scale up the government’s wheat initiative and later develop wheat production clusters.
Input markets
IFPRI worked with the ATA to critically assess Ethiopia’s fertilizer and seed markets, examining the policies, institutions, and actors involved and the incentive structure. In 2012, the MoA acted on the results from a projection model for fertilizer demand, which was developed as part of this study. These actions reduced inflated import projections and led to savings of around $200 million that year. IFPRI also supported the ATA in developing recommendation maps for soil fertility status and fertilizer use, the first of their kind in sub-Saharan Africa. Additionally, the results from a series of IFPRI studies on seed markets, including the evaluation of the Direct Seed Marketing system promoted by the ATA, were a key input in the development of Ethiopia’s current seed strategy and law.
Macroeconomic policy
IFPRI provided short-term analytical support to generate evidence for immediate policy decisions. Examples of this support include (1) a computable general equilibrium model of the Ethiopian economy that examined the likely broad national effects of increased grain productivity on growth, income, and prices; (2) a study on the cost-effectiveness of public wheat imports that indicated purchasing local products rather than imports yielded more savings in most years; (3) an analysis that estimated the adverse effects of grain export bans on local production and prices; and (4) results from a study of crop storage issues using specialized survey data, which were a key input for the policy discussion on expanding national grain storage capacity.
Commodity value chains
The ATA and MoA used results from IFPRI studies on selected value chains (i.e., for wheat, maize, and malt barley) as key inputs to develop national commodity-level strategies. The malt barley study, in particular, was instrumental in showing that promoting local production could yield enormous potential gains for both demand and supply. The ATA used the insights from this study to promote malt barley production and attract foreign private investment in malt processing.
Gender
IFPRI supported the ATA by creating a national sex-disaggregated baseline database that can be used to support new government policies to address disadvantages faced by women farmers in Ethiopia. The database was used in an analysis that showed clear gender gaps in education, access to household labor, and participation in crop production and livestock husbandry. The database is now being used to help close these resource gaps through efforts that are also significantly improving crop yields.
After the first three years of the ATA’s operation, IFPRI coordinated a review of the agency’s experiences, focusing on accomplishments and challenges going forward. Given that the ATA was the first agency of its kind in Ethiopia—in terms of both design and implementation—the review helped the organization to better understand areas in need of course correction and aided its partners in determining subsequent investment and funding decisions.
Most recently, BMGF decided to test the theory of change behind its Agricultural Development (AgDev) Program’s Inclusive Agricultural Transformation (IAT) strategy, which indicates key trends and signals of the agricultural transformation process. From 2020 to 2021, IFPRI collaborated with BMGF and the ATA to analyze data from three rural household surveys conducted in 2012, 2016, and 2019. Sample sizes ranged from 3,000–5,300 households, of which about 2,000 were panel households. The analysis examined various dimensions of agricultural transformation, including agricultural intensification, crop commercialization, income diversification, irrigation, and gender. The results showed a rise in crop intensification from 2012–2019, leading to higher and more stable yields, and an increase in crop commercialization, including small-scale farmers. This work was instrumental in providing empirical validation to the theory of change underlying BMGF’s IAT strategy.
The impressive growth in performance of Ethiopia's agricultural sector over the past two decades is widely recognized… IFPRI's research team teased out progress in on-farm productivity, output market participation, and enterprise diversification at the household scale, with important gendered insights where data allowed. These studies have provided strong empirical validation of AgDev's theory of change in driving agricultural transformation.
– Stanley Wood
Senior Officer, Strategy, AgDev, BMGF
As part of its collaboration with the ATA, IFPRI has conducted many capacity-building activities in Ethiopia. To provide training in data analysis, for example, IFPRI led an introductory training course on statistical software in November 2012 at the Ethiopian Institute of Agricultural Research (EIAR), with representation from nearly three dozen researchers from the ATA, EIAR, and the Ethiopia Development Research Institute. At the end of the course, participants received individually licensed copies of the Stata software, marking the first time that researchers from several of Ethiopia’s agricultural institutions had access to statistical software. Between 2012 and 2015, more than 200 people participated in eight more of these training courses.
IFPRI’s targeted gender empowerment activities have also been extremely influential. In 2014, IFPRI led two projects on gender and agriculture in Ethiopia: one of the resulting reports revealed patterns of agricultural production among men and women smallholders, while the other report reviewed gender trends in agriculture over the previous decade.
These analyses showed gender inequality in access to productive resources, extension services, new technology, land use and ownership, and participation in community organizations. Women farmers also faced barriers caused by regional differences. To address these issues, IFPRI partnered with the MoA’s Women’s Affairs Directorate, the ATA, and the Amhara National Regional State Bureau of Agriculture to organize a regional gender workshop in the state of Amhara in June 2015. More than 45 senior officials from the government and nongovernmental organizations attended the event, and three more workshops on this topic were held in other regions.
Collecting longitudinal data is central to IFPRI’s support for the ATA. Since 2012, IFPRI has collected four rounds of panel household data that are being used to evaluate flagship programs such as the Agricultural Commercialization Cluster (ACC) and improve understanding of conditions that smallholder farmers face, including insights into livelihoods and welfare status.
IFPRI continues to work closely with the ATA, which is now known as the ATI. The institute is currently conducting a midterm evaluation of the ACC, a flagship program of the ATI and MoA. The ACC integrates interventions prioritized by Ethiopia’s agricultural transformation agenda to target selected high-value and strategic commodities in specific locations.
In sum, IFPRI’s work in Ethiopia continues to make valuable contributions to support understanding of agriculture’s role as a vital driver of development. Two key elements of IFPRI’s efforts include support for evidence-informed policies and the establishment of influential local institutions to guide sustainable agricultural development. Because of the Ethiopian government’s commitment to policy decisions based on high-quality research, IFPRI’s work has made a significant impact on the country’s growing economy.
Role of agriculture in Ethiopia
