National Ag-Datahub Awareness Creation and Way forward in Strengthening Digitalization of Ethiopian Agriculture

Ethiopia is making great strides in of its effort to digitalize its major sectors in the country and transition towards a digital economy. In this regard, a Digital Strategy 2025 is set to transform the country’s national economy through four major sectoral pathways including agriculture, manufacturing, IT-enabled services, and tourism. Particularly, the recent effort in the development of the “National Digital Agricultural Extension and Advisory Services Roadmap to 2030” is a clear indication of the country’s commitment to transforming its agriculture through digital solutions.

The Alliance of Bioversity International and International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) hereafter the Alliance has recognized the government’s agenda towards digitalization of the agricultural sector and has put tremendous efforts to create awareness and build capacity in agricultural data collection, organization, management and analytics. As part of this effort, the Alliance and its partners have started to co-develop an integrated Agricultural Data Hub and ‘sister hubs’ (hereafter ag data hub) to harmonize and standardize agriculture-related datasets in the county and facilitate access and sharing of data. Once populated with data, the ag data hub will also be instrumental to facilitate and encourage innovations in the development of decision-support tools and advisories across different use cases. The data hub is co-developed to be a dedicated, and publicly owned and operated – one-stop shop for different users. The ag data hub is a collaborative effort between the MoA, EIAR, ATI, SCGSI, CSS, ACATECH, Alliance, CIMMYT, and ILRI through a finance support by Accelerating Impacts of CGIAR Climate Research for Africa (AICCRA) project. It is hosted at the MoA and can be accessed through (https://datahub.moa.gov.et).