Agricultural Mechanisation for Smallholder Farmers in Ethiopia (AMS)
Despite good success in the implementation of AGTP II, the Ministry of Agriculture and the national organizations involved are not yet sufficiently capable of implementing a private sector-oriented agricultural policy and creating the necessary conditions to enable a broad transformation of smallholder farms from subsistence agriculture to commercial agriculture. As a result, income and employment potentials remain untapped. The framework conditions for efficient land management based on the use of machinery are not sufficiently in place. The project “Agricultural Mechanization for Smallholder Farmers in Ethiopia (AMS)“started in 2015 and the current phase pursues the following objective: “The legal, institutional and operational framework for spreading agricultural mechanization has been improved.”
The target group of the project are smallholder farmers who lack the resources to mechanize their farms and local agricultural service providers (MSMEs) who facilitate the mechanization. The geographical focus is on the regional states of Amhara and Oromia and the Southern Nations, Nationalities and Peoples Regional State (SNNPRS). Intermediaries of the project are contractors, machinery dealers, experts and managers of agricultural training institutes, agricultural cooperative associations (Unions of Cooperatives) and private service providers in the agricultural sector. Women do not work as external service providers due to the high travel load, constantly changing external overnight stays and often difficult working conditions.
The project builds on the learning experiences of the Kulumsa Agricultural Training Centre, which was funded by the German Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture (BMEL) until the end of 2020, and the technical cooperation predecessor module “Increasing agricultural production through innovation (incl. mechanization)”.
In the first two years of the predecessor module, the number of smallholder households using mechanization services increased by 16,300. Surveys showed that the quality of services provided by trained machinery operators was rated significantly higher than those who did not receive such training (rated at an average of 5.0 out of 6 points compared to 2.3 points before). However, the figures so far do not yet indicate whether mechanization has also led to relevant increases in production. More than 1,100 people from different target groups have shown their interest and gained improved knowledge in agricultural mechanization by participating in field days and field demonstrations. A digital market platform based on the contractor business model was developed together with an Ethiopian start-up company. It is currently in the testing phase. A buying guide for agricultural machinery was created.
The political executing agency is the Ethiopian Ministry of Agriculture (MoA). MoA is also an implementing partner both at the federal level (MoA) and with the Regional Bureaus of Agriculture (RBoA) in the three target regions SNNPR, Amhara and Oromia.
