News in brief: Smallholder farmers in Ethiopia have partnered with the Agricultural Transformation Institute (ATI) and Lersha, a digital agriculture platform, to digitise agriculture, offering digital services and job creation.
Smallholder farmers have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with collaborating partners to digitise agriculture in Ethiopian, according to a local news source.
The farmers reached the agreement with Ethiopia’s Agricultural Transformation Institute (ATI) and Lersha, a digital agriculture platform.
The deal will focuses on implementing various digital agriculture services for farmers. It also offers a diverse range of priority value chains and includes job creation in the farmer production clusters.
ATI and Lersha will work together to create digital profiles for over a million smallholder farmers, and provide agro-climate advisory and fertiliser recommendations.
The partnership is set to kick off official in September 2023 and end after a period of 3 years, in August 2026.
Mandefro Nigussie, ATI CEO, praised Lersha for its strong track record of innovation the private sector. He said the project will significantly impact lives of smallholder farmers in Ethiopia and assured of ATIâs commitment to working with the private sector to improve service delivery.
Meanwhile, Lershaâs managing director, Abraham Endrias, mentioned that the partnership was a key step in the companyâs efforts to promote digital services and create jobs for young people in rural areas.
According to an Ethiopian digital agricultural profile report, the majority of farmers have limited technical capacity to adopt digital services and products.
Most smallholder farmers in Ethiopia have limited access to digital farming solutions with limited financing to support launching and upscaling digital products being additional challenges.
Meanwhile, improving agricultural productivity in Ethiopia is crucial to alleviating poverty, and meeting growing food demand amid environmental stress and climate change.
