Acting Now for Food Security and Resilient Food Systems: Ethiopia Baseline Report

Overview

Solidaridad's PMEL team carried out this internal baseline in July 2023 for the Acting Now programme (2023-2025) in Meskan and Mareko districts, around Butajira in SNNP region. The programme targets 20,000 smallholder farmers, with a focus on women and youth, and 13 service providers, and aims to increase food production, incomes and resilience. The baseline sets starting values for the programme KPIs: food sufficiency, income, yield, access to services, training and service-provider support. Treatment households in 22 project kebeles are compared with households in 6 non-project kebeles, and results are broken down by sex.

Key findings

• The average MAHFP was 9.2 months across 730 farmers (treatment 8.7, control 10.6). 10% of treatment households and 43% of control households had enough food in all 12 months.
• On the household hunger scale, 33% of farmers faced little to no hunger, 63% moderate hunger and 3% severe hunger (treatment group: 28%, 69% and 3%).
• 64% of treatment and 63% of control respondents could not read and write, with a significantly higher share among women. 66% of treatment respondents had no access to a phone, and only 2% (treatment) and 5% (control) had mobile internet.
• Maize was the primary crop for about 90% of farmers. Average cultivated land was 1.2 acres in the treatment group and 1.0 acre in the control group.
• Of crop responses, 38% reported lower farm income than the year before, 40% no change and 22% an increase. 43% reported lower yields, mainly because of drought, pests and diseases, and lack of inputs.
• Mean annual production costs were ETB 3,138 per farmer, with fertiliser the largest item (mean ETB 1,592).
• 53% of treatment farmers and 15% of control farmers had received a service in the past year, mostly education and training (41% of services received). 36% (treatment) and 51% (control) belonged to a producer organisation. All 11 service providers interviewed were owned by men.

In figures

Recommendations

• Build close working relationships with partners in the project area, such as the Productive Safety Net Project (PSNP), to create synergies.
• Use farmer field days rather than mobile-phone advisory services to share good agricultural practices and new technology.
• Give gender issues much more attention, given the large gaps found.
• Focus interventions on maize, the main crop, together with complementary climate-smart activities.
• Concentrate service support on improved input supply (seeds, fertiliser, agro-chemicals) and aggregation/buying services.
• Work with government to digitise farmer profiling and use the data to link farmers to service providers, markets and extension.

Methodology

Mixed-methods baseline: a household survey of 730-741 smallholder farmers selected by multi-stage purposive and random sampling (project kebeles as treatment, neighbouring non-project kebeles as comparison), interviews with 11 service providers, a transect walk and a review of PSNP documents. Data were collected on KoboToolbox and analysed in Python and R.

Limitations

• The study captures one point in time, and conditions such as climate may change.
• External factors (economic changes, policy shifts, natural disasters) were not accounted for and may affect later comparisons.
• Farmers kept poor or no records of yields and costs, and all data were self-reported, which may introduce bias.
• Consent was hard to obtain because of high expectations or poor past experiences with data collection.
• Service providers could not be split into treatment and control groups, and time was short for data collection, analysis and writing.