Blog 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).  

To increase the impact and sustainability of the ag data hub, awareness creation and consultation workshop was conducted on November 9, 2023, at ILRI campus, Addis Ababa Ethiopia. More than 80 desk heads, department heads and higher officials from the MoA attended the workshop. The workshop was opened by Mr. Tessema G/Medhin, lead executive for Management at the Ministry of Agriculture, and he welcomed the participants and briefly presented the objective and program of the day. In the workshop, four key presentations which are useful to create and raise awareness of ag data hub were delivered.  

The first presentation was given by Dr. Lulseged Tamene who is Global Director for Multifunction Landscapes Lever and Principal Scientist at the Alliance. Dr. Lulseged in his presentation highlighted how the ag data hub development was initiated, the different development processes that the ag data hub went through, it’s status and the future direction towards a fully digitalized system with some use case examples. The national ag data hub system is a federated data product which provide agriculture data services and the development follows a federated architecture which paved the way other data systems would be developed through a federated framework to properly link to it. Such kind of architecture builds trust and creates a sense of ownership in the process and at the same time facilitate trusted data‐intensive services.  It also gives a roam to work phase by phase to ultimately build the country’s data ecosystem. In this line, mini-datahub at the Ethiopian Institute of Agricultural Research (EIAR) which is dedicated to capture research data from national agriculture research system is already in place and linked up with the national ag data hub at MoA. Following, two mini data hubs that focus on Natural Resources and Livestock are being developed. These mini data hubs also follow the federated framework and ultimately integrated with the national ag data hub. Mr Yohannes Reda, who oversees the development of the Natural Resources data hub at MoA gave a presentation about the overall development progress of the natural resource sector mini-data hub. He further talked about how it can be integrated with the national ag data hub so that it will be one of the main sources of data to the National Ag data hub.  

Dr. Melkamu Beyene, who is the lead developer of the national ag data hub and CEO of ACATECH Technology delivered a presentation about the overall development process and main functionality of the national ag data hub. He particularly gave much focus on the five major components of the data-hub system namely the data acquisition, data curation, data storage (i.e., core data catalogue and integrated multimodal storage), data access and security and user management functionalities of the ag-data hub system that have been developed.  He deep dived and demonstrated these functionalities with example data which is already harvested by system from the MOA.  

The last presentation was made by Mr. Anteneh Legesse who is ICT Executive at the MoA. Mr Anteneh presented the infrastructure development of the ICT directorate of the Ministry to properly operationalize the ag data hub. According to his presentation, the Ministry is building an excellent data center facility that can provide centralized services on storing, processing and disseminating data and applications. The ag data hub is now hosted in this facility and being piloted. Mr. Anteneh further explained about awareness creation and building capacity are the necessary activities which will be carried out in the Ministry for effective utilization of ag data hub and continuous supply of data into the system. 

After the presentations, a thorough discussion was held among the participants. The discussion was led by Mr Tessema G/Medhin and Mr. Anteneh Legesse. Very relevant questions and discussion points were raised by the participants regarding the ag data hub and overall digitalization works in the Ministry. Participants who got the chance to reflect their ideas agreed that the development of the ag data hub is very essential specifically to the Ministry and generally to the country as it contributes and fastens the digitalization process towards building digital economy. They also mentioned the ag data hub facilitates sectoral integration and resolves data inconsistency issues which is one of the very critical problems in the Ministry. It is also used for avoiding duplication of efforts so that it can save resources.