WB’s digital agriculture lead praises Ethiopia’s digital agriculture efforts

Addis Ababa, April 11, 2025 (FMC) – The World Bank’s (WB) Global Lead for Data-Driven Digital Agriculture and Innovation has commended Ethiopia’s agricultural  progress driven by digital data to enhance productivity.

Parmesh Shah, World Bank’s Global Lead for Data-Driven Digital Agriculture and Innovation said that Ethiopia has made significant progress in leveraging agricultural digital data to enhance productivity.

According to Shah, substantial improvements in African agricultural productivity, products, and services can be achieved through investments in data regarding farmers, farms, soils, climate, and weather, coupled with the development of a data platform.

He further emphasized the critical requirement for significant investment in data systems and data platforms.

Shah also commended that “Ethiopia has developed a five-year digital agriculture roadmap and is providing some advisory services to farmers based on data. It has also digitized all their soil data, and a digitized soil map is available.”

He also acknowledged Ethiopia’s focus on empowering youth, the private sector, and startups in investing in data and climate services.

Under the World Bank-funded Food Security Resilient Program implemented since 2022, the agriculture sector has registered encouraging early results.

“Ethiopia has shown early-stage lessons as it has introduced some climate-resilient varieties with farmers’ seeds, which are being adopted by farmers,” Shah told local newswire service ENA.

“A lot of farmers are receiving advice based on climate and weather data and are implementing solutions based on this advice, leading to a 20% increase in productivity in the early stages,” he said.

While acknowledging that these are preliminary findings, Shah expressed optimism for the future.

He also noted the potential for enhanced market access. “Because Ethiopia is now emerging as a big agribusiness destination, with aspirations to do so, it will also give farmers better access to markets, both in Africa and outside, for selling their products.

If all the solutions and all the investments which are designed are implemented, we can expect to see a 30 to 40 percent increases in productivity”.

He also elaborated the transformative potential of agricultural data investments in other African countries. “Seven countries have invested in digital farmer registries and registered all their farmers on the digital platform,” Shah added.

He emphasized that these countries are making strides in providing weather services, quality data and farmer advisories, and digitizing agri-business data.

According to him, Ethiopia and Kenya are at the forefront in East African countries.

He emphasized Kenya’s progress, noting the registration of 6.5 million farmers and the delivery of weather services to 4 million and climate-smart advisories to 3 million.

Other African nations are also making strides in this area including Malawi, which has digitized all its data, and Ghana, which has developed digital advisory business platforms, according to Shah.