Coffee, Chickpea, Honey, Maize, Potato, Pulses, Sesame

• Agricultural Transformation Agency: Enhance the capability of the Ministry of Agriculture and other public, private and non‐governmental implementing partners with project management, capacity building, technical assistance and knowledge sharing.

• Better Potato for a Better Life: Create sustainable access of poor farmers to high quality potato and sweet potato planting material to reduce food insecurity and improve nutrition for 250,000 households in SNNP and Tigray regions; enhance income through establishment of value chains and strengthen public and private sector stakeholders to address key constraints in potato and sweet potato production systems.

• Increasing the productivity of chickpea in wheat-based cropping system: Increase smallholder production of chickpea through improved varieties and crop management practices. The activity is expected to reach 100,000 additional smallholder farmers with supply of high-yielding chickpea varieties and integrated crop management practices.

• Smallholder Horticulture Project: Through a partnership between USAID and MASHAV, Israel’s Agency for International Development Cooperation, promote economic growth of small-scale horticulture holders by strengthening the commercial viability of fruit and vegetable production.

Land

• Land Administration to Nurture Development: Build on USAID's substantial past investments to improve land governance and land administration and strengthen land tenure rights in Ethiopia and thereby promote economic growth, increase agricultural productivity, reduce conflict and resource degradation and improve women’s rights to control and manage assets.

Livestock and Dairy

• Agricultural Growth Program - Livestock Market Development: Support the Government of Ethiopia’s Agricultural Growth Program by improving smallholder incomes and nutritional status through investments in selected livestock value chains.

New Alliance and Private Sector

• Advanced Maize Seed Adoption Program: Help farmers transition from open-pollinated varieties of maize seed to higher yielding hybrid maize. DuPont Pioneer and USAID are investing more than $2 million to provide improved varieties of maize seed and technical assistance. A New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition public-private partnership with the Ethiopian Ministry of Agriculture, Agricultural Transformation Agency, DuPont Pioneer, and USAID. Video: Success of the Advanced Maize Seed Adoption Program,

• GUTS Agro Industry: Produce nutritious chickpea products using chickpea purchased from farmer cooperative unions. A public-private partnership with GUTS Agro Industry fostered by the U.S. Feed the Future Initiative and the New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition. Video: Guts Agro Industry

Nutrition

• Empowering New Generations with Improved Nutrition and Economic Opportunity: Use sustainable, comprehensive, and coordinated interventions to improve the nutritional status of women and young children. Focus on strengthening nutrition programs and policy, health care services, community-oriented care and practices, and a rigorous learning agenda.

Resilience

• Graduation with Resilience to Sustainable Development: Graduate 50,000 households (200,000 people) in 16 districts from the Productive Safety Net Program through increased income and creation of assets that enhance their livelihoods potential.

• Pastoralist Areas Resilience Improvement and Market Expansion: Target pastoral areas of Ethiopia to promote the viability and resiliency of pastoralist communities through market development and natural resource management.

Learning and Policy Support

• Agriculture Knowledge, Learning, Documentation and Policy Project: Capture lessons learned from Feed the Future-funded activity implementation and support policy reform in the agriculture sector and gauge successes and challenges of innovative approaches.

• Baseline Survey for Feed the Future Zone of Influence in Ethiopia: Assess the progress and impact of the Feed the Future initiative in Ethiopia at the midpoint and final.

Grand Challenge: Powering Agriculture

• African Bamboo: Develop and test a heating process to make industrial and commercial quality bamboo based on biofuel from organic waste, such as coffee husks and residue from processing the bamboo.

Local Capacity Development

Feed the Future Systems Change Initiative Grants are awarded to local and international organizations that support systemic and policy changes in the agriculture sector

• Camel Value Chain Development in Somali Region: Make camel milk production into a profitable business.

• Environmental Entrepreneurship Program: Benefit youth and women in four woredas (districts) through job creation in rehabilitated communal areas contributing to their overall economic empowerment and sustainable management of the environment.

• Ethiopia Sustainable Agribusiness Incubator: Incubate and strengthen private enterprises whose profit will be derived from the farm to market chains, which incubatees will develop, extend and grow.

• Feed the Future Ethiopia Farm Service Center Project: Build 40 farm service centers to reach at least 200,000 smallholder farmers.

Development Credit Authority (DCA)

The Development Credit Authority allows USAID missions to fund projects that are financially viable through loan guarantees in sectors that meet sustainable development objectives. USAID can also provide portfolio guarantees to financial institutions that extend loans to a broader number of small borrowers such as micro enterprises and small businesses. By sharing the credit risk with financial institutions, DCA is able to demonstrate the soundness of lending activity in sectors that may not otherwise have access to capital. With sufficient experience and credit history, local banks can then have greater confidence in issuing additional loans in targeted sectors without further USAID participation.

In addition, it is as a means to support the development of key sectors and financial markets, mobilize local cash, encourage local markets, explore new sectors and activities, and create more employment opportunities. Also, it demonstrates the sustainability and profitability in tradition under represented economic sectors, and strengthen market linkages between financial institutions and their clients.

As a result, USAID Ethiopia has established about $28 million in loan portfolio guarantees and disbursed $6 million investment and working capital loans to small and medium business enterprises and small holder farmers engaged mainly in the agricultural sector activities, and operating in AGP regions and woredas. 

Inter-Agency Cooperation/Agreements

• United States Forest Service Agreement: The  U.S. Forest Service has extensive expertise in natural resource management and has a comparative advantage providing technical assistance from government to government over a long-term period to increase the technical capacity of partners. The  U.S. Forest Service provides technical support to USAID’s Pastoralists’ Areas Resilience Improvement through Market Expansion activity, focusing on the improvement of natural resource management methodologies and practices through introducing remote sensing based participatory landscape level rangeland planning and management as well as control of invasive species. This is achieved through rangeland monitoring, biodiversity monitoring and continued Prosopis sp. (an invasive weed/tree) research.