iDE Ethiopia

iDE HAS BEEN WORKING IN ETHIOPIA SINCE 2007, with an initial focus on creating access to affordable household irrigation technologies (HITs) to help smallholder farmers produce and sell high value crops. As a result of this work, iDE Ethiopia received the “National Best Practice” Award in 2012 for its innovative, affordable, and scalable technologies and market-based approach. Building on its irrigation technologies, iDE Ethiopia has expanded its scope of work to meet the multifaceted needs of smallholder farmers and pastoralists and agro-pastoralists. Utilizing a robust agricultural value chain development approach, iDE Ethiopia engages farmers in livelihood diversification, integrated natural resource management, and climate-smart crop production. This entails developing profitable enterprises to supply appropriate farm inputs, technologies, and technical advice, while also connecting smallholder farmers and pastoralists to commercial markets. In addition to supporting farmers in crop production and income generation, iDE Ethiopia also works with local entrepreneurs to develop business models for clean drinking water and sanitation. By promoting sanitation and safe water technologies and practices, communities utilize the local market to improve their health and quality of life. Over the last Fourteen years, iDE Ethiopia has reached 159,050 smallholder households in five regional states (Oromia, SNNP, Amhara, SWEP, and Somali) through improved agricultural production, resilience building, sustainable land and water management, food security, and WASH projects that facilitated access to technologies, information, inputs, and services to improve rural livelihoods.