What do you enjoy most about your work?

As an agricultural professional, I am taking pride in the fact that agriculture is fundamental to the socio-economic development of not only my country Ethiopia and sub-saharan Africa, but also of the entire developing world. The sector plays a significant role to ensure food security in these nations which is the focus of the political and development agenda at all levels. It is a privilege to work for and with smallholder-farmers who constitute a majority of the workforce in developing countries and produce more than 70% of the food consumed worldwide.

It is also utmost important for me to understand the challenges that smallholder families face in their everyday lives and the basis of the actions and decisions they take to face them. I therefore particularly enjoy all of our interactions and engagements, which help us to shape our thinking and recognize these challenges to identify possible and context adapted solutions. Apart from the direct encounters with smallholders in our country and the region, I also appreciate our involvement in influencing dialogues and discussions with partner institutions, who work in the same area and are committed to improve smallholders’ livelihoods.

 Which are your favourite instruments?

 In my opinion, we need to increase awareness and promote technological innovations to ensure better livelihoods for smallholders through the benefits of modernized farming. With the introduction of these innovations, there are still enormous opportunities to realize the potentials of agriculture in many developing countries. However, these technological improvements need to become more accessible and affordable for all smallholder farmers in order to make them really benefit from an increased production, storage and sale of the surplus. We need also to strengthen our partnerships with various stakeholders, most importantly the private sector, to ensure the leverage for scaling up all the necessary innovations such as better access to inputs, mechanization, extension services and better access to markets. Nonetheless, it will depend on the effectiveness of our policy instruments and provisions whether innovations can be mainstreamed nationwide and coordinated with other sector policies and programs such as infrastructure, governance and health. Thus, I believe a coordinated programme support needs to be strengthened through appropriate mechanisms.

Your message for your colleagues:

Even though it is important to address major global challenges under the Global Program Food Security, we need to understand and address the great diversity of problems and challenges that small scale farming systems are facing nowadays in a more context specific way. Local solutions for global challenges must be promoted and adapted to the multitude of situations in different regions of a country or in the world at large. Of course there is important strategic thinking behind the interventions and thematic priorities we are offering right now, but let’s invest more effort in making them more compatible with the material challenges on the ground by asking ourselves continuously: Are the solutions we offer really relevant at the farmers’ level? Most of all: We need to focus more on youth and bridging the basic inequalities between genders. Young people constitute more than 65% of the total population and they cannot be left behind from the political and economic agendas of countries. Addressing the youth issues in terms of ensuring access to land, technologies, knowledge and capital will highly contribute towards solving other interrelated socio-economic problems of migration and vulnerabilities to conflict to mention a few.  To this end, a modernized and business oriented agriculture can play a great role to accommodate the unemployed local youth.   

Addis Kebede Teshome is the National Program officer in the Swiss Embassy in Addis Abeba, Ethiopia, and in charge of partnerships in the portfolio of the Global Program Food Security. Before coming to SDC, he worked in the GIZ Green Innovations Center for Food and Agriculture Sector in Ethiopia Project. He has a PhD in Agricultural Entomology from the University of Nairobi and did his Post-doctorate fellowship at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) on one of the SDC Funded projects in Eastern and Southern Africa.