In May 2023, a high-level delegation from Tanzania, Côte d’Ivoire, Niger, and Zambia traveled to Oromia, Ethiopia’s largest region, to explore how strategic agricultural transformation is driving large-scale job creation and economic growth. President Shimelis Abdissa has led Oromia in implementing a bold and systematic approach to transforming its agricultural value chain—creating 2.8 million jobs in four years and spurring the region’s economic growth.
During this Leadership Exchange, the delegations engaged directly with President Shimelis and his cabinet to understand the President’s strategic prioritization of agricultural transformation. They explored the rationale for focusing on four pillars for rural development: import substitution, export revenue, food security, and job creation. The delegates examined how the Regional Government identified wheat, avocado, and coffee as priority value chains based on their potential to drive job creation, increase productivity, eliminate the regions’ dependency on imports, and increase export revenues.
A core component of this agricultural transformation strategy was leveraging the full value chain across wheat, avocado, and coffee. This included upgrading farming efficiency, prioritizing high-value crops, mobilizing smallholder farmers, establishing market linkages, and investing in storage and packing technologies to enhance product value. This holistic approach led to a three-fold increase in wheat production, eliminating the need for wheat imports —saving approximately $600 million per year—and positioned Ethiopia as a wheat exporter for the first time in 2023.
Further, the transformation extended to the other high-value crops such as avocados and coffee. President Shimelis revolutionized the avocado value chain by targeting the export market and prioritizing the Hass avocado variety to meet global market demand. This strategic focus led to the start of avocado exports in 2021. Furthermore, efforts to enhance Ethiopia’s largest hard-currency earner, coffee, involved increasing high-quality production through sustainable farming techniques. This initiative created more than 1 million jobs in four years and contributed significantly to Ethiopia’s coffee export revenue growth, from $450 million to $1.4 billion.
