Scaling Delivery Strategy for Harmonized Digital Fertilizer and Agronomic Solutions (HaFAS) for Transforming Crop Production in Ethiopia

The Problem: Ethiopia's agriculture sector, which employs over 70% of the population, faces significant challenges in enhancing crop productivity and maintaining soil health. Over 70% of cultivated agricultural land is used to produce cereals, using 60% of the rural workforce. Moreover, over 50% of the daily caloric intake of an average household in Ethiopia is from wheat, sorghum, and maize. Yet, there are substantial yield gaps in maize, wheat, teff, and sorghum, with actual yields far below their potential. Inefficient fertilization practices, including incorrect application rates based on blanket recommendations that do not account for variations in soil type, topography, and crop type, limit the effectiveness of fertilizer use. Soil quality has been a concern of the Ethiopian government for some time, with soil fertility research starting in the 1950s. Affordability of fertilizer has become a major issue, even among commercial farmers, since the onset of the Russian Ukrainian war. The Ethiopian government is committed to improving crop productivity, as demonstrated by their expenditure of $1.1 billion on 1.35 million metric tons of fertilizer imports in 2023. Increasing fertilizer use efficiency is central to maximizing the benefit from its fertilizer investment and minimizing the potential negative impacts of its use on the environment. In addition, as fertilizer is mostly distributed through cooperatives, fertilizer is mostly accessed by market-oriented male farmers. The government recognizes that women’s access to advisory services, in person or digital, is 41% lower than men’s. The Core Innovation: The core innovation is a digital localized agronomy and fertilizer advisory tool (LAFA) that combines and harmonizes earlier work on two separately developed digital tools, the NextGen Fertilizer Advisory System developed by the Alliance of CIAT and Bioversity, and the landscape-based Specific Fertilizer Recommendation (LANDWise) developed by ICRISAT. There are other agro-advisory services, such as climate information, lime application advice, and crop-specific soil and agronomic advice that can be potentially bundled into LAFA and/or broader Harmonized Digital Fertilizer and Agronomic Solutions (HaFAS). The HaFAS framework is modular, meaning innovations and improvements in one part of the HaFAS ecosystem do not affect other parts of the system. Through a convening harmonization meeting in September 2023 and a subsequent launch meeting in November 2023, a harmonized digital decision-support tool (DST) framework led by the Ministry of Agriculture (MoA) and NARS (EIAR and RARIs) was adopted, which integrated multiple decision support tools (DSTs) into a comprehensive agro-advisory system, principally using digital delivery channels to service rural farmers directly or through extension personnel. The HaFAS will provide public access to data contributed by multiple organizations in a “Coalition of the Willing (CoW),” including a national soil database, remote sensing databases, and decades of findings from on-farm trials on fertilizer response for specific crops. A major component is harmonized site-specific fertilizer recommendations and bundled agro-advisories tailored to specific crop and geographic needs and adapted to variable climate scenarios, referred to as the Localized Agronomy and Fertilizer Advisory (LAFA). Extensive field validations of the LAFA have been conducted in 2024 across 1,570 farmers' fields to ensure the recommendations are practical and context specific. Data are being analyzed during the first quarter of 2025. The LAFA integrates machine learning, the QUEFTS model, extensive agronomic data, and geospatial covariates to provide optimized fertilizer recommendations. Practitioners can integrate the LAFA into user-friendly interfaces, such as APIs, dashboards, chatbots, IVR, mobile apps, web apps, and SMS, to ensure accessibility and practicality. This initiative aligns with the government's focus on Digital Agriculture Roadmap 2032 and modernized agricultural strategies on digital agriculture and extension advisory services (DAEAS). It is of note that the core now harmonized innovation, LAFA, is still under wide-scale validation in 2025 under different paths and referred to as the pre-scaling period.