The Impact of the Development Funds’ and EOSA’s Community-based Agrobiodiversity Management Programme in Ethiopia

FNI Report 07/2019- The Development Fund of Norway (DF) has commissioned an evaluation to analyse the impact, relevance and sustainability of the Community-based Agrobiodiversity Management Programme (CBAM) in Ethiopia. Target groups were households of small-scale farmers, including women and youth, in the Oromia and Amhara regions, and then also in the Southern Nations, Nationalities and Peoples Region (SNNPR). The impacts of CBAM have been impressive for most of the 13 EOSA sites. Not only has lost crop diversity in these centers of crop diversity been reintroduced and restored, varieties have also been adapted to climate change and further improved to accommodate the needs of local farmers. Farmers gave impressive accounts of how the programme has transformed their lives from poverty and hunger, to seed security, better food and nutrition security, improved livelihoods, and enhanced capacity and self-esteem. CBAM has also impacted on policies in Ethiopia, most notably as regards seed policies and agricultural policies. The evaluation offers recommendations as to how the experiences could be better documented, analysed and shared, how financial sustainability may be secured, and how conditions could be identified for scaling up the model to a national level in Ethiopia and in other countries.