Ethiopia

The Current Situation

Ethiopia has shown great progress in improving the state of food security in the country. From 1999/01 to 2015/17, prevalence of undernourishment was more than halved, from 52 percent to 21 percent —a sign of strong, yet incomplete progress.

Ethiopia has seen much improvement within health and nutrition during the past decade, through there is more work to be done. Under-5 mortality which from 123 to 67 deaths per 1000 live births between 2005 and 2016, and under-5 child stunting rates dropped from 51 percent to 38 percent between 2005 and 2016. Exclusive breastfeeding among children under the age of 6 months has consistently improved over time, from 49 percent to 58 percent from 2005 in 2016.

Despite this progress, child wasting persists, declining slowly from 12 percent to 10 percent from 2005 to 2016. The proportion of children between 6 and 23 months who get a minimum acceptable diet (which relates to an adequate diversity in food groups and meal frequency) only rose from 4 percent to 7 percent between 2011 and 2016. Adult women also consume on average only 1.67 out of 10 food groups. Nearly one-quarter of women are underweight.

Compact2025 activities in Ethiopia

Compact2025 is committed to partnering with Ethiopia and relevant stakeholders to this acceleration to the end of hunger and undernutrition by 2025. To achieve these outcomes, Compact2025 has undertaken several specific activities in the country:

Initiating Compact2025 engagement in Ethiopia

On March 28, 2016 the country stakeholder roundtable discussion was held in Addis Ababa, setting priorities, fine-tuning actions, and synthesizing sharable lessons in order to start the accelerated progress towards Compact2025’s hunger and undernutrition goals. A scoping study has been developed on Ethiopia’s current food security and nutrition challenges and opportunities to inform policy and progress moving forward. Read more about these recommendations from the Ethiopia Roundtable Discussion. [Meeting synopsis]

Compact2025 also held “The Future of Ethiopia’s Agriculture: Towards a Resilient System to End Hunger and Undernutrition” event in Addis Ababa on December 15, 2017 in partnership with the Ethiopian Development Research Institute (EDRI), and the Rural Economic Development and Food Security Sector Working Group. The event presented new research on agricultural and food system development, and acted as the follow-up convention to the roundtable discussion in 2016.

Supporting the National Information Platform for Nutrition (NIPN)

Compact2025 provides technical support to the National Information Platform for Nutrition (NIPN), an EU-backed initiative hosted by the Ethiopian Public Health Institute (EPHI). NIPN works under the umbrella of the National Nutrition Program with the objective to promote evidence-based decision making for nutrition. It implements various activities, and will answer high level policy questions on nutrition. To answer these policy questions, NIPN will not collect new data but will maximize the use of existing information and data, which will be assembled in a multisectoral Data Repository for Nutrition, housed at EPHI.

To support EPHI's design of a nutrition specific data repository, IFPRI staff began sharing experiences related to data management, data sharing, and establishment of a repository with EPHI NIPN team. This exchange is being facilitated through webinars and meetings. The objective of these training sessions is to provide a better understanding on the concepts of a data and knowledge repository. It is expected that this increased knowledge will support an informed design of EPHI’s NIPN repositories. Below are the links to training materials and resources.

1. Working with the dataverse repository [Presentation] [Video coming soon]
2. Setting up a data repository, what does it entail [Presentation] [Video coming soon]
3. Getting data into the repository things to ponder [Presentation] [Video coming soon]

Leadership Council and Technical Advisory Committee Members in Ethiopia

Ibrahim Assane Mayaki, Chief Executive Officer, New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD), Leadership Council
Demeke Mekonnen, Deputy Prime Minister, Ethiopia, Leadership Council
Khalid Bomba, CEO, Ethiopian Agricultural Transformation Agency (ATA), Technical Advisory Committee