To address food insecurity, the Government of Ethiopia embarked on a rapid transformation in the agriculture sector to increase production, productivity, market access and create employment opportunities by promoting large scale agricultural investment projects. However, progress towards achieving set objectives has been rather limited so far due to various challenges. One of the major challenges is that information on commercial farming is outdated and unreliable for decision making.

This paper aims at analysing the extent to which spatial data are accessed and shared among stakeholders. It also uses Social Network Analysis to investigate institutional and individual behaviour in that process. Finally, it investigates the level of cooperation of all involved actors towards Spatial Data Infrastructure development. Results showed that public and private organizations have been individually engaged data collection and management. However, they are still using different standards and this has led to some disparities in terms of spatial data quality.

Different government institutions in Ethiopia working on land related issues tackle and manage data and information independently, while their activities and mandates are often related or even overlapping. Ministry of Agriculture (MoA) deals with small holder rural land and until recently the Ethiopian Horticulture and Agricultural Investment Authority (EHAIA) was dealing with commercial agricultural land. Those institutions have not been able to share information each other’s data to make informed decisions.

Guide to determine if monitoring is actually a viable activity that can be undertaken by their organisation. Choosing to undertake monitoring is dependent on considerations such as evaluating the sufficiency of resources, capacity to design a sound monitoring system, and availability of political windows to effect change, amongst others.