Resource information
To address food insecurity in the country, the Government of Ethiopia envisages a rapid transformation in the agriculture sector to increase production, productivity, markets and employment. It has, therefore, strategically promoted land investments for agricultural development as part of the two successive five-year Growth and Transformation Plans (GTP). Agricultural investments are supposed to provide input for the processing industry, bring foreign currency as well as technology transfer to the country while the local communities would benefit from employment and infrastructure improvements related to these investments. However, progress towards achieving these objectives has been rather limited so far due to critical challenges facing agricultural investment projects. One of the major challenges is that information on commercial and contract farming arrangements and their performances is fragmented, outdated and unreliable for businesses and decision makers. Critical datasets on these projects are not appropriately captured, managed and analyzed in adequate and timely manner.
Towards solving the information management challenge, the Ethiopian Horticulture and Agricultural Investment Authority (EHAIA) with the assistance from the Support to Responsible Agricultural Investment Project (S2RAI)7 in collaboration with the Ethiopian Agricultural Transformation Agency (ATA), is currently developing Commercial Agriculture Management Information System (CAMIS).
CAMIS is distributed information management system that is under development using Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) for managing responsible agricultural investments both at federal and regional state levels. It will have reach features that supports investment land administration for horticulture, large scale agriculture, livestock and forest investment functions; commercial and contract farming administration functions. Specifically, it will have strong monitoring and reporting features that tracks the performance of each investment project. It will also have an interface to cadaster maintenance sub-system of National Rural Land Administration Information System (NRLAIS) developed by the Ministry of Agriculture and Natural Resources (MoANR) for handling transactions applied to investment land.
