Monitoring Agricultural Investment in Ethiopia: A Remote Sensing Based Approach

Between 2005 and 2016, the Ethiopian Government leased about 2.4 million hectares of land for commercial agricultural investments to private domestic and foreign investors as a means of economic growth, food security and job creation. In order to steer these vast amounts of large-scale agricultural investments towards the envisaged benefits, it is crucial to monitor the investments’ implementation progress frequently. But so far, the mandated agencies neither have the resources nor the capacities to check the implementation status of every contracted investment at certain regular intervals.

Germany and the European Union are supporting the Government of Ethiopia in improving policies and management related to large scale agricultural investments towards sustainable economically and socially responsible outcomes. Therefore, the Project Support to Responsible Agricultural Investments (S2RAI) - implemented by Deutsche Geselllschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH - provides technical support to the official Ethiopian partner institutions and other involved stakeholders like investors, local population and civil society organizations. One field of action is the establishment of a functional remote sensing monitoring system (RSMS), that will deliver regular information on the status of each large-scale agricultural investment. The project collaborates in this regard i.a. with the Joint Research Center of the European Commission (JRC).

The proposed paper describes how the envisaged RSMS will make use of high-resolution satellite imagery from the Copernicus Earth Observation Program of the European Union, namely Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 satellites. The data as well as the software to process and download the result are provided by Google through Earth Engine cloud infrastructure for free for non-commercial use. The workflow of accessing satellite images, pre-processing these data sets, and transforming the satellite data into information related to the actual land use and land use change within large scale