Memorandum of Understanding with Ethiopia’s Ministry of Agriculture

In June 2025, PxD signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with Ethiopia’s Ministry of Agriculture (MoA) to establish a Project Management Unit (PMU) that will support the rollout of Ethiopia’s Digital Agriculture Roadmap (DAR). The MOU was signed by PxD CEO Niriksha Shetty and His Excellency Dr. Girma Amente, the Minister of Agriculture for Ethiopia, and the signing was attended by PxD Ethiopia Country Director Freyhiwot Nadew and Ethiopia Director of Programs Habtamu Yesigat.This important milestone was commemorated on the MoA’s website here and on a PxD LinkedIn post here.  

This official launch of the PMU is the culmination of several years of work by PxD and other partners to develop Ethiopia’s DAR. This roadmap charts an exciting path for Ethiopia to make significant investments in digital agriculture in 2025-2032 to drive agricultural transformation and improve the lives and livelihoods of the tens of millions of smallholder farmers in Ethiopia. The DAR itself was launched in February 2025 at a formal launch event hosted by the MoA, the Ethiopian Agricultural Transformation Institute, the Gates Foundation, and the Boston Consulting Group (BCG).

The PMU will play a pivotal role in supporting the Ethiopian government’s digital transformation of agriculture by:

• Coordinating and aligning digital agriculture efforts with national priorities to reduce duplication
• Providing technical support to ensure digital tools are farmer-centric, evidence-based, and scalable
• Leading on monitoring, evaluation, and learning (MEL) to track the impact of digital tools on productivity, income, and resilience
• Developing action plans to catalyze implementation of the high-priority use cases and initiatives that were identified in the DAR
• Crowding in investment from the government, private foundations, and multilateral development finance institutions
• Building capacity of government staff and partners to strengthen digital literacy and delivery

The PMU will focus on implementing several high-priority digital agriculture use cases, including digital agricultural extension, timely interventions to help farmers respond to pest and disease outbreaks and weather shocks, access to credit and insurance, input procurement and distribution, input tracking, and access to markets. In parallel, the PMU will also catalyze investments in several foundational components of Ethiopia’s digital ecosystem and enabling environment, including a data stack, unique farmer IDs, digital literacy, data policies and governance, digital kiosks, and the creation of a permanent Digital Agriculture Unit within the MoA to oversee digital agriculture implementation.

Housed within the MoA, the PMU includes staff from both PxD and the Ministry and is governed by a high-level Steering Committee chaired by the Minister of Agriculture. The PMU is expected to operate for a period of roughly two years, from March 2025 to February 2027, and then to transition to the permanent MoA Digital Agriculture Unit.

This PMU is modeled on a similar successful unit that PxD helped establish in India within the Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers’ Welfare in 2023. Both of these PMUs are supported by the generous funding of the Gates Foundation. 

The launch of this PMU in Ethiopia is an exciting step forward in PxD’s shared vision with the Government of Ethiopia to deliver digital agriculture transformation and real impact for tens of millions of farmers in Ethiopia. PxD is committed to supporting the MoA and ATI for years to come to put that vision into action!