AGRICULTURE
a Livestock Information Vision Ethiopia (aLIVE) Program
Empowering Ethiopia’s livestock stakeholders to make data-informed decisions by providing relevant, accurate, and timely data and analytics.
Why Timely and Reliable Livestock Data is Vital for Ethiopia
Ethiopia’s agriculture sector accounts for 40% of the country’s gross domestic product and employs around 75% of the country’s workforce. With the largest livestock population in Africa, livestock is central to food security, trade, and livelihoods across Ethiopia. Reflecting the sector’s importance, Ethiopia’s Ten-Year Strategic Development Plan places agriculture at the center of the country’s national development plan.
While livestock data exists in Ethiopia, people face multiple challenges when trying to make use of it. Some of the available data is of poor or questionable quality. The existing data is stored in multiple formats across different databases – which creates accessibility issues and prevents comprehensive data analysis and comparison. Finally, limited guidelines and regulations on how data is stored and shared can make it challenging for the right people to access the data they need. All of these concerns result in stakeholders only having access to portions of Ethiopia’s livestock data and therefore being limited in their ability to make data-based decisions.
ABOUT aLIVE PROGRAM
To support Ethiopia in achieving its agricultural ambitions and modernizing the sector, the Ministry of Agriculture and DG, with support from the Gates Foundation, launched the ‘a Livestock Information Vision Ethiopia’ (aLIVE) program – an initiative aimed at transforming how livestock data is collected, shared, and used across the country.
In collaboration with the Ministry and other key partners, DG developed the first-of-its-kind National Livestock Data Standard to guide the collection, storage, and maintenance of livestock data in Ethiopia. Following the endorsement of the data standard by the program’s governing committee, the team implemented it across five pre-existing data systems used to track livestock data. Clear and effective implementation guidance was crucial to cascading the data standard to the regional levels, facilitating adoption and enabling the transition from paper to practice.
BUILDING FOR INTEROPERABILITY
In 2025, aLIVE launched the Livestock Information System (LIS) to improve how livestock data is integrated, accessed, and used across key platforms. Built for interoperability, the LIS is designed as a digital public infrastructure for the livestock sector, integrating the five livestock databases so they can share information with one another. This makes the data more usable and timely, supporting a shift from fragmented reporting toward collaborative planning and stronger service delivery.
For decades, we have supported systems interoperability and strengthened data pipelines so that institutions can make fuller use of the data they hold. The lessons from this work have informed data governance practices across health, agriculture, and other sectors, from the farm level to cross-border contexts.
IMPACT
While the LIS debuted in 2025, much of the lasting value lies in the capacity and ownership built around it. Working with the Ministry of Agriculture, the program trained more than 300 people and supported a third of the Ministry’s ICT team in using five core software tools, which benefit every agricultural system that the team manages, not just livestock alone. Along the way, the work helped raise the Ministry’s profile as a digital leader, contributing to its inclusion in joint working groups with other agencies and to stronger inter-ministerial relationships that have historically been difficult to manage.
This progress was bolstered by peer learning. In February 2025, DG and the Livestock Improvement Corporation organized a livestock study tour to New Zealand for a delegation of Ethiopian officials. DG selected New Zealand for its livestock sector, where data, technology, and institutional coordination support productivity, traceability, and market competitiveness. Visiting farms, an abattoir, research institutions, cooperatives, and regulatory bodies, the delegation saw how a country with no more than 10 million cattle has built a competitive system grounded in real-time data and farmer participation, and how well-collected, integrated data can support decisions from the farm to the national policy level.
Built by DG alongside the Ministry of Agriculture, LIS is now hosted locally and owned by the Ministry, a choice made after a careful look at the cloud-hosted options, and one that reduces reliance on outside technical support. The platform is already being used by the Ministry and other partners to strengthen livestock traceability, improve visibility into production, and track the performance of Ethiopia’s livestock sector from rural production systems to national statistics. It also reflects something we have learned over 25 years of this work: our greatest impact comes not from building tools for their own sake, but from helping institutions put in place systems that solve real problems and can be sustained within their legal, technical, strategic, and financial realities.
OUR PARTNERS
The MoA is the government agency mandated with overseeing the agricultural and rural development policies of Ethiopia. Learn more here.
LIC is a farmer-owned co-operative with over 100 years experience in delivering genetic improvement and technology solutions that empower farmers and enables decisions to be made efficiently for their farming operations. Learn more here.