Ethiopia’s rural development policy and strategies place in centre stage the transformation of smallholder subsistence agriculture to market-orientation to promote commercialization of the sector. Smallholder dairy production contributes 50 % of the livestock output and about 30 % of employment, with still a large untapped potential. Despite a plethora of projects and expressed policy intent, the dairy sector did never really take off. One of major bottlenecks as revealed by many studies is problems related to coverage, responsiveness and efficiency of supportive service delivery. Multiple service providers -public, private and third sector- are increasingly emerging in the dairy sub-sector, which calls for effective and efficient coordination mechanisms and enabling policy environment. The pluralistic service delivery framework was used to analyze the functioning of pluralistic service delivery system in Debrezeit milkshed, which has relatively developed and market-oriented dairy systems. In the milkshed, dairy sector is currently in a transition towards market-orientation, with private sector investment and multiple actor involvement in the service delivery. This district also houses the most advanced and largest dairy co-operative in the country. Primary data was collected from 150 randomly selected smallholder dairy producing households located in urban, peri-urban and rural areas; and also from various service providers. The data generated by Rapid Appraisal of Dairy Innovation Systems by IPMS project in Ada’a and review of government policy and strategy documents supplemented information generated by household survey.
Citation :
citation
Keywords :
Mekelle university, Ethiopia, southern Tigray