"This important achievement would not have been possible without the dedication and collaboration of numerous partners and stakeholders. On behalf of the Ministry of Agriculture, I extend sincere appreciation to the Food and Land Use Coalition (FOLU) for leading the process and for financial and technical support".
One phrase nearly became a barrier to Ethiopia’s first National Regenerative Agriculture Strategy.
“Regenerative agriculture.”
Authored by Morgan Gillespy, Executive Director of the Food and Land Use Coalition
“There was a thinking that regenerative agriculture came from a Western perspective, not from our perspective,” Sofia Ahmed, FOLU Ethiopia Country Director, told me when we spoke last week.
This was not a minor communications problem. Ethiopia was attempting to set a new direction for a sector on which more than 70% of its population depends. Asking millions of smallholder farmers to embrace a concept perceived as externally designed was never going to work.
So, the team did not begin by selling a global definition. They began by asking what regenerative agriculture should mean in Ethiopia and why it is needed
“We were able to produce our own definition of regenerative agriculture,” Sofia said. “We showed that regenerative agriculture is context-specific.”
This approach confirms something important about how food systems change happens. National transformation cannot be imported. It must be shaped through consultation, adapted to the local context and ultimately owned by the people and institutions expected to deliver it.
Ethiopia has now completed that process. Its first National Regenerative Agriculture Strategy, launched in May 2026, moves the country from a collection of promising but disconnected initiatives towards a ten-year national framework capable of reaching an estimated 12–15 million smallholder farmers.
What we are all asking ourselves now, is whether the needed investment will follow.
The strategy began in farmers’ fields, not in a ministry
There was no single meeting in which Ethiopia suddenly decided it needed a national strategy.
The need for one was built gradually though years of learning, discourse, evidence gathering stakeholder engagement, farmer movement building for regenerative agriculture and growing consensus around the need for a coordinated national framework. Land degradation, declining soil fertility and climate change are placing growing pressure on agriculture. At the same time, the country needed to improve food security, strengthen rural livelihoods and create economic opportunity.
“The challenges showed that conventional agricultural approaches were not enough to ensure long-term food security and resilient livelihoods,” Sofia explained.
FOLU Ethiopia and its partners began building the evidence from the ground up. Regenerative agriculture pilots led by Sasakwa Africa Association engaged more than 450 farmers across 135 hectares, testing integrated practices in real farming conditions. Interactive radio programming, led by Farm Radio International, took that learning much further, reaching more than 150,000 smallholders in local languages.
An external evaluation found that 89% of participating farmers in its focus groups had adopted at least one regenerative technique after listening to the programming.
Evidence generated with hundreds of farmers helped shape a national framework with the potential to benefit millions.
This is where FOLU added distinctive value. Our role was not simply to produce another technical report. It was to connect farmer experience, scientific evidence, government decision-making and the partners required for delivery.
As Sofia put it: “When credible evidence is presented to government officials, they are willing to make decisions that enable adoption at scale. You are not just asking for policy change. You come with the evidence you need to justify it.”
Building for success came from involving real people on the ground at the outset
The process ultimately brought together more than 115 organisations through 15 national and regional engagement forums over two years.
Government, regional institutions, researcher organizations, academic institutions, civil society, private sector actors, development partners and farmers all had a role. Each contributed unique knowledge, experience and expertise making the strategy a truly collective national effort.
That may sound painstaking, and Sofia assured me, it was. But the time spent building agreement was not a delay before the real work began. The team viewed it as essential preparation for future and successful implementation.
“One of the most important lessons we learned was that developing a national regenerative agriculture strategy is about building shared ownership by listening to everyone involved in delivering it,” Sofia said.
“The voice of farmers is always very important, and it is not mentioned everywhere,” she told me. “From the very beginning, farmers were part of this process.”
Farmer participation is often described as a principle. Here, it performed a practical function. Farmers generated evidence, tested what was realistic and helped ensure the strategy reflected the economics of regenerative agricultural transition, not only its environmental promise.
The real argument was about who carries the cost of change
The benefits of regenerative agriculture were not the hardest part on which to build agreement, where the team really struggled was in reconciling long-term gains with short-term costs.
“There is always consensus on the rewards of regenerative agriculture,” Sofia said. “The challenge was managing short-term cost over longer-term benefits.”
Crop rotation brought that trade-off to life. It can restore soil health and increase resilience. But Ethiopia is also seeking to move from subsistence production towards greater commercialisation, which has often encouraged specialisation and monocropping. A strategy detached from that reality would have failed before implementation began.
The final approach, therefore, supports an incremental transition from current farming practices rather than prescribing immediate, wholesale change. Importantly, this approach is not seen as weaker ambition, but rather more credible and legitimate.
Farmers cannot be expected to absorb transition costs, manage production risks and wait years for returns without support. They will need appropriate finance, stronger extension services, access to markets and evidence that new approaches can improve incomes as well as soils.
This is not meant to be another strategy on a shelf
Ethiopia already has agriculture, climate and development strategies. Adding one more framework would achieve little unless it changed how those agendas work together.
The new strategy was designed to reinforce existing national priorities. It connects regenerative agriculture to food security, productivity, land restoration, climate resilience, nutrition, employment and rural income. As Sofia acknowledged, Ethiopia is “very well known in terms of producing strategies.” However, the main challenge is ensuring that strategy is actionable and supported by the systems and resources required for successful implementation. “We were very careful when we supported the Ministry of Agriculture to develop the strategy, about what would make it different from other strategies, so that it could quickly go through to implementation.”
The result is strong in part due to this integration. Regenerative agriculture is not being positioned as a separate environmental programme but instead is viewed as a practical route through which Ethiopia can pursue several national objectives at once.
By 2031, the result should be visible in families’ lives
When I asked Sofia what success would look like five years from now, she talked first about farmers adopting integrated regenerative practices with access to the finance and support they need.
She talked about healthier soils, increased agricultural productivity and farmers’ incomes, climate resilience, more nutritious food and jobs for young people.
But then she described the outcome in a simpler way.
“Farmers achieve greater food security and are better able to invest in their families, including sending their children to school.”
That is the impact against which this strategy should ultimately be judged.
Ethiopia has developed a national framework grounded in farmer evidence, aligned with its priorities and context. It has created alignment across many organisations. And it has early proof that practical, locally delivered engagement can change farming behaviour.
Globally, Ethiopia has become one of the first countries to adopt a National Regenerative Agriculture Strategy. The next challenge is no longer proving that regenerative agriculture works—it is demonstrating how an entire country can successfully implement regenerative agriculture at scale. Ethiopia now has the opportunity to become a global model for translating policy ambition into landscape-level transformation.
The immediate opportunity for donors and investors is to finance the bridge from these early results to national delivery: farmer transition finance, extension capacity, regional implementation, monitoring and continued learning. A catalytic investment today can enable Ethiopia to translate an ambitious national strategy into measurable improvements in soil health, farmer resilience and food security while creating one of the world’s largest demonstrations of regenerative agriculture at scale.
And FOLU’s work isn’t done. Leading a consortium to drive this system-wide change, we now aim to establish and facilitate multi-stakeholder platforms that will promote innovative financing mechanisms to support coordinated action, scale adoption of regenerative practices, and strengthen sustainable and resilient food systems.
The difficult political and institutional groundwork has been done.
Now, in Sofia’s words: “Let us take this strategy to action.”
