Practical recommendations for donors to improve the enabling environment and increase sustainable investments in the dairy value chain in Ethiopia

Book excerpt: This policy note aims at providing practical and evidence-based recommendations to improve the enabling environment and subsequently increase sustainable investments in the whole dairy value chain (VC) in Ethiopia. The relevance of this policy note relies on the fact that to date, there are multiple assessment and studies that have been conducted on the VC but – to the authors' knowledge – no study has yet attempted to study the linkages between the challenges as well as to determine which challenges faced by VC actors are effectively enabling environment factors. In other words, building from these multiple studies and some specific studies, this note aims at going one step further by mapping the different challenges found in the VC assessments, as several of them are closely intertwined (like land size affecting both feeding and effective cattle management), as well as determining at what scale the challenges impact the VC. For instance, some factors have a national level impact (i.e. they are a national enabling environment factor, affecting most or all VC actors), others have a regional level impact (i.e. a regional enabling environmental factor, affecting only the VC actors of a specific region), while others heavily depend on the individual characteristics of the VC actors.