Background

Agri-Service Ethiopia (ASE) is an indigenous, non-governmental, non-sectarian and not-for-profit development organisation established in December 1969 by a French Catholic priest named Father Henry Ravaging. ASE is registered by the Ministry of Justice, and has signed operational agreements with the federal Disaster Prevention and Preparedness Commission (DPPC), and project agreements with the regional state governments.

Agri-Service Ethiopia is a membership association with a General Assembly of 20 members (five corporate and 15 individuals). Its second highest governing body—that is, next to the General Assembly (GA)—is the Board of Management (BoM), which has five members elected from among the members of the General Assembly for a two-year term, as well as the Executive Director.

The Executive Director is the CEO of the organisation and an ex-officio member of the BoM, to which he/she is accountable. Under him or her are three Departments: Department of Programmes, Department of Community Training, Education and Extension and Department of Support Services, and two Units (Fundraising and Public Relations and Internal Audit), as well as five Programme Offices located in Amhara, Oromia, and SNNPR.

ASE has given due importance to training and education ever since its establishment. For instance, between 1969 and 1976, it provided correspondence education to smallholder farmers by having their literate children read the lessons to them. The subjects it taught were the basics of agriculture, health and home economics. And they were delivered mainly through printed materials and occasionally complemented with field visits. The correspondence education programme was aimed at addressing the needs of non-literate farmers, as the level of illiteracy in the programme areas was very high.

In 1977, however, ASE changed its strategy, with a view to making its efforts in this regard more fruitful. In other words, it began teaching the farmers face to face—though the subjects remained more or less the same. Thus, between 1977 and 1987, along with agricultural education, face-to-face elementary education was given to farmers in socio-economics, personal hygiene, environmental sanitation and women’s education.  The face-to-face education was backed by distant education, in collaboration with the Wolaita Agricultural Development Unit (WADU) and the Ministry of Education, through rural radio forums. This approach provided ASE with an opportunity to serve both the literate and non-illiterate members of rural communities.

It was soon realised that the face-to-face training programme has had a real impact, in that it greatly improved the knowledge and attitude of the learners. It did not, nevertheless, help bring about the desired behavioural change. Why? Mainly because the new technology and the ideas introduced by the training were neither available nearby nor affordable. Moreover, ASE found out that giving theoretical training per se to adults, without demonstrating for them the new ideas and technology, seldom bears the desired fruit. So it had to try a new approach in 1986, known as Action-Oriented Training Programme (AOTP). Through AOTP, ASE helped the farmers grasp the new ideas and technology by demonstrating to them. It also enabled them to access the technology through a revolving fund.  

In 1986, an assessment of the impact of ASE’s interventions was done. The assessment report disclosed that the AOTP programme has helped the target groups to significantly improve on their agricultural practices within a relatively short period of time, but that it did not make any visible dent in their abject poverty, which has a multifaceted nature. Through time, many more new demands and development opportunities also came into the picture.

These situations compelled ASE to address the other felt needs of the communities as well, along with the AOTP. To this effect, ASE adopted a broader and comprehensive intervention known as Integrated Rural Development Programme (IRDP) in 1987. In this approach, the AOTP was complemented with a number of income-generating activities and other community projects such as forestry, soil and water conservation, rural water supply, community-health and micro-finance services. ASE carried out three IRDPs between 1987 and 2000 in the SPNNRS, Amhara, and Ormoia regions.

ASE came up with a number of different approaches after 1987, but AOTP has remained to be its core function. The name AOTP was, nonetheless, changed at different times, although the concepts and purposes of the emerging training and extension approaches remained the same. At the end of 1996, a change in the Government’s policy with regard to micro-finance services forced ASE to establish an affiliate MFI, known in short as PEACE—which stands for Poverty Eradication and Community Empowerment.

In the year 2000, the first Strategic Plan was developed to cope with the ever-increasing demand for change. The document stated as ASE’s vision that it aspires “to see a rural Ethiopia where poverty is significantly and meaningfully reduced and a favourable environment is maintained to the satisfaction of the present and future generations”. It, however, put ASE’s mission as being “to work with the poor communities in rural Ethiopia towards attaining food security, protecting and rehabilitating the environment and to providing adequate social services”.

In the strategic period, the programme formulation, implementation and monitoring and evaluation were done using participatory rural appraisal (PRA) tools, to create an enabling environment for the participation of those who have a stake in all these. Each programme office was given the right to develop its own programme. Therefore, community participation was enhanced; attempts were made to target the needy community group; the needy also got linked to micro-finance institutions (MFIs); indigenous knowledge and practices were encouraged; and inputs were supplied and demonstrated. Training groups were organised, and training issues were categorised into two: General Awareness-Raising Training and Skills-Enhancement Training. The training sessions were held under the shed of a tree or in other convenient places for the trainees, all of whom were farmers. It was also supported with home and farm visits by the trainers. Experience-sharing visits were also organised to expose farmers to improved and field-tested practices. Moreover, unlike other phases, village-level development promoters (VLDPs) were recruited and assigned from among the community members, to assist development facilitators (DFs); gender issues were mainstreamed; community training and HIV/AIDS were considered to be crosscutting functions; and the community-based institutions (CBIs) were established and duly registered.

To realise its mission, the organisation implemented five integrated food security programmes (IFSPs): in Amaro, Berek-Aleltu, Enebsie-Sar Midir and Tehuledere woredas and an IRDP in the Lalo-Mamma woreda, which was terminated two years back. The first is situated in the SNNPR, whereas the second and the latter three are located in Oromia and Amhara regional states, respectively. The second and third IFSPs, which are financially supported by Oxfam Novib and certain churches in Germany (EED), are in the last year of their second phase (2004-06). Oxfam Novib and EED have of late shown an interest in supporting the same programmes during the next two years. The Amaro IFSP is a five-year programme. Trocaire and Ireland Aid financed the first three years, whereas the European Union and Trocaire/Cafod are jointly financing the subsequent two years. A new IFSP programme in the Goro woreda, Bale Zone, Oromia Region, was launched in the third quarter of 2006, financed by the Dan Church Aid. A joint project to be implemented with a Lalo-Mamma CBI, in the Amhara Region, was recently launched with support from AAE. The whole programme covered 52 kebele administrations, with a total of 43,626 households (26.8% of them female-headed). The direct and indirect beneficiaries are estimated at 261,756 and 1,308,780 people, respectively.

The organisation has also been actively participating in 19 national and international networks/forums in various capacities. The networks and forums help to share experiences with one another, and serve as platforms for advocacy and lobbying of some important issues like community empowerment, HIV/AIDS, gender equity, participatory research, farmers’ innovation development, sustainable land use, etc.

ASE currently has a total of 141 permanent staff, of whom 45 (19%) are female. Compared with its workforce of 1999, however, the total shows some decrease—four in the number of its permanent staff, and 7 % in that of its female staff. The proportion of skilled staff has, however, increased. Of the total staff, 25% have earned BScs/BAs and/or MAs/MScs, which shows an 8% increase in the number of employees who have had university education. Almost 38% have college or vocational diplomas. That, however, reflects an 8% reduction, compared with the number of such staff in 1999. And most of the remaining staff members have finished their secondary-school education.

The number of the households that ASE has been rendering its services to has shown a 4% increase, and that of the women-headed households a 16.8% increase.

The audit reports of 1999 and 2005 disclosed that ASE commanded revenue totalling Birr 10,340,756 and 19,815,083, respectively (depicting a 92% growth), and that it deployed 23 vehicles, 24 motor cycles and three tractors. Of these, the POs used almost all the vehicles, including 12 of the better-off vehicles. That means, on average, three vehicles per PO. But the remaining were used by the Head Office to serve all the programmes. The organisation also deployed its single truck and another truck that belongs to the CRDA but has long been used by ASE on temporary arrangements. ASE’s Head Office is housed in the organisation’s own building. So are the POs, except the one at Tehuledere.