Sustainable Asset Valuation of the Nutrition Sensitive Agriculture Capacity Strengthening Project in Ethiopia

Ethiopia, a landlocked nation in Northeast Africa, is facing increasing challenges due to climate change, particularly in regions such as Oromia, Somali, and Amhara, which are highly vulnerable to extreme weather conditions like droughts and floods. Since 1960, the country has seen a 1°C rise in average temperatures, most notably from July to September, accompanied by erratic rainfall patterns. These climatic changes have exacerbated soil erosion, reduced agricultural productivity, and increased the risk of crop diseases and pests. In recent years, prolonged droughts in 2022 and 2023 have severely impacted food security, leading to widespread malnutrition, especially among children, with stunting rates rising to 39%, as reported in the 2023 Food and Nutrition Strategy baseline survey. The impacts of climate variability are further compounded by Ethiopia’s reliance on agriculture, which remains highly susceptible to these changes. In response to these challenges, the Nutrition Sensitive Agriculture Capacity and System Strengthening Project (NSA CASE project) was designed to enhance food security and climate resilience in Ethiopia’s most vulnerable regions. This 5-year project (2019–2024), implemented by Save the Children and the Ethiopian Ministry of Agriculture (MOA), is focused on strengthening the Ministry’s system to enhance access, availability, and consumption of nutritious foods. The project has been implemented in three regions of Ethiopia in selected zones and districts. The overall objective of the project is to enable the MOA to effectively implement the National Nutrition Sensitive Agriculture Strategy and contribute to the achievement of the National Nutrition Program and Seqota Declaration goals to address undernutrition and end stunting in children under 2 years of age by 2030. To achieve this, the project has been providing direct technical (personnel) and financial support to the MOA. The project targets three key regions—Oromia, Amhara, and Somali—where interventions include planting drought-tolerant perennial fruit trees, introducing improved seed varieties, and utilizing moisture-harvesting technologies. These actions are designed to address the region-specific climatic challenges while improving agricultural resilience and nutritional outcomes for Ethiopia’s most at-risk populations. The assessment presented in this report used the outcomes of the NSA CASE project to estimate the full impacts of investments for food resilience under the National Nutrition Sensitive Agriculture Strategy. As a result, project-specific results were extrapolated to match the additional funding allocated by the government and farmers and the area impacted by these investments. This analysis, therefore, offers insights into the potential outcomes of the larger-scale initiative. iv IISD.orgSustainable Asset Valuation of the Nutrition Sensitive Agriculture Capacity Strengthening Project in Ethiopia This assessment uses systems thinking and cost-benefit analysis (CBA) to value the economic, social, and environmental added benefits and avoided costs of the project. Some of the added benefits or avoided costs can be defined as externalities, and others can be defined as direct impacts. The CBA is conducted by comparing the impact of different nature-based infrastructure (NBI) strategies in three alternative scenarios against a business-as-usual (BAU) model. The BAU scenario represents the “no-action” approach, where no interventions are made to improve food security or increase climate resilience in the regions of Oromia, Amhara, and Somali. • NBI Scenario 1 models the introduction of all four interventions: planting perennial fruit trees, using drought-tolerant crops and enhancing seed variety as part of climatesmart agriculture practices, and implementing moisture-harvesting technologies. The latter includes making use of nature and its services to strengthen ecosystem service provisioning by building terraces, trenches, mulching, and geomembrane constructions to support water efficiency, improve nutrient uptake, and reduce soil erosion and loss. This scenario considers both direct impacts, such as agricultural productivity and job creation, and externalities, like flood and drought damage reduction, malnutrition reduction, and carbon sequestration. • NBI Scenario 2 includes the same interventions as Scenario 1 but focuses specifically on externalities linked to the agricultural sector. This scenario evaluates job creation in construction and maintenance, increased revenues from agriculture, and the reduction of damages from floods and droughts to agricultural production. • NBI Scenario 3 narrows its focus even further, considering only the economic impacts on the agricultural sector, such as the revenues generated from agricultural productivity and job creation, without taking into account broader environmental or societal benefits. The CBA indicators (see Table ES1) were identified through a co-creation process that involved project stakeholders coupled with a comprehensive review of relevant literature and project documents.