Farmer.Chat in Ethiopia — Digital Green's Government-Backed AI Advisory Pilot Scales to a 200,000-Farmer Impact Evaluation

Since April 2025, Digital Green has been piloting Farmer.Chat — a GPT-4-based, voice- and text-enabled conversational AI agricultural advisory tool available in Afaan Oromo, with Amharic and further Ethiopian languages planned — in close collaboration with Ethiopia's Ministry of Agriculture. The pilot phase ran across 3 woredas (districts) of Oromia region and 32 communities, training 100 government development agents to support the rollout.

The programme, funded by the Fund for Innovation in Development (FID), has since scaled into a formal impact evaluation covering 15 districts of Oromia, roughly 200,000 farmers and 3,000 government extension agents, led jointly by the Bordeaux School of Economics, Addis Ababa University and Ethiopia's Research Center for Inclusive Development in Africa (RIDA).

The evaluation is designed to measure Farmer.Chat's effect on the adoption of farming practices, crop yields and farmer incomes, and — notably — to assess its cost-effectiveness against Ethiopia's existing, agent-only extension model, rather than simply reporting engagement numbers.

Results were not yet public as of this review. The programme is documented here for the rigor and scale of its evaluation design and its direct integration into the government's own extension-agent network — not for outcomes that remain to be confirmed.

Read the full analysis: https://fundinnovation.dev/en/projects/leveraging-transformational-potential-ai-empower-small-scale-farmers--ethiopia