Ethiopia faces daunting poverty and food security challenges. Despite the articulation of a rural development and food security strategy and a commitment to the broader framework of pro-poor rural development, many complex issues remain to be resolved.

Important knowledge gaps concern:

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• Finding the best ways to target investments among regions by investment and household types, to best achieve growth, food security and poverty reduction
• Making the rural development strategy actionable and designing feasible instruments for implementation, and
• Monitoring and evaluating the implementation and impact of the rural development strategy.

In response to these challenges, the Ethiopian Strategy Support Program (ESSP) aims to:

• To strengthen the national capacity for practical policy research that informs the rural development strategy
• To improve the data and knowledge base available for policy analysis, and
• To address specific knowledge gaps concerning the implementation of the strategy.

ESSP, a new Ethiopia-driven and Ethiopia-owned program, is a collaborative undertaking of the Development Strategy and Governance Division of the International Food Policy Research institute (IFPRI) and the Ethiopian Development Research Institute (EDRI). Building on IFPRI’s longstanding involvement in Ethiopia, it seeks to strengthen policy analysis and dialogue by helping bridge the gap between knowledge and policy on agricultural and rural development issues.

The ESSP program is overseen by a National Advisory Committee (NAC), which provides input and feedback into the program. A key feature of the program design is that the structure is flexible. Thus, the action research topics are determined and updated through the participation of the National Advisory Committee. Similarly, the REKSS activities are designed to reflect strategic priorities, while the capacity strengthening is similarly tailored to the activities being undertaken in the other two pillars.