Webinar 6 | The food system approach and the sesame sector in Ethiopia

Ethiopia is one of the major sesame producers and exporters in the world, with sesame being the second agricultural export earner after coffee. The Ethiopia sesame sector has an annual turnover of 300 million USD, sesame is cultivated by about 150,000 farmer households. The Netherlands support for the Ethiopia sesame sector between 2013 and 2020 aimed at important systemic challenges: productivity, quality and in-country value addition. This led to the Sesame Business Network (SBN) initiative.

In this webinar we look back at the Netherlands support strategy for the sesame sector. This case offers insights and lessons learned on how complex, multi-stakeholder, farmer-owned sector transformation agendas have evolved and developed into workable food systems agendas. Sustainable and lasting food system and sector transformation cannot be achieved without the active involvement of farmers and a broad range of private and public sector actors. The basic question is ‘What is the added value of food system approach in program development and implementation?’

In this webinar, we have invited three experts involved in the sesame programme for interviews and a panel discussion.

Ted Schrader, WCDI, former program manager for the SBN initiative
Geert Westenbrink, consultant, former Agricultural counselor at EKN Addis Ababa.
Andualem Tadesse, RAISE-FS, former communication expert for the SBN initiative

You can register via the event page:

Here are the documents and the recording clips: