Abstract:
In developing countries like Ethiopia, agriculture is the pillar source of the economy that
maintains food security and fulfills other basic living standards. Ethiopia has faced the typical
challenges of inadequate and unorganized communication among various stakeholders for
farming professional support and advisories. The current systems are time-consuming, costly,
and sometimes have inappropriate advisory support for Ethiopian farming. After a pre-research
context analysis of the existing farm advisory systems, the researcher developed a multi
stakeholder data consolidation and advisory framework over the cloud for sustainable farming
in Ethiopia. This research focuses on selected agricultural issues for exploration in Ethiopia to
enhance the management of agriculture support and advisories. Due to the emergence of
technologies, cloud-based multi-stakeholder data consolidation and advisory frameworks are
being developed to solve the numerous problems required for sustainable development. This
research explores the possible cloud computing intervention in Ethiopian farming to support
them through numerous advisories in alleviating the salient agriculture challenges quickly and
cost-effectively. Initially, this research examines and evaluates (utilizing a mixed (qualitative
and quantitative) approach) the issues present within the existing agricultural advisory and
support systems. Subsequently, it employs an exploratory design to explore the potential of
cloud computing applications in addressing the identified challenges. Finally, an applied
research design is employed to develop the advisory framework and its generic solution. The
generic solution design is a multi-stakeholder data consolidation and advisory for the Ethiopian
farming sector using the cloud to provide support services. The research contributes to the
economy of scale through the growth of agricultural products through coordinated activities of
farmers, development agents, heads of agriculture departments, and the Ministry of Agriculture
using cloud computing.
