On behalf of the “The Agricultural Growth Program-Livestock Market Development (AGP-LMD)” the ATS Consortium of Unternehmensberatung Dr. Karb GmbH and ADT Projekt GmbH is supporting the implementation of a traceability system for livestock in Ethiopia (ETLITS). The ATS consortium is developing and providing the Livestock Identification and Traceability System (LITS) database” The project is financed by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).

Ethiopia has one of the largest livestock populations in the world with around 53 million cattle, 26 million sheep, 23 million goats and 1.1 million camels.
Initially the ATS platform traceability system will be used to support the beef export sector in Ethiopia starting with a pilot intervention of around 200.000 cattle annually.
In close cooperation with the Ethiopian partners the ATS team elaborated the relevant business processes covering the identification of the cattle at local livestock markets, the movements to feedlots , the quarantine procedures (e.g. treatments, vaccinations) and the production of certificates for export.

The ETLITS will include a strong GIS component which is able to visualize the location of all establishments involved and the movements of animals between them in real time.
The major challenges for the ATS team was to design the ETLITS as a system which can be easily expanded to other schemes, such as for other production types (e.g. dairy), other species with different means of identification. Further the system should be capable to deal with a large number of livestock if the ETLITS is expanded countrywide.

For ATS team the Ethiopian case is another proof that a country specific implementation of a traceability system can be carried out just through parameterization instead of developing a specific source code. After Tanzania and Jamaica Ethiopia will be the third country to run the traceability system under the ATS platform on the basis of the same source code whereby it is tailored exactly to the country’s needs