Abstract            Volume:13  Issue-10  Year-2025         Original Research Articles

Online ISSN : 2347 - 3215 Issues : 12 per year Publisher : Excellent Publishers Email : editorijcret@gmail.com

Despite its immense contribution to sustaining agricultural development and ensuring national food security, attention given to indigenous knowledge (IK) by some modern communities in Ethiopia is weak. Thus, the purpose of this article is to investigate how smallholder farmers manage agricultural IK in the districts of the East Showa Zone of Oromia, Ethiopia. The study employed mixed research approaches based on quantitative and qualitative data. A field survey involving semi-structured interviews and focus group discussions was used for data collection. A total of 125 smallholder farmers were drawn from eight kebeles located in the four districts of the East Showa Zone through simple random sampling and probability proportion to size. Both quantitative and qualitative data analysis techniques were employed. The study revealed that agricultural IK was acquired and shared within small and family-based networks during social interactions and was dominantly preserved in individuals’ minds through memorization, suggesting that there is a danger of losing IK in the studied communities as individuals with resident knowledge die. It was also found that IK utilization is limited to a few farming activities and varies across the studied districts. Thus, it can be concluded that the method of acquiring and sharing agricultural IK involves informal apprenticeship and socialization, where observing, questioning, consulting, imitating and practicing are applied by smallholder farmers. Therefore, more efforts should be made to strengthen social ties among smallholder farmers and encourage them to use a holistic knowledge management approach involving both tacit and explicit formats in the management of agricultural IK.

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