Dr. Eleni Gebremadhin, founder and outgoing CEO of Ethiopia Commodity Exchange (ECX) says her inspiration for founding ECX was the mere difficulty for buyers to find sellers and sellers to find buyers, and how difficult it was to enforce the contract. This is according to the interview she gave to the Guardian today. She said that on the one hand farmers often don’t get paid for weeks or months after selling their gains and on the other hand buyers have to inspect grain or coffee visually to check if it was really the quality they'd been told it was.

So these are all the problems in the supply chain that make Ethiopia poor and food insecure, she says. If people can't get grain where it's produced really efficiently to where it's needed, then it creates markets that are segmented. This creates pockets of surplus where prices collapse and places in other parts of the county where prices shoot up because there's a deficit and there's no grain coming in.

Dr. Eleni attributes this as one of the several factors exacerbating the 1984 famine in Ethiopia, where there was an obvious shortage in the north but there was a grain surplus in the fertile parts of western Ethiopia. Ultimately Ethiopia had to go to the world and beg for food aid due to lack of proper mechanism to distribute farm products.

Dr. Eleni said that addressing food shortage through more seeds, more fertilizers and more irrigation isn’t the only solution for food shortage. But there was a need to have a hard look how to properly address efficient distribution of production to the different part of the country. Otherwise, the country could get a bumper harvest and six months later people are still going to starve.

Dr. Eleni, who has written extensively on market issues, says that our development policies are skewed about more production. But she says if we want to prevent hunger in the country we need to have a more balanced perspective and we have to think about the marketing side. This approach, she says has somehow resonated, and the Ethiopian government decided to start up a whole initiative on markets led to the establishment of ECX, reliable interface for buyers and sellers to meet.

Now the idea of ECX has reached far and beyond Ethiopia. She says 18 countries have come to visit ECX; there has been a huge amount of interest from governments and international organization. Now, many countries are writing ECX into their policies to establish commodity exchange. Organizations like the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, New Partnership for Africa's Development, UN Development Programme, and the World Bank have taken the idea seriously, and help countries think through initiatives like the Ethiopia commodity exchange.

Dr. Eleni says after stepping down from the helm of ECX, she says her next project is to sponsor the enormous demand generated around ECX. This, she says, will do it through a company she setup to carry out precisely this kind of project for different countries, bringing in knowledge, technology and management experience. At this point, there are about six countries that are moving quite aggressively on getting commodity exchanges set up in Africa, she says.

Dr. Eleni has won the Yara award at the African Green Revolution Forum in Arusha, Tanzania, for her role in transforming Ethiopia's commodity market.