Assessing the Harmony of Supply Chain Actors in Live Animal Export: The Case of Gurage Zone, Ethiopia

Abstract

This article aims to study the harmony of supply chain actors in Live Animal Export at Gurage Zone, Ethiopia. This problem is relevant and researches in this sense can help policies that aim to improve the functioning of supply chains. Harmony of supply chain is the collaboration level of supply chain participants which is measured in terms of common planning and action guidelines they have, how they share information and generally the overall relations they have one another. Being descriptive in design, the study has targeted main live animals supply chain actors who are 719 producers, 6 traders and 2 exporters in Gurage zone from whom 257 producers were randomly chosen as a sample and all the traders and exporter have been used directly from whom questionnaires were collected from. The findings have proved that there is relatively consistent flow of information throughout the supply chain actors in live animals export in Gurage zone. Additionally there have been seen that there is a culture of planning jointly among the chain actors followed by having common updating means in case of plan fails to meet the expectations even though there exists problems of sitting for evaluation of actions made by the chain elements which is the key for future improvement of the export business. Finally it has been found that the overall harmony of the chain actors is attractive with some reservations.