The survey was conducted to assess the challenges and opportunities of small-scale extensive/backyard and semi-intensive poultry farming in Nekemte city of East Wollega Zone Oromia regional state, Ethiopia. The study population was voluntary individuals who are practicing poultry farming in the city. Data were collected using pre-tested structured questionnaires and analyzed by descriptive statistics using SPSS version 16. In this survey, we identified challenges and opportunities pertaining to poultry production in the area. The main challenges are disease, lack of poultry multiplication center, lack of commercial feed, vaccine, chemical disinfectants and lack of poultry production equipment. Most of these production inputs are found far away from Nekemte incurring transportation costs and thus expensive to obtain. Among the opportunities are the presence of market to sell poultry products, availability of manpower, availability of raw materials to construct poultry house and cheaper cereal grain and agricultural by-products though to be used as poultry feed. We also noticed that farmers have a low perception of how to exploit the prevailing opportunities or alternative options to resolve the challenges they faced. This indicates that the poultry improvement extension program and health care service is not efficient. Such constraints are likely consistent across Ethiopia except around Bishoftu (formerly named Debrezeit) which is known to be a chicken production focus area of the country. Hence, the poultry improvement program should resolve the identified constraints in parallel with adapting alternative technologies of poultry extension packages that help to exploit potential opportunities prevailing in those areas.

Keywords: Poultry; Nekemte, Wollega; Challenges, Opportunities; small-scale; Ethiopia