Ethiopia: Bridging hunger gaps

Etenesh Daniel from Muguja Village in Ethiopia has lived with hunger most of her life. Every year during the dry season, she adjusts her eating habits, along with other families in her community, until the rains bring relief. The situation is a struggle year after year, and it has become even harder in recent years due to the increasing effects of climate change, such as shifting rainfall patterns, more frequent drought, increasing food prices and decreasing land for farming and animal grazing. 

‘We should normally be planting our crops right now. But there is no rain. Under normal circumstances, we eat in June what we plant now,’ Etenesh explained in late February this year, ‘We are very scared. Four years ago, the same thing happened and there was a famine. We are afraid this might happen again.”

To survive, many women take loans to provide short-term relief for their families. Long term, this strategy often leads to more debt and hardship.

CARE has partnered with FARM Africa, with support from the European Union’s Food Facility Fund to help women like Etenesh in Ethopia.

Since early 2010, the project has been establishing and supporting village saving and loan associations in which affected people are trained to collectively save small amounts of money. This money is then lent out to the same group.

The members of Etenesh’s group are all women. Last year, they collectively invested 2,000 birr (approx. 80 euro) from cultivating and selling ginger. With this money, some of the women moved from grass-thatched huts into houses with proper roofs; but all of the families’ diets have improved, and they now have money to send their children to school. 

Etenesh was also able to join another CARE and FARM Africa supported women’s group that provides two goats to each woman in the group. (Once those goats have offspring, another woman will receive their first two baby goats.) Etenesh was selected to train to become a Community Animal Health Worker. She now helps to monitor the health status of cattle and other small farm animals, and provides basic treatment – an invaluable skill in often remote and isolated areas.

More than 15,000 women like Etenesh will benefit from this kind of work. They will no longer be at danger of losing everything due to a delayed rain season, drought or poor harvest. These women will earn their own income. And they will be empowered both within their families and their communities.