This campaign has now closed
Ethiopia is one of the least developed countries in Africa. 81% of the population lives on less than US$2 a day and over 40% survives on less than 50 cents a day. More than 65% of children experience stunting due to poor nutrition and only 28% of rural households have access to clean water (source www.dfid.gov.uk). Women in rural communities in Ethiopia are particularly disadvantaged: they suffer from few economic opportunities, low literacy levels, poor access to public services such as healthcare, and harmful traditional practices such as early marriage and female circumcision. Studies consistently show that families, and especially children, benefit enormously from improvements in women’s income and knowledge particularly in terms of improved health and commitment to education. This project aims to build the capacity of 2,700 women in the Southern Region of Ethiopia to improve their income and knowledge. Thus the project is expected to bring substantial improvement to the lives of 16,200 people.
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This four-year project will work with communities in the Southern Nations, Nationalities and People’s Republic (SNNPR) region, starting in late 2008 and continuing until 2012. FARM-Africa successfully ran a women’s enterprise project in this area from 2004-2008, and this new work will build on our expertise and enable us to help more women and their families. The project will take an integrated approach to enabling poor women to improve their status by: • establishing strong women’s groups through which poor women gain peer support, • building the productive assets of these extremely poor women through dairy goats. Through dairy goats women gain the potential to generate income to invest in other enterprises. Dairy goats provide highly nutritious milk for the family and excess to sell and also breed quickly so can be sold to meet household needs. • providing literacy and numeracy training. Literacy and numeracy are essential for these women many of whom are illiterate to manage their lives successfully, to fully access public services such as healthcare, and to claim their legal entitlements, • establishing Savings and Credit Co-operatives (SACCOs) from a number of strong women’s groups. SACCOs enable women to save securely and also to take loans to develop income-generating activities such as vegetable production and petty trading that bring regular income into the household, • providing women with important knowledge in matters relating to their legal rights through members trained as Community-based Legal Advisors. The Advisors provide individual advice on request and also run community workshops on wider issues such as land ownership. Supporting this project will enable 2,700 women and their families to move out of extreme poverty and provide a means for building on this improvement. Our previous work in this area led to some significant economic benefits, for example women have achieved an extra 126 Birr (£7.87) through goat milk sales - a 14% increase on what they would expect to gain in one year. SACCO members have been able to develop enterprises that generate regular income. Women spend their income on basic household necessities such as food, improving their homes, educating their children and investing in their enterprises. 35% have already secured additional productive assets (land or livestock) that will enable them to improve their lives further.