The spectre of famine is, like many
aspects of life in Ethiopia, ambiguous. The government pegs the number of people at risk at 4.5 million. Aid agencies claim the number is double that. The government and many of those aid agencies are at loggerheads over new legislation which controls and limits the activities of aid organizations in civil rights advocacy. This, so the government claims, has angered aid organizations and resulted in exaggerated claims designed to embarrass the government. The bickering seems irrelevant. 4.5 million people at risk of starvation should be enough to mobilize massive relief programs. Yet, it has not. There is huge gap between the funds that are needed and those that have been donated to the issue. It seem clear from the images that appear on our TV screens of distended bellies and lifeless eyes that many young Ethiopian children will die of starvation.
This year’s famine is different because of the current and atypical inflation. In a country like Canada, where the average family spends about 20% of its income on food, inflation cuts into our life style but is not tragic in its consequences. A 30% increase in the cost of living means that our food bill goes up to 26% of incomes. In Ethiopia, where a family spends 70% of its income on food a 30% increase in the cost of living means that a family has to spend about 90% of its income to feed itself. And today the rate of inflation in Ethiopia is reported to be as high as 39%. But a family cannot spend a high percentage of its income on food and still survive. Clothing, medicine, transportation and housing all make demands that can only be met by reducing the amount of food which is purchased.
In the result, famine is not confined to the rural poor but also includes those in urban areas that simply lack the means to purchase food even though employed. These terrible increases have arisen largely because of the rising price of fuel. Governments in the third world are increasingly finding themselves unable to subsidize fuel costs and prices for diesel fuel have increased dramatically and driven up the prices of foods that are largely transported to market by trucks. And the craze for bio fuels also plays a part. While people in wealthy nations feel good about using ethanol in their cars, the inevitable and resulting impact on corn prices operates to increase the price of all edible crops.
All of this has created a conundrum for Partners in the Horn of Africa. Should we move into the field of food relief to help address the issue—a field where we have no experience or expertise. After much debate our directors decided not to. Food distribution is not an area where we have expertise and it would be inconsistent with our model of working with Ethiopian ‘partners’ on specific projects if we were to simply transfer funds to food relief agencies. Better for us to emphasize permanent, on going food security measures that will lead to long term food stability…e.g. irrigation projects, farmer training, reforestation.
In the meantime we are undertaking
new projects, rapidly. After a successful pilot project involving washable, reusable sanitary pads for rural school girls we are now setting up manufacturing shops where local women will fabricate the pads which will then be distributed, along with special modified panties that hold the pads, to rural girls who routinely miss two or more days of school each month. This project was initiated by Mom and Me, a wonderful group of mothers on the North Shore of Vancouver who hold a Mother’s Day dance and dinner to raise funds for Partners each year.
And we are now exploring another prison project. Prisoners in Ethiopia, as in most parts of the world, are routinely bypassed by aid organizations. Yet, third world prisons have great needs. To date we have had two wonderfully successful projects in Ethiopian prisons. The first was a bio gas project that converted waste to methane gas for stoves serving 2000 prisoners. The second project set up a metal shop where prisoners could receive training 
that would make them employable upon release. Now we are looking at education for children….in prisons. In Ethiopia mothers in prison are expected to raise their own children and this creates great challenges related to education. Getting the kids to school outside the prison is expensive and the mothers have no money for transport or for school registration. And the mothers themselves need new skills if they are to be employed upon their release. So we are now working with the Executive Committee of an in-prison association. We’ll keep you posted.
School construction continues apace. We are getting better at this, picking up experience and know how with each new school. We have excellent engineering resources both in Canada and in Ethiopia and we are developing construction standards that are both affordable and reliable. We try and spend 55% of our funds on education-related projects, many of them involving construction. We are now undertaking our first turnkey construction project in the town of Gubya, in the Gojam Region, where an entire 
high school will be turned over to the education authorities in a couple of months. This will allow a remote community, for the first time, to send their kids to school in the same community. Up to now only the more well-to-do families (and there are not many of those) could afford to send their kids to high school in neighbouring towns. And in those cases the families were deprived of the children to assist with chores after the school hours…a not inconsiderable sacrifice in a society where all the labour is manual and where the availability of high school age kids makes a difference to the family’s welfare. Other families, and by far the majority, had no such option. Higher education and the promise that comes with it of breaking the cycle of poverty were simply not available. The school will change all of that and one of the surest signs of that was the degree of community involvement in the manual labour of basic construction. Up to 500 townspeople regularly showed up to dig foundations, carry sand for cement etc. etc.
We are also getting ready to start on footbridge construction as the rainy season comes to an end next month. As we noted in our last newsletter, we will be building a bridge at Ayu where 20 to 30 lives are lost each year as people try to ford swollen rivers…and where entire communities are cut off from medical, educational services as well as markets for three months each rainy season.
The cost of these construction projects, like food, is rising dramatically and this will create some challenges but we are all optimistic as one must be in this business. We know that our presence will make a difference and that we are fortunate to be able to assist the wonderful but desperately poor people of Ethiopia.
