A warm welcome for GTLI by the Dasenech people of Guerenarema, South Omo Zone, Ethiopia

The people of Guerenarema welcomed us in July with this heartwarming celebration! We were there to check up on the progress our Women’s Strengthening project, and we were greeted with overwhelming enthusiasm from both the women and men of the community.

The people are thrilled that they have learned to read and write Amharic, the national language of Ethiopia. This simple skill is an important step in improving their long term survival. They are better able to negotiate with merchants and communicate effectively with government officials in charge of providing them important services.

Two years ago Guerenarema was at the bottom of a long list of Dasenech communities unable to adapt to their rapidly changing environment. They had access to clean water, because they had participated in our WASH project in 2014-2015. But they had no school, no health facility, and no community-based microenterprise of any kind. Access to food was not dependable, and the people were barely subsisting. Their community was often in conflict with the adjacent Hamer people, because they were forced to compete for scarce grazing land and water for their livestock.

With the help of our funding partner Boeing Global Corporate Citizenship, we began a Women’s Strengthening project with the goal of improving economic empowerment and stability in this area.

The first step in this project was to provide more than 50 men and women our Integrated Functional Vocational Literacy classes. IFVL provides basic literacy and numeracy for adults while at the same time introducing new skills for food production and consumption, including chicken farming and gardening. You can see how proud they are by the messages they wrote on their hats!

Women Cooperative members in Guerearema are learning to read and write

When GTLI first piloted Integrated Functional Vocational Literacy (IFVL), attendance averaged 15 people, with only three regular attendees. Lessons were simple learning exercises. Now, five years later, each of the 12 lessons are organized into six discrete learning activities that reinforce healthy hygiene and sanitation, reproductive health, and nutrition behaviors.  In Gueranerama Dasenech, 51 adults (37 women and 14 men) have already attended 32 out of 72 learning activities and their commitment continues to grow! When men and women practice joint problem-solving in school, their respect for each other increases, which starts shifting norms in favor of gender equality. It’s transformative—and Gueranerama adults are raising the bar!

The Gueranerama Women’s Cooperative is also ahead of the pack in earning money. These amazing women have established an executive committee, a management committee, and a credit committee, with more than half of the 24 members actively participating in co-op management. The cooperative is licensed with the local government office, and during the past few months they have been able to deposit 4,095 birr (approximately $190) in profits into their Omo Micro Finance account. This may not seem like much but when the average household income is less than $1/day, it’s a fortune.

The women have been busy selling local drink and coffee chaff while they wait for the completion of the new rural trading center and the inauguration of their new grinding mill. Soon, more than 170 very vulnerable households will be able to purchase food and commodities locally (instead of walking for two days) and to save 2-3 hours per day using the grinding mill rather than grinding grain by hand.

Less than two years ago, Gueranerama Dasenech had no access to water, no literate adults, and poor linkage to health services. Women spent 100% of their time fetching water, manually grinding grain, walking for days to purchase sorghum, and were often victims of violent abuse. Thanks to four projects funded by different donors, 204 lives have been transformed:

• USAID/Ethiopia’s project constructed a new water well
• JSI’s APC project last year stimulated demand for reproductive health and family planning
• JSI’s APC project this year has provided 48 households with a total of 288 moringa seedlings
• Boeing Global Corporate Citizenship’s project is teaching IFVL, constructing a rural trading center, and installing a grinding mill

And, best of all, the people of Gueranerama are truly helping themselves. They contributed 11,340 birr as cost share (approximately $528) in May alone by fetching water for construction and participating in other activities.

Our aim is to equip South Omo pastoralists so that within five years, they will have the ability—the health, livelihood options, and leadership skills—to thrive. It looks like Gueranerama may well be our first success story in resilience. Fingers Crossed!

Guerenarema woman grinding grain by hand

A Dasenech woman grinds by hand the grain that she will use to prepare her family’s meal. This is a task she spends 2 to 3 hours on, every day. Despite her work load, she is finding the time to participate in our women’s strengthening project now underway in the Guerenarema community.

Our project seeks to improve economic empowerment and stability for the women in this underserved community, where there are no schools, no health facilities, and no community-based organizations promoting microenterprise. We are not focusing only on the women, however. A group of men and women are coming together twice a week to learn to read, write, and do basic arithmetic. And in the process, they learn to make decisions together.

In these traditional communities, women do bulk do the bulk of the physical work—fetching water, carrying heavy loads, grinding grain. When we work with communities to empower women, they learn how to form a cooperative to operate a grinding mill and rural trading center. The cooperative will save hours of productive time each day for all of the women in the community. Time that would otherwise be spending grinding grain by hand or walking miles to the nearest trading center.

Our experience with women cooperatives has shown us that as they contribute to the overall economic vitality of the community, they also improve status of the women as valued community members. The women gain productive time, and they gain a voice in matters that affect their well-being and their families’ well-being.

Worku in a GTLI Integrated Functional Vocational Literacy class

Worku learning to write her name

Where we work in Ethiopia, in the South Omo Zone, tribal traditions do not value education, and education for women, especially, is frowned upon.

But how do you vote, how do you access government health services, and how do you negotiate fair prices at market if you can’t read, write, or count?

When communities ask us to work with them, we offer integrated literacy and livelihood classes for men and women. This is life changing for the women as they acquire the skills, know-how, and confidence to negotiate with men and engage in a small business.

Their new ability to self-advocate then leads to better social standing: the women are recognized for their new knowledge and skills, and they participate more in community decision-making and governance.

What’s in a name? A whole new world of opportunity!

Wonga Bayno women learning to write and read

The women of the Wonga Bayno and Minogelti communities in the Hamar region of the South Omo Zone, Ethiopia have inspired us from the day we first met them. They work long hours to provide water and food for their families, and they want to do so much more.

And that, in a nutshell, is the problem. When all of a woman’s time and energy is spent hauling water by foot and grinding grain by hand, that is all she is valued for. Under those conditions how can she help her community climb out the endless reliance on emergency water and food aid?

In July more than 80 women registered for our adult Integrated Functional Vocational Literacy (IFVL) classes in Wonga Bayno and Minogelti. And this tremendous response from the women even though they were still walking long distances for water while waiting for their local wells to be repaired.

With our Economic Empowerment of Women projects we are helping to create and support women cooperatives that operate grinding mills and trading centers, giving all of the women in those communities more productive time.

Practicing using the scale at the trading center

The women in our IFVL classes are learning that they can solve problems. They are learning tangible skills to earn money and raise food, and they are gaining the confidence to advocate for themselves, their families, and their communities.

By working together these women are beginning to transform their communities.