CHRISTIAN AID NEWS

LAST WORD
A reflection on playing a part
in the fight against poverty,
and living life in the wider
family of Christian Aid
Christian Aid trustee Charlotte
Seymour Smith recently visited
Ethiopia to see how our partners
there are responding to huge
development challenges –
and opportunities
LISTENING TO
COMMUNITIES IS KEY
TO LASTING CHANGE
SINCE THE 1970s, Ethiopia has been
firmly fixed in the global public
consciousness as suffering drought after
drought, and famine after famine.
Arriving in Ethiopia’s capital and
travelling to the country’s far south, it
became clear, however, that the reality
was more complex.
Leaving Addis Ababa’s outskirts we
drove along the roads that connect
Ethiopia’s main towns and cities, passing
new shops and blocks of flats in various
stages of completion, and roads being
maintained and upgraded. Major
investments are planned or underway,
including for hydro-electric power, dams
and irrigation. These projects have
enormous potential, but must carefully
consider the needs of the poorest if they
are to deliver improvements in the lives
of people across Ethiopia. For example,
in the Rift Valley there are a number of
commercial growers of flowers and fruit
for export, who use the water from the
nearby lakes. Noone would deny that it is
important for Ethiopia to get vital export
earnings. Yet neighbouring tenant
farmers lack any improved water supply
and struggle to get enough water to
grow crops for subsistence or for market.
Is this water justice?
Certainly, for Christian Aid’s partners in
Ethiopia, ensuring that communities –
including the most vulnerable – drive
their own plans for development work is
critical. By doing so, partners are
ensuring that supporters’ money delivers
lasting results, whether it is donated for
an emergency response or for longerterm
development work. It was
heartening to see that the community
and government in Ethiopia’s
Arsi-Negele District continue to take
responsibility for managing and
maintaining a water project eight years
after it was handed over to them by
Charlotte (centre) visiting a shallow well in
Hamer district with the Christian Aid team
and partner Action for Development
partner Centre for Development
Initiatives. And because they listened,
when the project was designed, to those
responsible for providing water for their
families – the community’s women –
they have seen transformational results.
These include an increase in girls’
enrolment in primary school in the area,
from four per cent to 46 per cent, in part
because girls no longer need to travel six
hours a day to fetch water.
In South Omo, which is home to the
Hamer, the Dasenech and other
pastoralist communities and which was
particularly badly affected by the drought
in 2011, I met men and women working
together to identify the risks their
communities face and how they can
address them. While they are
traditionally excluded from making
decisions in the public sphere, women
like Bola were speaking up about the
needs of their communities and were
evidently taking real ownership of
imp lementing projects that should
reduce the impact of future droughts,
from digging boreholes to diversifying
their means of earning a living.
We may not know precisely when, but
we may be certain that Ethiopia will face
drought again. In this context, we hope
that our support allows partners to
improve conditions in a country that
remains one of the poorest in the world.
Yet it is gratifying to hear that these
partners regard Christian Aid as more
than a funder – as a genuine partner, a
leader, and an organisation prepared to
invest in helping them improve. And it is
touching, too, to hear from the people
supported by these projects, who would
like to pay Christian Aid back one day
for the help they have received to break
the cycle of hunger, poverty and
vulnerability.
Our trustee
Charlotte Seymour Smith is a
member of Christian Aid’s board of
trustees, having joined in November
2007. She is the author of the
Macmillan Dictionary of
Anthropology and she has worked
with the UK Department for
International Development and the
Foreign and Commonwealth Office
in Mozambique, Brussels, Delhi
and London.
Binyam Bekele
30 Christian Aid News