I worked in Ethiopia for 18 years and came back to Ireland in 1995. I have been back there twice, including a one month visit in August 2002, so I know the place very well although I may not be very well up to date with some of the more recent events. My colleague, Fr. Paddy Moran, worked in Ethiopia from 1996 to 1998 as a student and has been re-appointed there. He is waiting for his visa to get back. He hopes to get back there in June.
Like other speakers I thank the committee for inviting us here. We appreciate it very much. I also thank the Government for the support it has given us over the years, particularly through APSO. Some really depend on that for their daily bread. I also thank the Irish embassy in Addis Ababa for its support, particularly the chargé d’affaires, Pauline Conway, who has visited our work and supported it. She is very highly respected. I invite committee members, if they ever get the chance, to visit Ethiopia because I think they would find it a unique and enriching experience.
At present there are two Irish Holy Ghost missionaries working in Ethiopia, including one in the south west. At the back of the handout, there is a map and we are down at the very south-west bordering on Sudan and Kenya. It was known for many years as the forgotten province - a little bit of the béal bocht I think.
We moved there in 1972 and over the next ten years a particular approach was developed based on a decision that was made very early on that we would work within local structures. If a school existed in a town we would not build a mission school. If a clinic existed we would not build a mission clinic and so on. We would support the structures that were already there. We still follow that policy today. Sr. Isabelle's sisters, who worked with us for many years, worked through the ministry of health primarily in health care, but not having our own structures.
We have two Irish Spiritans, as I said, one working in the capital, Addis Ababa, and one working in the south. We have two French Spiritans doing the same. In the other area mentioned by Sr. Smyth we have one American, two Dutch, three Nigerians and one Kenyan. The area about which I am speaking is in the south-west.
Over the first ten years we were there each mission was working on its own, doing the best it could. Then around 1982 there was a consortium formed and we had an integrated, developed programme, again working through local structures and this continued for about 15 years. In 1997 and 1998 there was a reorientation and the conclusion was that the programme was much too extensive. It was trying to cover too much ground and perhaps also rendering too much service. So there was a reorientation to concentrating on very specific communities and a process whereby, rather than providing a service, we would empower the community to get on its feet so that it could look after itself. That is the programme in existence at the moment.
The first page of the handout shows a one-page summary to which we will return at the end. The other three or four pages give a summary of the overall project. We have two groups as shown on the map in South Omo and Gamo Gofa. Those two groups work independently but together. At the moment they are responsible for nine communities with a target population of about 84,000 people spread over quite long distances, with particular implications for travelling although less so than before. There is a staff of 66 involved in the programme.
On the second last page there is what is called an organogram, which is a plan showing the organisation of the thing. The shaded section shows the integrated community development programme of Gamo Gofa and of South Omo. There are at present seven project areas. Members can see the workers, the community facilitators and that type of thing and the areas in which they work. The first one on the left is the Arba Minch urban dwellers association. This represents a very poor part of the town of Arba Minch, which has about 40,000 people. There they concentrate on women in development, gender and development and a social programme.
The next area is Zegitti Merche which is up in the highlands. There they have three facilitators working on natural resources management - agriculture, preventing erosion and that type of thing, primary health care and women in development and gender and development. There are similar programmes across the seven areas.
The community-based primary health care, which is the first item on page two, works through the local structures with the ministry of health. It encompasses the following major components: health education; providing supplementary food where necessary; safe water supply and basic sanitation; maternal and child health and family planning; control of epidemic disease; treatment of injury and illnesses; provision of essential drugs; and awareness raising. All of this is done within the local structures but also in a way in which the local people will be able to continue it without us within a few years.
In the water development programme, previously we dug a lot of wells, we bored some and protected springs, but the emphasis now is to enable the people to do it themselves. It is on a much smaller scale, but I hope it will last longer.
In some areas there are marginalized groups such as tanners, blacksmiths and potters. A certain amount of work has gone on there to bring them more into the community, to reduce the prejudice against them and get them more involved in the market network so that they can get a better income and be involved in the social life and the decision making of the community. They have been very happy with the progress made with that in the past three years.
The same is true for the women's empowerment programme. In many communities in Ethiopia, the women have a very heavy workload with very little influence in terms of making decisions in society and often in the home. A lot of work has gone into this in terms of sensitisation and also to get them involved in the programmes we are running. If there is a water committee, they would have a certain membership on that. The details of this, I do not know much about, because I was not involved in it.
Number five is interesting because it is the question of a small amount of funds being set aside for programmes which the community decides it wants. However, it is done in a way in which the community comes up with the suggestion and then it goes to the Government where it is discussed and the funds are allocated. There was a lot of difficulty with this because local government never really came across this type of experience before. Sometimes it may be a meeting hall that the community decides it needs, at other times it might be a grinding mill or something like that. One would be talking about small sums of maybe $2,000 or €3,000, but they could make a massive contribution there.
Number six is interesting also because it deals with an area, Dimeka, in which Fr. Moran worked and where they have a non-formal education. Quite often there was a school there with one teacher and one student. There was one teacher for each class and one student and maybe no student. Obviously local semi-nomadic or nomadic people were not taking to formal education. This is an attempt to get them involved in non-formal education where they need it. It may simply be helping them to count or read so that when they go to market they will not be cheated by the weighing scales or something like that, and then to expand on that and take it up to what they call functional adult literacy. They have specific targets. This has been very successful and is to be expanded in the next few years.
With agriculture and natural resource management there is a huge problem with erosion which is increasing by the year. I was away for five years and when I came back I was astounded. In some cases there were improvements but in other cases things had become drastically worse. There was more pressure on the land and people were moving further up the hillsides to cultivate. When the rains came this was all washed away. This project aims to preserve the natural resources. I mentioned the organogram but I do not know much about it. However, people are happy with its progress.
The present situation is unique because some parts of the country are enduring massive famine and drought but we are dealing with a small area in the south-west where flooding is the problem, and we have a small drilling machine, the size of a small truck. Recently it had to drill down 80 metres but no water was found, and that night the machine was washed away in a flash flood. Many crops have been damaged, such as maize and potatoes, as well as roads and bridges, so huge damage has also been done to the infrastructure. It is as serious as drought because of the food shortages. Assessments have to be done to establish whether people need food or finance for reseeding and replanting.
Our programme is funded for three years to the cost of €1.5 million. It is half funded by the European Union and half funded by funding agencies, particularly from Austria but also from Holland, Germany and Ireland. The EU, as a big bureaucracy, is slow to make decisions, so if the committee has any influence in making the EU office responsible for speeding up its decisions we would appreciate it very much. There may be a future need for seed money where flooding has taken place but we do not know yet. That will depend on assessments. If there is ever any spare money it would be appreciated for transport needs.
