Ethiopian women get down to business of beating climate change

KONSO, Ethiopia – Kessasa Delebo, a 46 year-old widow and mother of four, has not been able to feed her family properly over the past seven years, mainly due to drought conditions affecting Konso district in southwestern Ethiopia.

The yields from the maize, sorghum and wheat Delebo grows on her 0.75-hectare plot have been very low in the decade since her husband died, with her crops failing much of the time.

To make ends meet, Delebo, a resourceful woman, proposed a system of in-kind cattle-keeping to her family. They donate cattle to her, which she feeds and sells, splitting the profits.

She then tries to save enough money to buy sheep and goats to rear.

But Delebo’s cattle innovation does not provide her with enough income. So like many women in the area, she also works as a labourer on other farms. She earns 25 Ethiopian birr ($1.20) a day by tilling and sowing fields.

The impacts of climate change on the local weather are making the lives of women like Delebo increasingly hard.

Extreme temperatures and precipitation are causing both floods and droughts, making their responsibility to feed their families more challenging.

But help is at hand from a new climate change adaptation project that began in Konso in January 2015. It aims to enable local women to become more economically stable and independent, so they can avoid negative ways of coping like day labouring.

The project run by the Women Support Association (WSA), a local NGO, provides them with business training and sometimes animals, while improving local infrastructure and offering loans from shared savings. Ultimately, it hopes to benefit 1,400 women.

Women are selected to participate based on their wealth and socio-economic vulnerability, said Fantahun Alemu, a project coordinator for WSA. They are then organised into self-help groups, each with around 20 members.

The women are taught how to develop their business ideas. They meet weekly to make contributions to the group’s savings fund, and to discuss issues like climate change and gender.

The savings will be used to provide revolving loans to group members, according to Marta Nemara, WSA’s chief executive officer.

Some women are also eligible to receive animals, including sheep, goat, chicken and cattle.

And WSA will encourage them to switch to efficient cookstoves, to cut down on deforestation and the time needed to cut and gather wood, Nemara said.

WSA is implementing the project in collaboration with international development agencies SoS Sahel and Christian Aid, as part of the BRACED programme, a three-year UK-funded initiative supporting community-based adaptation to climate change.

In Ethiopia, women are responsible for taking care of children and cooking, while men earn money through crop production or other means.

When erratic or extreme weather causes crops to fail, the burden of maintaining the household with few resources falls on women, who are sometimes asked to find work outside the home.

The Konso project aims to ease that burden by building up women’s economic assets, making them more resilient to the growing pressures of extreme weather and climate change, Nemara said.

They environmental shocks women face include droughts, which previously occurred every 10 years but are now happening every three, according to Henock Hailu of the Ethiopian National Meteorological Agency.

In Konso today, the trees are bare and fields barren due to a severe drought linked to the El Nino weather phenomenon, which is affecting many parts of the world.

The U.N. Children's Fund (UNICEF) has said 10.2 million Ethiopians, including 6 million children, will need emergency food assistance in 2016, and 435,000 children will require treatment for acute severe malnutrition.

The Ethiopian government has asked donors for $1.4 billion to bankroll humanitarian aid this year, including $1.1 billion for emergency food assistance.

The Konso project hopes to make a long-term difference so that people will be less vulnerable to these kinds of shocks in the future.

Women are taking the lead by sharing climate information and weather advisories at their weekly meetings.

They also pass on agricultural knowledge from government extension workers on topics such as climate, crop selection, cultivation and harvesting schedules, use of improved seeds and fertilisers, and terrace and forest farming.

The project is also working to improve local infrastructure, for example by installing community water wells.

That could help Sabiya Bernase, a 40-year-old mother of six, who started her own business when her husband, who also has a second wife, was no longer able to feed his family due to repeated crop failure from drought.

Bernase began brewing cheqa, a traditional beverage made with sorghum, and selling cash crops, such as maize, sorghum, and wheat, which she purchases from a nearby area with access to irrigation.

When the Konso project began, her business was not operating smoothly due to water shortages.

“When I was a girl we fetched water from a nearby stream which is now dried up. So we go to Delban River which is very far from our area to fetch water and takes us almost a half day,” Bernase said.

But the new wells, business development training and education on climate-resilient agriculture provided by the climate adaptation project could turn things around, she and the WSA project backers said.