Ethiopia's Famine Stricken Deserts Turning To Green

Back in 1984, images of the unfolding Ethipian famine shocked the world. As Michael Burke's news reports filled our screens with images of weak, fly-covered babies with distended bellies taking their last weary breaths in front of our very eyes, the world decided it must do something to help.

The net result was the Live Aid and Band Aid charitable events, aimed at the people of the West giving money to flood the crisis stricken region with grain and build wells. It was an incredible scene of generosity to help prop up a region that was beset by biblical droughts.

"Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime" - proverb

However, it wasn't a sustainable way for the country to go on living. It was time to stop buying the man a fish, and time for the man to build himself an irrigation system. And that's just what the people of Ethipoia's Tigray province have done for themselves.

The region is primarily agricultural and the majority of the population is employed in this sector. Agriculture is dependent on unreliable rainfall. For many years rainfall has been very low and erratic. As a result, repeated crop failure and scarcity of food have forced inhabitants to depend on famine relief in the form of food for work.

Using an ancient system of national service like labour conscription, where able bodied men and women give 20 days labour a year, the people of Tigray province have set about terracing entire mountains to trap water. As the BBC reports, once you had to dig 50ft (15m) down to find water. Now it's just 10ft, and 94 acres (38 hectares) of former desert have been transformed into fertile fields.

Source: BBC News

Thanks to land restoration programmes, young people and 14 households headed by women have been allocated communal land to farm for themselves. Abrehan Girmay (pictured below) has raised his income from US$0.35 an hour as a stone mason and increased his income four-fold thanks to his new role as a farmer.

Source: ruralpovertyportal.org

Irrigation allows a farmer to raise the number of harvest from two per year to three, to move from barely above subsistence farming to the ability to produce a surplus. Schemes like this allow Ethiopian people to move from dependency to self sufficiency, and from being aid recipients to being entrepreneurs.

If that continues, they'll no longer need the west to give them that fish, they'll be able to fish for themselves.