Action Aid in Kemba

Our trip to visit Action Aid Ethiopia’s field operations in the town of Kamba proved fruitful an rejuvenated our feeling for work taking place in Ethiopia. There, more than 70 projects display their commitments to useful, harmless work that improves the life of entire communities. They work diligently with few resources and smaller staffs to produce results that have social, political, and economic ramifications and should yield even more sustainable and long-lasting results far beyond their mission.

Their entire plan has no footprint except to honor and empower the community they are serving. While I found it awkward that they also aspire to affect cultural norms, they are careful to only tentatively, and with great community ‘buy-in’ take on what are termed by the NGO and the Ethiopian government as “Harmful Traditional Practices.” Some of these which were described to us go against the grain of western norms: wife and child beating, excessive slaughter of livestock at occasions of deaths, female castration of girls, all are much too violent and nonsensical to weestern minds and values but are actually very ancient tribal rituals here.
Action Aid’s staff is superb, from Birhanu the District Manager, to Markos (guard, farmer, general labor & resident dad). They employ locally as much as they are able and when they post positions for professionally qualified managers they receive 400 applications per position. This is a privilege of being ferenge (foreign) ngo’s and is also a burden of responsibility to make certain the right persons are selected to enhance their programming and teamwork.
Action Aid also has an affirmative policy of preferring women and other marginalized groups and classes (making their policy operational beyond secretarial, cook, or household positions is problematic, however, due to Ethiopia’s limited and recent history of allowing women’s education to exist; much less be encouraged).

We were truly inspired and amazed by our trip to Kemba with Action Aid; many thanks for the incredible experience and wonderful friendship.