In Ethiopia:
    • One child in 17 dies before reaching the age of 5.
    • Women are 40 times more likely to die in childbirth than in the UK.
    • Almost four in ten people don’t have clean water.
    • Less than a fifth of people have access to adequate sanitation.

We first visited Ethiopia in 2007. In rural areas simple health posts and primary schools were just being built and staffed but there was little money for equipment, so it was not hard to find gaps that we could help fill.

By carefully targeted funding we have helped teachers and healthcare staff do the jobs they have been trained to do. We have provided equipment and furniture for health posts and health centres, and desks and teaching materials for schools. Local health and education services are slowly developing, with support from us providing some pieces of the jigsaw.

Our support for health centres and schools was in liaison with local government officers to whom we were introduced by the Ethiopian NGO SUNARMA (www.sunarma.org) who had agricultural development projects in the communities that we supported.

By supporting SUNARMA's Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WaSH) programmes we have funded clean water and hygiene training for over 5,000 people in the catchment areas of the schools and health centres that we have supported.

Circumstances are changing in the project areas (see the Projects pages). At the start of 2018 we judged that we could help the communities most by supporting clean water via SUNARMA and their UK 'sister organisation' Action Ethiopia (www.actionethiopia.org). We do not currently have any plans to resume support for schools and health facilities.

For more information see our Projects pages.