‘Ethiopians are confused when we ask about the famine’

Yeshi Endeg was 17 when a group of floppy-haired singers filed into a studio in Notting Hill to record the original Do They Know It's Christmas? The Ethiopian mother of five shakes her head when asked if she has heard of Band Aid or Bob Geldof, but the release of the single, 30 years ago next Saturday, had a direct impact on her family's life.

A few months after the Band Aid Trust was set up, Self Help Africa, then a fledgling Irish development agency, received one of its first substantial donations – $1 million – for irrigated horticultural projects in Meki Batu, south of Addis Ababa.

Endeg's father was one of the farmers whom Self Help Africa organised into co-operatives to benefit from the project. Through an interpreter, she says this gave her family a more secure income. "Yes, I remember it. The farmers were supported with seeds and irrigation pumps. So the assistance coming from Self Help Africa was very much useful to the families."

Today, Meki Batu Fruit and Vegetable Growers’ Co-operative Union represents 150 local co-operatives with almost 8,000 farmer members, including Endeg, her husband and her son.

As well as selling their fruit and vegetables locally, the union runs nine shops and is exporting green beans to the Netherlands. Now they are looking at producing sundried tomatoes and at canning tomatoes, to add value to their produce.

Ethiopia has experienced food shortages and droughts since the famine of the mid 1980s, but for many Irish people the country is indelibly linked with that disaster. Yet, on the several occasions we ask about the famine, we get confused looks in response. Fasika Kelemework, Self Help Africa's head of programmes, says the reason is simple: we are in the centre of the country, but it was the north and the southeast that bore the brunt of food shortages, droughts and civil war. So did the rest of Ethiopia not know what was going on, while we were watching it on the evening news? "How could they?" he says. "There was no television, no radio, no phones."

Animals dying

He says people remember animals dying because of the drought, but the suffering was nothing like it was in northern Ethiopia, where hundreds of thousands of people died. Jimma Shanko, a vegetable grower, was nine in 1984; he remembers the drought. “People were suffering a lot,” he says.

Today access to water is not a problem for farmers in his co-op. He proudly shows us the 10-metre-deep well he dug that draws water from Lake Ziway. Shanko grows two hectares of cabbage and onions, and, depending on the time of year, he could have 15 labourers working on his farm.

The father of five left school when he was 12, but his children will be different. The older children are going to private school. “They will stay in school,” he says.

A farmer sending his children to private school would have been unheard of 30 years ago, but Ethiopia is a mass of contradictions. Its capital, Addis Ababa, is in a construction boom, with apartment blocks springing up everywhere and a new light-rail system promised for next year.

“Will that be delivered on time?” we ask, as goats feed from a trough on the unfinished line. “Oh yes,” one man says. “There’s an election coming up next May.”

With just one opposition MP in a parliament of 547, it appears that the election will bring no great surprises for the ruling party, the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front.

Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have strongly criticised the government's approach to dissent, saying it has led to widespread human-rights violations and the jailing of journalists, bloggers and opponents of the regime. No one we meet will speak freely about the government.

The country has had almost double-digit GDP growth in the past decade, but you don’t have to travel far from Addis to see women and children walking for hours to collect water. A third of children live more than five kilmetres from their schools. Streams of uniformed children walk that journey, often carrying little more than a copybook.

Ethiopia is still a farming country, and 80 per cent of its 90 million people live off the land. Helping farmers to help themselves was the mission of Self Help Africa when it was established 30 years ago.

The agency was set up after a meeting between Dr Noel McDonagh, who was in Ethiopia on business, and Fr Owen Lambert, a Holy Ghost priest. It was March 1984, and the priest warned him that a catastrophe was about to unfold. The development charity was set up in September with a mission to help farmers to help themselves, and to use local people to lead this work. Fr Lambert's prediction was correct, and Michael Buerk of the BBC told the world about the "biblical famine" a month later.

Thirty years on, Self Help's recent merger with Gorta has made it one of Europe's largest development agencies focused on farming. In Ethiopia it is trying to improve the quality of seed being planted for crops such as wheat, barley and beans.

One farmer, Shiferaw Legese, says his barley crop is expected to give a threefold increase in yield because of a new variety of seed, improved fertiliser application and drainage technology. “We can make history by avoiding poverty,” another farmer says on hearing of the expected yields. That’s what it’s all about.

Up to 15 per cent of Ethiopians still do not have enough food to live on at certain times of the year. When food starts to run low, families drop one meal a day, then two.

In another Gorta-Self Help Africa project Shmegie Kulbla, a widowed mother of 10, has been growing two hectares of high-quality seed for multiplication. Getting access to quality seed has been a major problem for farmers in Ethiopia; her improved seed will supply about 30 farmers.

New house

It has also doubled her income in the past two years. The new house she built from this increased income dwarfs the home where she reared her older children. Two of them have become teachers, and a third is studying social science at college.

Has life improved in recent years? “Yes, life is far better than before. Before it was very hard to get the food for consumption, but now I can do things for my children. I can get them clothes or what they want. I have built my home from what I have earned.”

Gorta-Self Help Africa’s country director, Dr Wubshet Berhanu, says he believes his country is in a far better place now than it was 10 years ago. But can it protect itself against another bad drought? “Definitely,” he says. “Our farmers are more resilient now because they diversify their income. “There is also a readiness now, a disaster-preparedness for drought, so nobody is really displaced these days because of drought. We have this safety-net programme, and Ireland is a very big supporter of this.”

An estimated 3,000 nongovernmental organisations work in Ethiopia. Will a day ever come when they are not needed? “That is the vision,” Berhanu says. The government aims to make Ethiopia a middle-income country by 2025. Berhanu says this may be a bit optimistic, “but definitely we are on a very good track. I think we could do it by 2030 or 2035. It could be achieved.”

Alison Healy travelled to Ethiopia with Gorta-Self Help Africa