by Kathryn Mahoney
Alamii Tufaa is a 22-year-old Ethiopian farmer. She lives with her husband and two young children in the Oromiya Region, an area which has recently been affected by severe droughts. In 2006, Alamii received her first microloan of 300 birr (approximately $33) from The Hunger Project. She used these funds to purchase two goats and four chickens. Within a year, Alamii’s herd of two goats grew to eight, and by selling three of them she was able to repay her loan. Before she received her first loan, Alamii’s husband struggled to cover all household expenses. Now Alamii can proudly and independently support her family and, for the first time, she has enough savings to protect them in case of emergency.
Farmers like Alamii are the most important, yet the least supported, producers on the African continent. These women grow 80 percent of the food and do virtually all the work to process, transport, and market it. Yet they own only 1 percent of the land and receive only 7 percent of farm extension services and 10 percent of small-scale agricultural credit.
Since 1991, The Hunger Project has been working with rural African women like Alamii to mobilize their communities to end their hunger and poverty. The African Women Food Farmer Initiative (AWFFI) is the first microfinance program in Africa specifically targeting women food producers. In addition to providing training, credit, and savings, AWFFI is also the first microfinance initiative to successfully implement a credit program to establish rural banks led and owned by women that are recognized by the government. As women’s businesses expand and rural banks are established, women across Africa become independent economic players in their household and effective leaders in their communities in the fight against chronic hunger.
The Hunger Project believes that the continued success of AWFFI is contingent upon its integration into a broader strategy. Known as the Epicenter Strategy, rural villages are united into clusters. The focal point of the strategy is an epicenter building, which houses programs for health, education, food security, and economic development. The community itself develops, manages, and owns the epicenter building. This multi-sectoral development approach transforms dependency, resignation, and gender discrimination into a culture of responsibility, self-reliance, and gender equality. The approach is therefore an effective means of addressing the root causes of extreme poverty while empowering communities to meet the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).
However, in the midst of the global food crisis, the difficulty of the fight to achieve the MDGs is exacerbated by escalating costs of scarce staple foods. While the global crisis clearly requires an emergency response in the form of food aid and short-term assistance, communities need to be equipped with long-term and sustainable solutions to better mitigate and avoid future food security challenges.
Ethiopia is now experiencing a drought which has left roughly 8 million people in need of urgent food relief. Compounded with the floods of 2007, which devastated crops, food prices have now soared by approximately 330 percent. As many Ethiopians are forced to wait for aid that may never reach them, Hunger Project partners are weathering the crisis with stocked food banks and permanent access to critical health and financial services, all of which are available right in their communities. While it is paramount for the international community to increase efforts to help those suffering in the global food crisis, it is equally important to promote, replicate, and scale-up initiatives that equip communities with the tools they need to effectively and autonomously respond to the next crisis. To help prevent, or at least mitigate, future crises, international aid policies need to focus on supporting the developing world’s rural women (and men) to take self-reliant actions in order to sustainably provide for their own food needs. Multilateral and bilateral funding agencies could reduce human suffering by funding bottom-up initiatives, thereby empowering people at the grassroots level to end their own hunger.
Women across Africa are on the front lines of the global food crisis. Thankfully, there are women like Alamii who are not only armed with the requisite tools to survive the crisis, but are also empowered to create a sustainable and self-reliant future for themselves and their families.
Kathryn Mahoney is a program officer in the Africa department of The Hunger Project.
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