Meet four Ethiopian pastoralists dealing with climate change

by Lisa Hiller-Garvey

Meet Ahmed, Kadra, Osman and Muktar. They are among Ethiopia’s 14% of people who live along the country’s arid borders in pastoral communities, where the effects of climate change are already being strongly felt.

Ahmed Mohammed (pictured above) says: “We used to see a wind blow from one direction, a cool breeze. We used to follow this wind because it told us of rain coming. Now there is wind from four directions and even when it whistles to us we don’t trust it anymore.”

“Just like a farmer who cultivates the land, I cultivate these animals,” says widowed mother of two, Kadra Abdi (pictured above), outside her house in Madawayn – a small village of 400 households. “My life depends on them.”

“The rainy season is the period people expect plenty of milk. The animals have bred and are well fed from all the green plants that are normally everywhere. But now the animals breed when it is dry.”

With support from a UN-backed scheme, people like Kadra are improving the odds against them. She joined the local Madawayn Livestock Marketing Cooperative to diversify her income.

“It is beautiful for women to work so that they do not suffer from hunger and are able to feed their children and benefit themselves.”

“Before the cooperative, people might try to save the animals from dying on the road by using a vehicle to transport them to the market, but this was very expensive,” says Muktar Yousef Hasan (pictured above), the Madawayn cooperative chairperson.

“Our future is good.” Motivated by their success, the cooperative is now confident to look at expanding their business activities by opening the village’s first shop to sell foodstuffs and basic items like clothes and shoes, he says.

Most of time water was the problem, says community leader Osman Mohammed (pictured above, far left).

“This place was once dense with vegetation. The drought has wiped out everything and there’s too much wind, which gets stronger as the dry season gets longer.”

When the rains fail, the people living in Farah Liben would regularly have to haul water over 12 kilometres. Filling the reservoirs meant hiring expensive trucks to bring it from even further away.

This community was one of many to set-up a water facility under the scheme.

“Once we had the information we started to collect money and hired a digging machine. When the machine broke we continued to dig by hand. That is how we built it,” Osman says of their new community managed water reservoir.

Each family is given a coupon and is allowed to draw a set amount of water. This is the only community managed water facility in the area. Others are owned by individuals “who can charge what they want.”

“Even though the problem isn’t completely gone, we are now much better off.”

Small World Stories captured, on video, their stories of resilience in the face of climate change.

This was part of an effort by the United Nations Development Programme to inspire other pastoralists the get involved with similar activities.

Glossary:

pastoralist-a sheep farmer or cattle farmer.

Arid-dry, parched.