CHAIR visits training projects in rural and urban Ethiopia.

WISE, ORGANISATION FOR WOMEN IN SELF EMPLOYMENT, Addis Ababa.

This was inspiring and was housed in an enormous training centre humming with busy women.

WISE works with poor women to achieve self reliance, exercise rights and improve the quality of their lives through self employment. They offer micro loans and a savings scheme for health care.

In order to ensure that not everybody has the same idea for business, the graduates undertake a creative thinking programme so there are many businesses from a pottery group making economical cooking stoves to others recycling bamboo waste for use as cooking fuel.

One woman I met said “I have moved beyond the fulfilment of my basic needs and that I now have independent access to my own supply of tap water” Whilst another commented “How humiliating begging is while you are an able bodied person, now I have my own small business in the same area I used to beg, but I now have constant income, savings and am sending my children to school.

WOMEN FUEL CARRIERS PROJECT in Addis

Throughout Ethiopia a common sight is to see women of all ages weighed down by heavy loads of wood for cooking.

In Addis a project has been set up to train the women in other skills to make a better living.

The workshop I visited was training the women in weaving and the goods were sold in a shop near the workshop and were popular with tourists so buy your tourist items there.

PLOUGHSHARE WOMEN’S CRAFT TRAINING CENTRE, in rural Gondar

Supports single parents with HIV/AIDS by providing skills training. Based in a lovely rural area the centre provided training in pottery, weaving, basket making, literacy and numeracy and has a well filled shop on site selling a variety of different items. It offers residential training of up to 4 months to enable women to set up businesses. It has recently started dairy production and the cow pats can be used for fuel. They were the best looking animals I have seen in Africa.

THE Addis Ababa FISTULA HOSPITAL FOR WOMEN WITH CHILDBIRTH INJURIES

As a bill board outside the Organisation for African Union Building says “no woman should die giving life” and one of our trustees Angela Gorman, chair of HFGK works to prevent this happening. The hospital helps women have a life afterwards should they suffer childbirth and related injuries.

Many are rejected by their families. For those who cannot be cured` they have a facility where women learn how to manage their medical condition, learn to read and write and learn skills for an independent life.

Jennifer Twelvetrees, June 2009