PROMOTING THE EMPOWERMENT OF WOMEN

 

AIM

Our commitment towards gender equality involves integrated actions aimed at empowering women throughout Tigray. It stems from the recognition of the various dimensions of women’s poverty and responds with a holistic approach of complementary interventions, integrating economic empowerment with access to reproductive health, literacy and behavioral change at community level. Women participating in our program are targeted by all the intervention areas, which results in all-rounded improvement in their lives.

 

 

CHALLENGE

Despite improvements in the well being of women and girls, experiences of poverty and vulnerability in Tigray remain highly gendered. Women constitute 60 percent of the region’s chronic food insecure, 62 percent of illiterate persons, and suffer the most from malnutrition, with more than 34 percent reported as underweight. These disparities have come about because women have less access and control over productive resources (including land, water, financial capital, information and technologies), and they experience time poverty due to the unequal distribution of household tasks such as collecting water and fuel wood – tasks that are becoming more difficult as a result of climate change, depleted forest resources and water scarcity. Cultural norms and practices, limited access to education, and low self-confidence, are compounding factors that continue to inhibit women’s ability to influence decision-making at the household and community level. Collectively these inequities undermine women’s access to productive resources, and by extension act to reduce household and community resilience, and food security overall. Redressing these structural and cultural barriers to women’s equality and empowerment is the central focus of our work.

 

 ACTION

Our work  strategically targeted  vulnerable Women Headed
Households and female youths affected by a variety of physical,
economic and social access constraints, by:

• Improving access to livelihood strategies, income and
  productive resources;
• Reducing women’s work burden;
• Creating access to skills knowledge and capacity;
• Promoting gender equality within REST

 

LIVELIHOOD DEVELOPMENT FOR LANDLESS & UNEMPLOYED YOUTH

AIM

Tigray’s population is demographically young – positioning young people as the cornerstone of the region’s current and future progress. Our aims is to unleash the inherent potential of youth by ensuring they take an active part in all aspects of REST’s work, and acquire the knowledge and skills, technologies, resources and technical support to participate more widely in their communities, and benefit from economic growth .

 

 

CHALLENGE

Youth and adolescents account for nearly 30 percent of Tigray’s population. Most of them live in rural areas and face complex challenges such as high levels of poverty and unemployment. Though a prerequisite for self-reliance, an increasing number of young people have no access to land and its resources. This is because farmland in Tigray is already scarce and degraded, and many farms are very small while population is increasing. Even though females are said to have equal rights to land ownership, landless among young females is very high, representing only 3 percent of all landholders. In the absence of viable alternate livelihoods, and few productive resources, more young people are becoming unemployed. The barriers to owning land and other assets have fuelled the steady migration of young people to urban centres and the Middle East to work in domestic servitude.

ACTION

With all its shortcomings, REST still believes that agriculture is capable of delivering practical livelihood options to rural youth. Our long experience working with landless and unemployed youth shows that various pathways do exist to help them engage in productive agricultural livelihoods without having to leave their own communities. We have registered many successes, many of which are considered ‘innovative best practices’ in Ethiopia that include:

• Helping landless youth groups earn a good income from growing cash crops using irrigation water and degraded hillsides converted into productive bench terraces that were developed under our PSNP.
• Strategically linking PSNP public works in rehabilitated enclosures with income and employment opportunities by equipping landless youth groups with bee hives, bee colonies, technical training and access to markets in order to help them earn a living as honey producers.
• Supporting landless youth groups to become productive by establishing private fruit and vegetable nurseries on small land plots with access to REST irrigation schemes.
• Contracting out, for example, the construction of road reinforcing culverts and fords or certain elements of irrigation infrastructure development, where a certain level of skills are required but cannot be fulfilled by regular public work labour.
• Prioritizing young landless people when apportioning treated hillsides, reclaiming gullies and improved area enclosures for them to use for farming and other economic activities.
• Prioritizing young landless people when apportioning treated hillsides, reclaiming gullies and improved area enclosures for them to use for farming and other economic activities.
• Giving over ultra-poor landless youth the chance to improve their incomes by providing livelihood transfers for IGA start-up such as shoat fattening, beekeeping and petty trade. Livelihood transfers are a new component of the Ethiopia PSNP 4, and build on the very successful and trailblazing REST “Wukro Graduation Pilot”.

Supporting unemployed or under-employed youth through the USAID funded and Save the Children lead, POTENTIAL project.