Milking Profits in Ethiopia

By Debbie DeVoe

Five years ago, Nuria Umere couldn't even imagine sending her children to school. Living 20 rocky, barren miles from the nearest town in the Ethiopian lowlands, her family had little opportunity to earn enough money for daily essentials, let alone the school's modest tuition fees. Now she's milking the profits of a project introduced by Catholic Relief Services that has changed her life — and that of her four children.

"As you see, we are illiterate," Nuria explains, nodding at the other mothers in her milk marketing group, organized by the CRS-supported Hararghe Catholic Secretariat. "But four of us have now sent our children to school."

Before CRS came to Ajo, Nuria would carry a liter or two of milk from her cow — and perhaps an egg and some firewood — over rough track roads for seven or eight hours until she reached the market in Dire Dawa. Once there, she would sell the milk for around 20 cents a liter, using her profits to buy needed household supplies.

The late hour of the day would force her to spend the night in town in an open field, trekking the long, dusty miles home the next day. A day later, household demands would require her to repeat the journey, leaving her unable to care for her home, help her husband in the fields or properly look after her children.

With assistance from the CRS project, funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), Nuria has now joined forces with nine other mothers to form a milk marketing group. Each day, just one member walks to the market, carrying milk supplied by all of the other members. The appointed member sells the milk and retains all of the profits, saving half of the usual $5 earned and using the other half to buy needed items for her home for the next nine days. With each member heading to market only once in a 10-day period, the other group members are able to stay in the village undertaking more productive activities.

'We're Building Our Assets'

"We've been trained to save money from selling the milk," adds Nefisa Shek Mohamed, noting that she and her fellow group members use the savings to improve their lives. "We're building our assets, with some buying ox, others building houses with corrugated iron, and others sending their children to school with this money."

In addition to increasing household incomes through collective milk selling and savings, these mothers are taking advantage of other integrated CRS projects to enhance quality of life for their families. A water project has brought clean water to the village center, along with troughs for cattle watering and basins for clothes washing, saving the women many hours each day in water collection.

Easy access to water is improving family sanitation which, along with household toilets and outside living areas for livestock, almost eliminates visits to the doctor. Ajo villagers are also tending gardens planted with disease-resistant vegetable seeds and are caring for hardy livestock provided by CRS. Nutrition training has even taught women how to mix a range of local foods to serve a balanced diet to their families, instead of preparing only sorghum and corn.

"We used to go to the bush and find stumps for firewood [to sell], suffering and traveling each day," Nuria says. "Now we save money from the milk and can provide for our homes and help our husbands." The reduced need to collect and sell firewood also helps protect the community's watershed, which in turn supports better crop production, livestock management and sanitation.

"Before the project, my earnings were nonexistent," Nuria adds, shaking her head with the memory. "Now I'm earning almost 1,000 birr [$110] a year."

Debbie DeVoe is CRS' regional information officer in East Africa. She is based in Nairobi and has recently visited CRS programs in Sudan, Uganda and Ethiopia.