Author: Oliver Balch / Source: Positive News
Drylands in the Tigray region of Ethiopia, home to more than 4.3 million people, are being restored on a massive scale. Villagers volunteer for 20 days each year to help make it happen
‘We are people who live through work.’ OK, as national anthem lyrics go, it may not be the punchiest.
But Ethiopians are a pragmatic people. Poetic sentiments are all well and good, but star-spangled banners and long lives for noble monarchs don’t put food in your stomach. Hard work does.And hard work is precisely how rural communities in the country’s mountainous north kicked off this new year, just as they have every year in recent decades. In Ethiopia’s Tigray province, hundreds of thousands of villagers – the vast majority of whom are subsistence farmers – leave their fields in January to join together in a mass conservation effort.
Over 20 consecutive days they head out with spades and picks and build hillside terraces, construct soil bunds (embankments), install basic irrigation systems and create micro-scale dams. In September, the process is repeated, only this time they plant seedlings on the province’s denuded hillsides.
On visiting the region, the need for such interventions is immediately obvious. Located in the far north, close to the border with Eritrea, Tigray has always been a dry, mountainous, tough place to live. Today, due to increasingly erratic rains and decades of gradual deforestation, eking out a living there is harder than ever. But Tigray is also now greener than it has been in the last 145 years. At a time when hundreds of millions of people around the world are directly threatened by land degradation, could the region become a blueprint for change?
Discover a world of inspiration.
“Fifteen years ago, this whole valley was absolutely barren. There was no irrigation and very little drinking water. Much of the water, we had to bring in from elsewhere,” explains Gebre-Egzabihir Gebre Washid, a village council leader in Merere, a remote community in central Tigray.
He stayed, but many of his neighbours didn’t. Having once been proud producers of food, they joined the queues of food aid migrants in far-off towns and cities.
The scene is very different today. Looking down from his hillside plot, its earth freshly ploughed, Gebre Washid points to the verdant valley floor below. Rich grazing land gives way…
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