In cooperation with „Sonne International“, Lyoness Child & Family Foundation supported a project in Ethiopia. With their herds decimated, many families are still desperately struggling and unable to earn the money they would need for a genuine recovery.
Project location: The Afar region (in the Northest of Ethiopia at the border to Eritrea and Djibouti) zones 1-4, Ethiopia (Africa)
Project time frame: December 2008 – April 2009
Project objective: Support for 150 Afar families and education/training in economic farming in the Afar region
With this project Lyoness didn’t want just to give the people the money and solve their problems, they wanted to teach every man, women and child there to think for themselves and came up with the solutions on their own. The first thing the teams did was establish common goals and objectives with the local people that would later lead to the accomplishment of a shared vision. From the project evaluation and primary report teams understood the environment they have been sent, internal and external contexts of the Afar region and villages there. They also had an understanding of strengths and weaknesses of the local people, but the strengths and weaknesses of them self’s. And according to those understandings teams acted appropriately. Teams guided the local people to make appropriate decisions by working and talking with them encouraging them to suggest and in the end develop simple and realistic ways to gain necessary skills and resources in order to designee a strategy to make their goal’s happen. This was done by involving everyone into a decision process and “pushing” the local people to think for themselves and the community. In every round of decision process and brain storming all had to agree with the decisions made. The teams together with the local people provided entrepreneurship plans for the community of the Afar region. The plan of this project was a strategy for economic development of the villages in that region. The plan and choices were to involve many decision makers in the persons of Lyoness people and local people in a bigger transformational leadership team in order to create a strategy which could be realised by the Afar people. In that way, creative problem solving and entrepreneurship is established as logic of the transformational team (Lyoness people and Afar community) at the villages being main part of the transformational leadership mindset and culture, thus leading to strategic renewal, sustained regeneration, domain redefinition, organizational rejuvenation and business model reconstruction at the villages.
After all of this process the Afar people came up with very simple but creative solutions. The first one to prevent meat form going bad was to set up trade with a next region for salt to preserve meat longer. The second one was to build a water pump to get the clean water closer to the villages. The next was when they built the water pump start planting crops so that people have more to eat and to sell on the market. And the last but not least was to start producing pots for an easier transports of milk and meat and eventually sell the extra pots for money or trade them for the salt and material for the pump. This whole process lasted for two months, but in the end the teams saw the transformation in the local people, as well in them selfs.
Only a year after villages in the Afar region have set up trades with the neiboring regions for salt, crops, seed, wagons and livestock. Because of the water pump now it is much easier to plant crops, feed the animals and get clean fresh water for the local community. Manufacturing pots for meat and milk makes the transport of the goods easier and safer, therefore making more money when selling them on the market. They built a school for 200 children so that one day they could also do the same for the rest of Ethiopia. Livelihood has been created for approximately 150 families, just by helping them figure and solve their own problems
a. Sade’s story
Sade was a fifteen year old girl when Lyoness came to Afar. She was already married with one small child and the other on the way. She and her husband were involved in the crop plan and building of the pump. She was the one of the best “students” Lyoness team had in that village. She wasn’t scared to ask questions or speak her mind as the other women did. Today after two years Sade is an entrepreneur and has her workshop for making dolls, flip-flops and things from straw and corn leaves. Also she is a motivation speaker to other women so that they also become entrepreneurs like she her self did. After Lyoness left she along with her husband helped to build a school for 200 children. After this class I asked one of the volunteers if I can get in touch with some of the Ethiopian people involved in the project and they gave me Sade. She told me that she is very glad that Lyoness came, because they thought her how to think for her self and that she saw that help doesn’t have to be just money, that it can be empathy and understanding of some else’s needs.