Ethiopia
Global Communities has been working in Ethiopia since 2005, using integrated approaches to partner with vulnerable communities to adapt and transform in the face of ongoing shocks and stresses.
Since 2005, Global Communities has built a strong reputation in Ethiopia for community-based, integrated programming to build resilience in the face of environmental and conflict-related shocks.
Ethiopia has been experiencing a growing frequency and severity of disasters due to long-term environmental degradation and shifting global weather patterns. As a country prone to recurrent droughts, millions of people are regularly at risk of hunger and disease when crops fail and rangelands dry up. For the country’s pastoralists, who migrate their animal herds in search of fresh pasture and water, changing weather conditions have disrupted traditional pasture growth cycles and significantly increased the costs of scouting for grazing areas and supplemental feed. These challenges have led to widespread livestock deaths from lack of food and water, leaving communities food insecure, malnourished, and vulnerable.
Through innovative program platforms such as the AfriScout app, which combines satellite data and mobile technology to help pastoralists find pasture and water, and the Women Empowered social and economic empowerment model, we are implementing innovative approaches that are carefully integrated with customary institutions and proven grassroots approaches, leveraging indigenous knowledge and traditions.
Throughout Ethiopia, we are dedicated to partnering with local governments and communities to manage uncertainties while addressing root causes of these vulnerabilities.
IntraHealth International, a Global Communities Partner, has also worked in Ethiopia for decades, including with pastoral and migratory communities to improve their access to health information and maternal, newborn, and child health services. Other IntraHealth programs have focused on assisting the Ministry of Health and local partners to make progress in specific areas of need including improving the country’s health workforce information system, strengthening the capacity of local organizations to receive donor funding, preventing mother-to-child transmission of HIV, and addressing Ethiopia’s high incidence of obstetric fistula.
Current Programs
AfriScout
Almost 70% of Africa’s grasslands are degraded or severely degraded and the 250 million pastoralists (nomadic and semi-nomadic herders) that steward these rangelands lose significant numbers of livestock because they're challenged to find pasture or water for their herds.
Together with indigenous communities, AfriScout has mapped over 60 million hectares of traditional grazing lands across Kenya, Ethiopia, and Tanzania to create community-defined digital grazing maps overlaid with near real-time satellite vegetation and surface water data. This information is displayed in the AfriScout app and supported on the ground by local field agents. Users can post geopositioned alerts on disease, conflict, predators, forbidden grazing areas, water availability, and other information that amplifies traditional practices of sharing information to improve rangeland management.
To actively regenerate grasslands across Southern Ethiopia, sequester carbon, and protect biodiversity, AfriScout’s Regen projects help communities plan, monitor, and implement community grazing plans for themselves and visiting pastoralists. Collaborating with 70 communities representing more than 250,000 pastoralists, and a collective herd of more than 1.2 million cattle, shoats, and camels, the project delivers significant and long-term social, livelihoods, and environmental impact at landscape scale. The project is registered as a carbon project under Verras VM0042 standard enabling AfriScout to guarantee long-term sustainability of the project, and to deliver significant additional impact through benefit sharing agreements with participating communities.
Previous Programs
Building Community Resilience in Pastoral Lowlands
Global Communities (formerly PCI) embarked on a five-year, USAID-funded initiative to improve resilience to withstand and recover from climate and conflict-related shocks in some of Ethiopia’s most vulnerable pastoral regions. Through the Resilience in Pastoral Areas (RiPA) project, Global Communities, in collaboration with implementing partners GOAL and iDE, worked to address many of the root causes of vulnerability for pastoral families, such as poor livestock and crop productivity, limited access to markets, poor nutrition and limited options for livelihood diversification. Through RiPA, Global Communities supported building community-managed disaster risk management capacity, improving pastoralists’ ability to locate green pastures to sustain their herds through the AfriScout app, increasing access to livelihood opportunities for individuals transitioning out of pastoralism (particularly women and young people), empowering young women and mothers through Women Empowered social and economic empowerment groups, engaging the private sector to improve crop and livestock production and marketing, and improving health and nutrition outcomes for women and children through proven behavior change strategies.
Past IntraHealth Programs
- IntraHealth past programs (selected)
- Ethiopia Digital Health Activity (USAID), 2019-2024
- Promoting Quality of Medicines Plus (PQM+) (USAID), 2019-2025
- Accelerating Support to Advanced Local Partners (ASAP) (USAID), 2019-2022
- TRANSFORM (USAID), 2017-2022
- Global Health Supply Chain-Procurement Supply Mechanism (GHSC-PSM) (USAID), 2016-2022
- CapacityPlus (USAID), 2009-2015
- Community Prevention of Mother-to-Child
- Transmission (USAID), 2009-2014
- Fistula Care (USAID), 2007-2013
Impact
1,113,741
individuals reached from 2020-2025 (RIPA South)
21,000
pastoralist households adopted regenerative grazing practices across 1,197 million hectares of land (RIPA South)
7,815
people transitioning out of pastoralism received technical value chain training from 2020-2025 (RIPA South)
Resources
Targeting individuals or communities? Learnings from AfriScout on improving pastoralists’ well-being
Women Empowered: Championing Innovative Approaches to Savings Group Programming
News
How Oral Information Management Tools Boost Women’s Financial Literacy and Savings in Ethiopia
By Jessica Ayala, Sr. Manager for Digital Communications Savings groups—often referred to as informal community banks—are small groups of people who save together and lend to each other from their pooled funds. Globally, as many as 500 million people belong to savings groups. Approximately 80% of members are women, and many savings groups programs are…
Adapting and Innovating in a Volatile World: Reflections from the 2024 Fragility Forum
By Paula Rudnicka, Sr. Manager for Public Affairs Last month, the World Bank held its 2024 Fragility Forum – a biannual conference that brings together policymakers, researchers and practitioners from humanitarian, development and peacebuilding communities to exchange knowledge and ideas about how to improve our approaches in fragile, conflict and violence-affected settings. This year’s theme…
Pass the Mic: Reinvigorating Global Efforts to Reduce Maternal and Child Mortality
By Paula Rudnicka, Sr. Manager for Public Affairs at Global Communities In 2012, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) partnered with the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and the Governments of India and Ethiopia to convene the Child Survival Call to Action, which galvanized unprecedented commitments from governments and civil society around the…