By Isabelle Bryan | Project Leader
Our Self-Help Groups in Ethiopia are working hard to adapt to the current pandemic. COVID-19 presents unique challenges that these groups face, due to high levels of vulnerability, poverty and other factors. In response to the pandemic, groups have been meeting together practicing social distancing (in line with Ethiopian government regulations) and have learned about the importance of thorough hand washing as well as other practices to ensure their health and wellbeing. All our Self-Help Groups are continuing their regular savings and supporting one another’s businesses through our loans program to protect themselves, their families and communities from economic hardship magnified by the current global crisis.
Your support helps women like Alemitu.
Alemitu, one of the women in our Self-Help Groups, is just 28 years old. Her first husband died leaving her widowed and alone with a young son. She then remarried to a man who had two children of his own from another wife. Hope for Justice set up a Self-Help Group with women in her area, and Alemitu quickly joined. With the help of the group, Alemitu started saving money from what she earned doing physical labor.
However, Alemitu’s new stepchildren began threatening her and told her that they would take her property. She then decided to leave her current husband and return with her son to the land of her late husband. Alemitu worked with her Self-Help Group to take out a loan so that she could move back to safety. With her own savings and the added loan from the Self-Help Group she was able to build for herself and her son a new home with corrugated iron sheets.
Alemitu is now one of the most hopeful women in the area. She has continued to support herself and her son with a small business that she started with the help of the group. Even with all the current struggles around the COVID-19 pandemic, she has kept saving regularly and is even leading the Self-Help Group as a secretary.
Alemitu expressed her gratitude by saying “Unless the encouragement, advice and support from the Self-Help Group, my story would have been something ugly. Thank God that I am alive today and leading my life with hope and more success in the future.”
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