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In the beginning....

In the 1980's people like Bob Geldof raised everyone's awareness that there was poverty and starvation in Africa, especially Ethiopia. He organised concerts, first Bandaid, then Liveaid. The proceeds of these concerts went to worthy causes.

Meanwhile, Jember Teferra was completing her Master's Degree, looking at ways of making maximum impact on poor communities. She created a model of the "Bottom-up Approach", which incorporated Health, Housing, Education and Employment. In fact it looked at the needs of a community "Holistically", which means every aspect of the situation, rather than just health, for example.

So it was that Bandaid, together with other charities backed Jember's idea. The Ethiopian government identified three kebeles (administrative districts) to begin work. They were selected because they were situated near the busy Mercarto (Market), and had a high population of beggars, petty traders, shoe shine boys, and others who were trying to scrape a living, often unsuccessfully. Three quarters of the households had female heads of family, the men often having been called to serve in the army, or were not around for other reasons.

52 Programmes operate in total, run by 250 community programme workers, with some professional experts from outside.

At the start the project was set up by a team of some two dozen indigenous local professionals (NGO). However training and capacity building of local community programme workers takes high priority, in order to enable a hand over and a smooth phase out.

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