heks

  • Encouraging enterprise, reducing poverty

  • Ethiopia, country aid strategy

  • Ethiopia is one of the poorest countries in Africa and a HEKS primary-focus country. Ethiopia is well down the scale in all the poverty statistics, ranking 171th out of 182 in the UNO Human Development Index, for example. Ethiopia is characterised by political instability and repeated armed conflicts with its neighbouring countries (Eritrea, Somalia).

    The biggest challenges in terms of development are its lack of infrastructure and basic supplies for the largely rural population. Sadly, their poverty is all too familiar to people in Switzerland since the harrowing days of famine, with women and children first and foremost suffering from malnutrition, poor health care, lack of access to drinking water and lack of education.

    Aims, points of focus, initiatives:

    The assistance strategy for Ethiopia adopted by HEKS, and scheduled to run from 2006 to 2010, places the focus of the work on humanitarian aid and development cooperation in the regions of Oromia and Gambella.

    In giving humanitarian aid HEKS seeks to underpin the means of livelihood of particularly vulnerable sections of the population. The people, households and communities benefiting from the aid gain access to material, financial and natural resources. Through its project work HEKS contributes to the sustained improvement of living conditions for the people in the villages.

    Those who are targeted for aid stand to gain a life of self-sufficiency and dignity. The initiatives engaged in to this end include safeguarding the provision of food and drinking water, promoting peace, strengthening civil society and imparting technical and social skills.

    The two points of focus in the work are closely linked, with sustained development cooperation on the one hand, intended to minimise longer-term humanitarian aid, and with measures needing to be put in place as soon as possible after catastrophes on the other hand, in order to avoid areas of dependency and so as not to stifle self-help at local level.

  • HEKS No: 370.600
  • Total programme cost 2010:   CHF 1 440 000.-

A donation of 250 Swiss francs will buy an ox for ploughing.

Donate: PC 80-1115-1

 
Contact us: 

HEKS Kommunikation
Projektdienst
8042 Zurich
Tel.: +41 44 360 88 95
email: projektdienst@heks.ch

  • Ethiopia
  • Country data:

     

    Population:

    78.6 Millions

    Human Development Index Rank:

    171

    GDP per capita (US$):

    245

    GDP per capita (PPP US$):

    779

    Population living below $1.25 a day:

    39%

    Population living below $2 a day:

    77.5%

    Children underweight for age (% under age 5):

    38%

    Life expectancy at birth:

    54.7 Years

    Combined gross enrolment ratio in education (%):

    49%

    Adult literacy rate (% aged 15 and older):

    35.9%

    Population not using an improved water source:

    58%

     

    Source: UNDP statistics

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Contact:
HEKS, Seminarstrasse 28, Postfach, CH-8042 Zürich, Phone +41 44 360 88 00, Fax +41 44 360 88 01, info@heks.ch | Post office account 80-1115-1