AAM DISPATCH

A few fast, fun facts about Ethiopia: it’s home to the second largest population in Africa, with 83 million people. The majority either farm or raise livestock. But only 12% of the land is suitable for agriculture, and of that, only 1% is irrigated. So you’ve got millions of people watching the heavens, relying on the rain to grow the crops that would feed this nation. Add to that the fact that historically there have been droughts every three years – with major droughts happening every decade or so. It all makes for some serious topsoil erosion. The dry and dusty topsoil eventually ends up as river silt that flows toward the Nile delta. As one development worker put it to me, Egyptian farmers have been reaping great harvests for three thousand years courtesy of Ethiopian silt.

That’s just the agricultural side. Add it all up and you get some major challenges for development. It’s no wonder that the Ethiopian mission is USAID’s (United States Agency for International Development) largest in sub-Saharan Africa. Addis Ababa is teeming with development workers. Conservatively there are easily 400 foreign nationals in that line of work here. And every NGO and foreign mission employs many more local staff. At USAID there are 7 local staff for each American. That’s not including the CDC (Centers for Disease Control), the US State Department, DOD (Department of Defense) and other US agencies who’ve all taken a slice of the development pie in recent years. Over the coming month, America Abroad will be exploring how the bureaucratic jungle of agencies try to work together to make life for Ethiopians more secure, healthy, and economically well off. It’s a tall order given some of the natural demographics working against them.

What everyone here will tell you is that it’s all about food, food, and more food (though that may not be reflected in the way Congress allocates USAID’s budget here). The challenge is getting Ethiopia off of it’s reliance on imported subsidies/relief and begin to develop the natural capacity of this country to feed itself – in spite of environmental challenges and a population that’s doubling every generation. What’s encouraging is that most aid workers say that things are in fact trending up, and the situation has significantly improved in 25 years. In 1984, Bob Geldoff and the BBC trained the world’s lens on the famine (don’t say the F word here today) that killed a million Ethiopians. Despite a doubling of the population since then, this country has not seen loss of life on that scale since. Still, nobody will tell you Ethiopia is out of the woods. This year the government announced that 6.3 million of its people are at risk of starvation. A number that’s considered low if anything. Add to that the more than 7 million who are permanently “food insecure” and you start to see the scale of the problem.

In my short time here, I’ve met some amazingly committed, hard working, and innovative aid professionals. Some come from abroad, but many are Ethiopian, who are rolling this boulder uphill. While it seems a long, long way from the political wranglings happening on Capitol Hill about the future of USAID, most folks here are keenly watching who will finally be appointed to head the United States Agency for International Development; and nervously waiting to see if, alongside Diplomacy and Defense, Development will really be Obama’s third – and equal – “D.”

Arrested Development: Shortchanging Foreign Aid on next month’s America Abroad.

Matt Ozug Africa, USAID