BOMA
Easing poverty through natural resource management in Ethiopia
The Trafigura Foundation is supporting BOMA in its work to help pastoral communities overcome extreme poverty while restoring degraded forests and pasture in the drylands of southern Ethiopia. With a focus on women and youth, the project is fostering green enterprises and the revival of ecosystems.
The challenge
In southern Ethiopia, recurring, severe droughts linked to climate change are making it difficult for herders to find water and pasture for their livestock. This forces them to resort to alternative but destructive livelihood practices such as charcoal harvesting, clearing forest land for fuelwood and building, or mining.
Women and girls are bearing the brunt of increasing scarcity, making tasks such as gathering water and fuelwood more arduous and time-consuming. They also suffer discrimination around access to property, assets, education and financial services.
The solution
In Borena, a zone of Oromia Region, BOMA’s Green Rural Entrepreneur Access Program (Green REAP) is building community resilience through economic inclusion. Women, youth and refugees are accompanied in the creation of green enterprises through two-year sequenced interventions combining training, mentoring, grants, savings groups and market connections.
Community members are involved in the preservation and restoration of forests and degraded lands, for instance through tree nurseries and apiaries. Participants “graduate” from the programme by reaching benchmarks on, for instance, food security, livelihood sustainability and preparedness for shocks.
Partnership impact
Between 2022 and 2025, BOMA empowered 2,100 women entrepreneurs, with more than 10,500 dependent children and family members, to strengthen their livelihoods and foster green economic activities.
Households reported the following progress:
- Food security: 95% had no child going to bed hungry in the past week, up from 65%
- Income diversification: 83% had more diversified incomes, up from 35%
- Green livelihoods: 3% drew on environmentally damaging income sources such as charcoal burning, down from 21%, while reforestation, agroforestry and organic farming all increased
- Preparedness: savings group membership rose to 100% from 17%, while bank account usage rose to 61% from 3%
Through a two-year extension of our partnership, BOMA aims to increase the resilience of a further 1,800 households.
Other partnerships in the same area of work
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