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
The Green REAP project aims to engage with 2,100 households in order to help them diversify their income by tapping more green economic activities. It also targets clear progress in the reforestation and restoration of degraded lands. Most of the program participants will be women.
Our partnership aims to:
- Help 13,000 people to escape extreme poverty
- Establish 700 green micro-enterprises
- Have 70% women among the participants
Three-year grant (2022-2025)
