Samrawit Solomon - Opening Doors for Ethiopia’s Most Vulnerable

Staff Spotlight: Samrawit Solomon, WEEMA’s Gender and Disability Mainstreaming Program Officer

WEEMA Wednesday, August 28, 2019

Based on her experiences and interests, it isn’t surprising that Samrawit Solomon is leading WEEMA’s Gender and Disability Mainstreaming work.

Her first exposure to WEEMA was volunteering on its first Cataract Campaign in 2015, an annual effort to restore vision to hundreds of Ethiopians blinded by deterioration of the lens in their eyes. Growing up in the Oromia Region in southwest Ethiopia, she also saw firsthand the painful discrimination that disabled people experience, especially girls and women.

“Gender-based violence is common in Ethiopia and it’s especially common with women who are physically disabled,” the 31-year-old says. For example, she knew of a physically disabled woman in her hometown who was raped and became pregnant.  “She was too embarrassed and frightened to tell anyone.”

Such memories left an indelible impression on Samrawit, who grew up in Jimma, where educational and health services were sparse, clean running water was rare, and opportunities for girls and women were bleak.

Samrawit overcame these hurdles to graduate with a college degree in sociology and a master’s degree in business administration in Addis Ababa. She also has extensive work experience in community development and as a social worker. 

Her calling was always to help others – and when the opportunity came up to work at WEEMA she jumped at it. Earlier this year, she assumed her new post leading WEEMA’s Gender and Disability Mainstreaming work. She also became a first-time mother.

“All of WEEMA’s interventions are very crucial for the community, but, as a mother of a child, my biggest interest goes to health and to women’s empowerment as an independent and decision-making woman,” she says.

In her new position, she is responsible for ensuring that all of WEEMA’s projects – on clean water, medical care, education, and economic empowerment – are creating comparable opportunities for women and the disabled. That means building wheelchair-accessible ramps in new libraries. It means creating jobs for women in male-dominated occupations such as beekeeping. It means upgrading schools and training staff so that disabled students can attend and thrive.

Samrawit says the work can be challenging. But the rewards are far bigger.

“I love that WEEMA tends to work with the most deprived part of society,” she says. “I love that it has a holistic and community-led approach.”

Samrawit teaching primary school girls about gender equality

WEEMA explores new partnership for menstrual pad production

In India, a revolutionary 37-year-old known as the “Padman” is solving an age-old problem by creating low-cost sanitary pads for millions of Indian women. WEEMA staff recently visited with the Padman to see if the entrepreneur’s success could be replicated in Ethiopia.

Arunachalam Muruganantham, the “Padman”, invented a low-cost sanitary pad making machine that has made sanitary pads affordable and accessible to poor Indian women for the first time. More than 5,300 machines have been produced over the past decade and they’re now being used in every state in India, along with 27 other countries.

Despite numerous offers from corporations to commercialize his venture, Muruganantham only sells to women’s self-help groups and schools, which handle local production and distribution of the sanitary pads. By doing so, he creates local quality jobs for women.

Three WEEMA staff members met the Padman and they also visited a self-help group, which has four women employees who are making and selling about 1,000 cotton pads every day for 2 to 3 rupees each (less than 5 cents in the U.S.) A portion of their sales – 25 percent – is donated to local schools and for other community needs.

“It’s amazing,” said WEEMA Operations Manager Susan Daly, who traveled with Ethiopian colleagues Ashenafi Tadesse and Tewodros Belachew on the five-day trip. “They’re creating jobs making the pads and they’re providing a product that other women can buy and afford. There are health benefits, too.”

WEEMA’s visit was a first step in exploring whether the Padman’s model can be replicated in Ethiopia by engaging women’s self-help groups to produce and sell the sanitary pads - a venture that would substantially increase access to menstrual materials, while creating quality local employment. WEEMA already has 110 such self-help groups in place involving more than 2,000.

And there’s certainly a need: lack of access to menstrual supplies – and general information about hygiene and menstrual management – is widespread among girls and women in Ethiopia’s rural areas. In addition to health risks, this access gap contributes to girls’ absenteeism at schools - a problem that WEEMA is tackling head-on by distributing reusable pads to students at the Saruma Primary and Middle School.

“The India trip was inspiring, and we’re hoping we can bring this model of women supporting women to Ethiopia,” said Daly last week.

Stay tuned!

WEEMA Program Manager, Ashenafi Tadesse, and Country Director, Tewodros Belachew, after meeting with the Padman

Under WEEMA’s leadership, midwives provide training on menstrual health to 405 students in the Saruma School in rural Tembaro, Ethiopia.

Why Giac Nguyen is Running for WEEMA in the Falmouth Road Race

18-year-old patient and his mother soon after surgery

Giac Nguyen cannot shake the image of seeing hundreds of blind Ethiopians get their eyesight restored.

One of the patients he saw in February was a tall 18-year-old boy who had developed cataracts from his diabetes.

“He’d just gone blind 3 or 4 months before (I met him.) It was sad to see him walking in with help from his mom, who he towered over,” Giac recalled. 

Twelve hours later, moments after removing the bandages following cataract surgery, the boy’s life was transformed. He could see again, and he no longer needed his mom’s help. “The next morning, he walked his mom out,” Giac said. 

Nguyen saw 954 such transformations during a five-day stint helping the Cataract Campaign, organized every year in Ethiopia by WEEMA and the Himalayan Cataract Project. Cataracts are the leading cause of preventable blindness in Ethiopia, affecting an estimated 2.4 percent of rural populations.

This year’s effort was held in Hosanna, an area six hours southwest of the capital, Addis Ababa. Ethiopians of all ages were helped, most of them older.

“It’s beautiful to see the immediate change in people when they remove the bandages,” said Giac, who assisted the doctors by trimming patients’ eyelashes before surgery and removing bandages. “People were singing, praying and bowing to God in joy and celebration.”

Giac, a 54-year-old refugee from Vietnam, is a big supporter of WEEMA’s work. He raised money running for WEEMA at last summer’s Falmouth Road Race. In fact, he attracted more donations than any of WEEMA’s non-staff runners, qualifying him for a free roundtrip to Ethiopia (compliments of Ethiopian Airlines).

His five-week trip – a week with the Cataract Campaign, three weeks working with WEEMA’s Ethiopia staff and a side visit to ancient Christian churches in Lalibela – was eye-opening both personally and professionally.

It rekindled powerful memories of Vietnam, his childhood home until he was age 10, when his family made their escape – on a boat - after the end of the Vietnam War in 1975. Visiting Ethiopia reminded him of his first return to Vietnam in the mid 1990s.

“I was delightedly surprised by the similarities between Ethiopia and Vietnam,” said Giac, a Health Unit Coordinator who now lives in Oregon. “How Ethiopia is emerging as a developing country just as Vietnam was 25 years ago. The way they treat each other, the nuclear family, reminded me of my people.”

He was also impressed by the work WEEMA’s Ethiopia staff is doing in rural communities – so impressed that he’s flying back to Massachusetts this week so he can run for WEEMA in this year’s Falmouth Road Race on Sunday.

“Being able to see it firsthand and meeting the WEEMA team really brought it home that I want to continue to help,” he said.

To support Giac and/or any of  the other WEEMA runners, click here

18-year-old patient delighted with the results of his surgery

The Difference a Book Can Make

Students study, read, and access the Internet at The Degale Public Library.

 “A library is not a luxury but one of the necessities of life.”

- Henry Ward Beecher

In Europe and the United States, we take libraries for granted. They’re in our schools.  They’re in our cities. They’re in our neighborhoods.

Not in Ethiopia. Libraries are rare, especially in isolated rural areas where schools are poorly equipped and students have little or no access to updated textbooks, quiet study space and the Internet.

One result of these barriers can be low enrollment levels and high dropout rates in densely-populated rural areas, especially among secondary school-age students who are critical drivers of Ethiopia’s future.

Just as libraries are a mainstay in American life, WEEMA is trying to do the same in the rural Kembata-Tembaro Zone, which has nearly one million people, roughly half of them children.

Last month, we finished construction on the Adilo Public Library and Computer Center, a key cog in our goal of building and equipping a public library network for the entire Kembata-Tembaro region. Another library, the fourth in the district, will be built in Hadero next year.

When it opens later this year, the Adilo Library will have hundreds of new books, 20 computers, Internet access and a generator to keep everything running. It will be run by the government using locally-trained staff.

The public libraries are open to everyone, but primary and secondary school-age students are a top priority. The Adilo Library includes a study space specifically geared for secondary school students needing to pass the national exams. It also includes a reading room for younger children.

We expect lots of activity. The expanded Degale Library is reaching more students of all ages, many of them drawn to mobile library services linking four of the district’s five high schools. More than 2,500 students used the mobile library service in 2018 alone. The full library network, once the Hadero Library is up and running, is expected to have over 4,000 users every month.

Most importantly, students are getting better opportunities to learn.

Betelehim Aleka, 16, struggled academically when she was a younger student in Mudula. “When I was in grade 8, I didn’t score well. I was an average student,” she recalled.

Then she began spending more time at the Degale Library, where she could access textbook and updated materials on the Internet. Her grades quickly improved, and by the 9th grade, she ranked second in her class. Now she dreams of going to medical school.

Of course, there are other factors at play that keep students, especially girls, out of school and libraries, such as the need to help support families and the lack of funds for books. The free libraries are designed to catalyze opportunities and realize the transformational power education can bring not only to individuals - boys and girls - but also their communities.

The new Adilo Public Library and Computer Center

Celebrating Ethiopia's Trees

WEEMA’s Ethiopian team made global history this week.

Team members and community members in the Tembaro woreda planted hundreds of trees on Monday – part of a record shattering 353 million tree seedlings planted across the country in just 12 hours. This week’s effort crushed the previous world record for trees planted in a single day: 50 million trees were planted in India in 2016.

And Ethiopia is just getting started. The country’s Green Legacy campaign aims to plant 4 billion trees this year in an effort to protect soil conditions and help mitigate climate change.

The issue is an urgent one. Rapid population growth, livestock grazing and widespread use of firewood for cooking have contributed to vast losses in forestland across the country in recent decades. Research from a few years ago showed that less than 4 percent of Ethiopia’s land was covered with forest compared to 35 percent just over a century ago.

For arid, agriculture-dependent regions like Tembaro, where WEEMA works, the issue is especially important. Forests play a key role in protecting healthy soil that farmers rely on for nutrients. Trees also keep water in the soil instead of being washed away during rainstorms, which are becoming more intense due to climate change. Tree planting also helps mitigate climate change since they absorb carbon dioxide, which is heating the atmosphere.

Monday’s tree planting effort in Farsuma, one of the hottest areas of Tembaro, was one of more than 1,000 tree planting sites across the country. WEEMA staff and dozens of community members, many of them school children, planted nearly 500 trees, many of them indigenous dryland acacia tree seedlings. A total of 450,000 trees were planted in Tembaro.

The effort garnered worldwide praise.

“Ethiopia is one of only a few countries that are very invested in getting trees back in the landscape,” Fred Stolle, deputy director of the nonprofit World Resources Institute, told Fast Company. “They’ve gotten to a very bad place. And so they really see the value.”

Of course, planting trees isn’t a final solution. The local government has set up a community system for watering and protecting the seedlings now that they are in the ground. Nurturing the trees for the next couple of years is especially critical. This summer’s planting was purposely timed to coincide with Ethiopia’s rainy season, which runs from May to October.