This article is from page 31 of the 2008-11-18 edition of The Clare People. OCR mistakes are to be expected so download the original SWF or the rendered page 31 JPG
A REMARKABLE irrigation project in Ethopia has been described by Bunratty woman Marinella Raftery as ‘a huge boost to the area’, as she embarked on a campaign to raise funding and build the profile of Self Help Africa over the autumn months
The positive impact that the Irish development agency is having was underlined when an Irish delega- tion visited a 20 year old irrigation scheme and found a community that had been transformed by the project.
Visitors to Ethiopia with Self Help Africa learned that an irrigation project developed with funding from Bob Geldof’s Band Aid in the late 1980s was still thriving, and 23,000 families in the region were earning a livelihood from the venture.
‘People talk about the importance of lasting development, but the peo- ple who travelled to Ethiopia were
able to see the impact that a scheme undertaken 20 years ago, was still having today’, said Ms Raftery
“I am going to encourage people to support Self Help Africa over the coming weeks, and it is great to be able to tell them that the projects work, and that empowering African people to help themselves, Self Help is able to transform the lives of the continent’s rural poor permanently.”
The Irish visitors who met with rep- resentatives of the Band Aid funded ‘Adami Tulu Farmers Co-Opera- tive’ heard that the group’s numbers had grown from 480 members to a present level of nearly 23,000, and farmers were producing surplus quantities of food every year.
Ms Raftery is currently involved in organising events and co-ordinat- ing a programme of fund-raising activities in Clare. To find out more visit www.sandwichday.ie, or e-mail Marinela on Clare@selfhelpafrica.