Imagine walking six hours for a drink of water. Loko Dadacha is learning to adapt and prepare for drought’s devastating effects.
It’s midday in the tiny village of Gutu Dobi, in southern Ethiopia, and Loko Dadacha, a widow who is supporting her family single-handedly, has been at work since before dawn. That’s when she rises to milk her animals, fix tea for the family (two of her six children, plus one grandchild, are living with her) and get a jump on the exhausting task of keeping water in the house—a chore that often involves her trekking six hours round trip to a distant pond with a big green jug on her back. (When full, it weighs 40-plus pounds.)In the daylight that’s left when she returns, Dadacha may climb trees to cut the leafy branches as fodder for her livestock, scour the landscape for wood to chop and sell, and tend to her crops, if it’s rained enough for them to survive.
But in recent years, including 2009, the rain has been too scant for her seeds to thrive. She lost everything, including the field of grain called teff, a staple of the Ethiopian diet.
“The climate has changed a lot,” Dadacha says. “We are now in a very difficult time. When I was younger I wanted to have enough cattle, have enough food, to send my children to school. I imagined there would be a better future, a better life. Now it is completely different.”
I first met Dadacha in 2008 during a field visit to Gutu Dobi for my employer, Oxfam America. An international aid organization, Oxfam has been helping villagers find ways to cope with the increasing cycles of drought that shrivel the pastures and kill the crops, driving many people deeper into poverty.
Hoping to avoid that fate, Dadacha has joined a growing number of women participating in an early-warning drought surveillance system that takes women’s intimate knowledge of their communities and combines it with broader data on harvests and market conditions. By staying abreast of what’s happening in her town—how much rain has fallen this month compared with the previous one; how much milk the animals are producing now compared with the last season; how many animals have died—and gathering the finer details from her neighbors, Dadacha provides a visiting data collector with a monthly report that eventually gets charted into a graph.
