Water scarcity in Ethiopia causes cyclical droughts, which impact crops directly. As a result, the people, and especially children, have severe health and developmental disabilities, which deprive them of other rights, such as education.
As a solution to this situation, the Mother-Child Center was opened in 2008 in Muketuri, North Shoa, Ethiopia. It is now home to 250 children aged 4-5 years, where they are given proper nutrition and prepared for elementary school. The center also provides training to their mothers in agriculture (food production) and nutrition.
To this end, the Center has a garden where they grow vegetables, 600 fruit trees, a nursery, a farm with 4 cows and 200 chickens, and a well to meet the nutritional needs of the center and conduct training courses. The center was established also as the only place in the area where the population can receive basic medical care.
The FPSC believes that the only way to reach the basic needs of the population of Muketuri is to improve their diet, and so the Foundation will begin a project at the end of this year, with the funding of the City of Alcobendas, whose priority is food security by building an additional classroom to the existing center to serve more children, until the age of 6 years, responding to the new Ethiopian law regarding inreasing admission to school to children of this age.
Additionally, wells will be drilled in Muketuri to supply the families of the 50 women attending the course (50 new mothers of children admitted to the center). A single well will be shared by five families from a nearby area and serve to irrigate the gardens they have learned to tend during training.
Moreover, the agreement between the FPSC and the Foundation CIONE Path of Light www.fundacionrutadelaluz.es reinforces the work of the FPSC in Ethiopia: professionals from this Foundation will collaborate with our projects, putting opticians on the ground to make revisions and provide correct eyeglasses, thereby improving visual health of disadvantaged populations, especially in Africa. The glasses will be sent from Spain, and will be assembled in the solidarity workshops of the Foundation Path of Light.