Rural Eritrea

Females carrying heavy items on their heads is a common picture in Africa. Eritrean Women in rural areas use to carry wood and fetch water from approximately 2 to 5 kilometres distance from their home.

Carrying a 20 litres jerrycan could be quite exhaustive and a time consuming task for a woman, which has to take care of children and household at the same time.

In 1994 Stefanie Christmann travelled to Eritrea to conduct a scientific research. This was the first time she encountered women carrying heavy items on their heads or shoulders, while having babies on their back, a typical African fashion.

In astonishment Stefanie asked the women: “Don’t you have donkeys?” to emphasis that this work could have been done by donkeys. However, the reply she got back was: ”We are the donkeys!”

When she returned back home from her research in Eritrea, she planned to help the women, by raising money for the National Union of Eritrean Women (NUEW). The NUEW used the money to buy and distribute the donkeys to the females in need.

The first donkeys were delivered to rural areas in the Gash-Barka region in 1996 and later on in 1998 to the Sahel Province in the north of Eritrea. Indeed the project was still expanding to the Southern Red Sea Province as well as highlands, south of Asmara, during the war (May 1998 to June 2000).

In 2007 the project also expanded to other regions such as Nepal in the Himalayas. Especially women who raised their children on their own or came from a family with a very poor background were the ones benefiting from this project.

The value of one donkey was equivalent to $US126 as a start-up capital investment. This was because, the women started to deploy the donkeys for transporting and selling water, wood and grass for livestock for other people.

The return gained was then reinvested into launching small scale vegetable and brewery businesses as well as constructing houses for them selves and others. In this way, the project had become a microfinance system which enabled ordinary females to become successful entrepreneurs.

Moreover, played a important role in transforming the traditional perception of females in rural areas. It demonstrated that women can support themselves being self-reliant and independent in a male dominated society.

Back then in 1994, no one would have imagined that such a simple idea could have created that much impact and added value to the livelihoods of females in poverty. However, according to the donkey project authorities as well as the NUEW work on the project has been brought to a halt until further notice.

The donkey project was evidence that some times small but innovative ideas could be more efficient than projects undertaken by big NGOs with enormous amount of money.