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Emergency Aid and Disaster Response
AmeriCares has worked in Ethiopia for more than two decades, beginning with a famine in the 1980s that killed an estimated one million people. AmeriCares responded with shipments of nutritional supplements, essential medicines and supplies, and provided grants for nutrition programs run by our in-country partners.
AmeriCares retained ties with partner organizations working in Ethiopia over the years, supplying targeted aid in times of need. In 2003, AmeriCares sent several airlifts and shipments of emergency aid to southern Ethiopia in response to crop failures that left 12.5 million people vulnerable to starvation.
AmeriCares helped support feeding stations which provided sustenance for 25,000 people a day--and two therapeutic sites for children to combat the 2003 food crisis. AmeriCares also delivered essential medicines and supplies, water purification systems, waterproof tents and scales to determine nutritional needs on a weight-to-height basis.
Again in 2008, when Ethiopians started to see signs of a worsening food crisis, AmeriCares was ready to help. We awarded a grant to a school-based feeding program, ensuring several hundred students and orphans were fed healthy meals three times a day.
In an effort to ease the profound human suffering caused by catastrophic famine in the Horn of Africa, AmeriCares large scale emergency response includes ongoing shipments of medicines, supplies, and nutritional supplements, to help children and adults in refugee camps in Somalia, Kenya and Ethiopia.
Medical and Humanitarian Aid
In addition to providing emergency nutritional and medical relief in response to crises, AmeriCares has established partnerships with local groups and health care providers to help support general heath care services. AmeriCares delivers critical supplies that are distributed to a network of partners in Ethiopia including referral hospitals, primary health clinics and rural health posts.
In The News:
AmeriCares cholera initiative is featured in the New York Times' Saving Lives in a Time of Cholera. Read the article »
AmeriCares also supported other facets of Ethiopia's ongoing health needs through the establishment of a 53-bed hospital, which continues to offer surgical, pediatric and maternal services to a rural community of 74,000 today. General medical aid is also enhanced by targeted programs around specific diseases.
Among the many health challenges Ethiopians face, nearly 15% of the population suffers from trachoma – an infectious eye disease contributing to the growing rate of blindness in the country. In fact, 1.3 million people, almost 2% of Ethiopia's population, have had their sight impaired or are fully blinded by trichiasis, a condition caused by the trachoma infection.
Much of AmeriCares recent work in Ethiopia focuses on a program to stop this debilitating disease. Working with in-country partners and Pfizer, which donates the antibiotic Zithromax®, trachoma infections are being treated throughout the country. To help restore sight and prevent further vision damage, AmeriCares also delivers hundreds of specialized surgical kits and supports training programs for a simple, yet highly effective, surgery to help prevent the blinding disease.
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