Run Across Ethiopia Final Report
Click here for stories from the Run Across Ethiopia
View the Run Across Ethiopia Photo Collection
In January 2011, 10 American and 6 Ethiopian runners ran 400 kilometers (over 250 miles) across Southern Ethiopia as part of a campaign to generate awareness and funding for education.
The Run Across Ethiopia was a great success, raising over $200,000 to:
• Construct three schools that will directly serve over 1500 children.
• Fund a school nutrition program for the Mercato Kindergarten, where over 40 children will receive a nutritious meal each day they attend school.
• Provide job training, experience, and wages for 10 street teens as part of the Gorumsa Project.
• Support the work of the Tesfa Foundation and the Oromia Cooperative Farmers Cooperative Union (OCFCU), a union of 129 fair trade coffee cooperatives that, together, represent some 800,000 families.
More than 600 years ago, merchants trekked through the mountains and valleys of Ethiopia to export the world’s first cultivated coffee beans—thus beginning what has since become a multi-billion dollar industry. But in modern-day Ethiopia, despite the country’s coffee exports accounting for nearly 60 percent of the national GDP, many coffee farmers and their families live in dire poverty. Education, health care, and access to water are all very limited. In the Yirgacheffe region, where some of the world’s most unique and sought-after coffees originate, little more than half the region’s children complete primary school. The adult literacy rate is 36 percent. Life expectancy is 53 years.
But at the Ethiopian fair trade coffee cooperative of Negele Gorbitu, in the town of Afursa Waro, coffee farmers are taking their future into their own hands. They’ve used the premiums from the sale of their fair trade and organic coffee beans to build a health clinic and primary school. These were big steps, but they’re still not enough: the primary school is already overfilled with students and understocked with school supplies. Access to water and nutrition are minimal, at best.
For these reasons, the Run Across Ethiopia was formed.
Click here for the final report and more details on the Run Across Ethiopia
See pictures from the Run in January 2011, and update trip, September 2011
