The overall, food insecurity situation has been deteriorating across the Tigray region, especially since the conflict erupted during the harvest season. The interim Regional Administration has estimated that 4.5 million people are now in need of food assistance. Further deterioration is expected as the conflict continues and disrupts the next planting season. Nutrition partners have expressed grave concern that the significant number of moderately malnourished cases identified so far will become severely malnourished unless the food and nutrition responses are urgently scaled up.
This project will address the immediate and lifesaving needs of the conflict-affected communities through the promotion of nutrition-sensitive agriculture where targeted households receive crop seeds including vegetables, pulses, cereals, provision of cash (MPC) labeled for agricultural inputs, and livestock services to ensure adequate animal fodder and veterinary services are available. Cash will be used as the preferred modality to provide this agricultural support to help farmers/pastoralist/agropastoralist to purchase agricultural/livestock inputs like livestock feed and water given the functionality of local markets. The cash response aims at boosting the devastated local market affected by the conflict. All these proposed interventions will enhance household food security in Kilte Awlalo, Saesi Tsaedaemba, and Gata Afeshum woredas of Tigray Region, Shewa Robit/Debrebrehan, Kombolcha and Dessei Towns of Amhara Region and Zone 1 amp zone 4 of Afar region. GOAL has operational presence in these woredas with other humanitarian interventions such as nutrition, health, WASH, ESNFI, livelihood and cash based assistance.
In the original design of this project the cash distribution was proposed to address the lack of basic agricultural inputs including fertilizer, chemicals, and farm tools for a total of 1,500 households impacted by the conflict. However, through this amendment the cash distribution purpose is to support the conflict affected communities of Amhara to use for basic household consumption, while the veterinary drugs is proposed for Afar pastoralist communities to use it for protecting the core breed animal through accessing veterinary services by in conflict damaged areas.
Overall, the project will address a total of 15,000 households through the provision of animal veterinary drugs and vaccines. The new proposed activities will be implemented in Debrebrehan/Shewa-robi, Kombolcha, Dessie and Afar (Zone1 amp Zone 4) where the need is high.
The multipurpose cash will be supported for those very vulnerable women headed HHs, disabled and pregnant lactating women and HHs who have malnourished children Each household will receive 2000 ETB in total. This will be provided as an unconditional cash transfer through the Bank transfer modality as a once-off payment.
The seeds intervention is proposed to deliver in time for the Meher planting window however, this is highly dependent on a timely proposal review process, availability of seeds supplies in Ethiopia Seed Enterprise or the neighboring region of Amhara to ensure timely procurement, as well as collaboration with local stakeholders in facilitating agreements rapidly and supporting beneficiary targeting and verification. GOAL will maintain regular communication with the DRM-ATF on the progress and coordinate closely with local-level stakeholders to ensure that this project will have maximum impact and effectiveness. GOAL’s existing presence in Amhara and Afar regions will be a value-added to hasten the project implementation as the project will contribute to the realization of the 90-days plan.