PRIME: helping pastoralist families build resilience
As a partner in the USAID-funded PRIME project, FSA ran adult literacy and nutrition programmes in five districts of Afar.
PRIME (Pastoralist Areas Resilience Improvement through Market Expansion) was a five-year project funded by USAID. It aimed to help pastoralist communities in Ethiopia’s dry lowlands cope with shocks like drought, and so improve their chances of long-term development.
FSA was a sub-grantee of Mercy Corps and CARE Ethiopia. We worked in five districts of Zone 3 in the Afar region: Argoba special district, Dulessa, Awash Fentale, Amibara and Gala’alo.
Our part of the project had two aims:
- to help households find other ways to earn a living beyond herding, through our Integrated Functional Adult Literacy programme
- to improve nutrition in the households we worked with, using steady, well-targeted activities based on evidence
After the project ended, we spent two weeks with Mercy Corps carrying out a market mapping study. FSA is now running an eight-month extension focused on nutrition. It bridges the gap until the second phase of the project, PRIME II, begins, and aims to improve nutrition in target households through ongoing, evidence-based activities that encourage changes in behaviour.