'I am struggling all alone,' says a widowed Ethiopian mother of 6. Now there's hope

Fatouma Zahara Hasan had waited patiently in the hot sun for almost an hour, alongside hundreds of others in the Ethiopian town of Chifera. Eventually, her turn came and she checked her name off a list provided by her community, stood for an unsmiling photo against a backdrop of crumpled tarpaulin and received a small scrap of card with a QR code printed on it.

The card would serve as both a form of identification and voucher for future food assistance, after months in which she and millions more in the dusty desert region of Afar had gone without aid from the United Nations’ World Food Program despite their obvious need.

The U.S. government is the largest donor to the feeding effort here, but for many months last year the Biden Administration suspended its support after warehouses in a nearby city were plundered and supplies intended for the World Food Programme were sold on the black market rather than provided to the intended recipients.

That left the U.N. racing to strengthen the security of its supply chain in troubled northern Ethiopia, part of the largest national feeding effort by foreign agencies on the planet. The task involved an unprecedentedly complex endeavor to digitally register more than 6 million Ethiopians to ensure food aid reached only those in need, and that the supply chain would be better audited to meet U.S. standards.

“When they come here, they know that their names are here and they know how they are selected,” says the World Food Program’s Misrak Wosenyeleh, an energetic, lanky presence at the community center on the edge of Chifera, who spent much of the morning answering questions from confused locals about who is included on the long paper lists and why. “We explain to them that this is the measure that we are taking to assure that the right beneficiaries are receiving the right entitlement, in the right amount, at the right place.”

Fatouma's wait for aid: 'I am struggling all alone'

This uncomfortable chain of events was the reason that Fatouma — a widowed mother of six who was consequently a high priority on the list — had found herself waiting that weekday morning, hoping to regain access to monthly food assistance after more than half a year without it.

The conflict between rebels and government forces raged across Afar and the neighboring Tigray region for several years, and food assistance was often weaponized by warring parties along with the occasional demonization and exclusion of international aid agencies. And while the war remained largely hidden from the outside world, the death toll by the time fighting stopped in late 2022 was estimated at half a million people.

Fatouma’s civilian husband was shot dead, and her family — like thousands of others — displaced to a distant camp. At least there, she and her children had access to some food. But upon returning to a rented living space on a ramshackle mud-paved street in Chifera, Fatouma had been left with next to nothing — her possessions looted, the family’s small collection of livestock stolen.

“I swear that losing him was hard,” she says of her husband. “Life is even harder now. I have no place to call home. But I think losing your means to live is more difficult than losing a loved one.” Despite her registration for food assistance, it would likely be several weeks until she would receive it. Until then, daily meals for herself and her children would continue to consist of small hunks of local bread dipped in a spiced tomato sauce. With few other options to earn cash, she had begun to serve coffee on her front stoop for a few pennies a serving — with the beans often bought on credit in the morning, then roasted and ground in the traditional Ethiopian manner by using twigs, a large pot and plenty of elbow grease. It earns her around a dollar a day.

“I do what I can,” she says, as her children, ranging from several months to 16 years old, huddle in the family’s single room. “But you can see they don’t look at all comfortable. I am a woman, all alone. And I am struggling all alone.”

Why conflict continues

The U.N.’s Human Rights Office last month released its annual report on abuses in Ethiopia, where it saw a significant spike in violent clashes, arbitrary detentions and civilian deaths. Civil conflict continues in certain parts of the country, more than a year after the government agreed to a peace agreement with rebels in the Tigray and Afar regions.

The U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, called for more concrete measures to halt the abuses that continue to endanger peace in Ethiopia. Türk urged authorities to take “all feasible steps to protect civilians, prevent further violations, and ensure there are full investigations to bring those responsible to justice.” But local officials throughout much of last year were angry about the U.S. decision to suspend food aid where climatic conditions like drought already render food supplies unreliable before accounting for the impact of conflict.

“That is difficult for us, for everyone,” says Mahe Ali, the director for early warning and response at the Afar region’s commission for disaster risk management. He said throughout the U.S. suspension he asked repeatedly for food assistance to resume, in light of the difficulties households were facing in rebuilding their supplies after the war. “There is no recovery and rehabilitation,” he says, recounting the warning he gave international agencies: “If it continues like this … death will be happening, and the food security situation will be in dire situation.

”Even under the most difficult conditions when U.S. funding had dried up, the United Nations continued to support the most vulnerable populations such as breastfeeding mothers and their babies. In a remote Afari village, the worries of the war remain etched on the face of Merym Ali Mohammed, 32, who has five underfed children. Her youngest, a baby of several months called Awall, was the only one to receive food assistance throughout last year, in the form of small packets of a peanut-based supplement. NGO workers had weighed and measured his upper arms and legs. He was on the edge of malnutrition but still relatively healthy.

But after so much dislocation and disruption, that update on Awall’s health seemed to provide very little comfort to his mother as she returned home to her other children inside a thatched house ringed by a fence of sticks. “After the war, the price of commodities was very high. The money we had left wasn’t enough to afford the things we needed,” she explains. “We are not getting the food – all the time, the kids are not getting what they need.”

Restarting the distribution of food

Now that the U.S. suspension has ended and distribution operations have resumed, the World Food Programme says it is aiming to deliver food assistance to more than 600,000 people in the Afar region. In one of its vast warehouses on the edge of the regional capital, Semera, workers were loading up trucks that would fan out along roads in several directions to distribution centers. Walking up makeshift ramps, the men dumped bag after bag on board as clouds of finely ground grain hung like a haze around them, part of the roughly 4,000 tons inside one of half a dozen buildings on this single site. The bags were filled with wheat flour from the United States and rice from South Korea, among other products.

For refugees, another vulnerable population in Afar, some of that food aid restarted slightly earlier than it did for local residents. Apart from the more than four million Ethiopian citizens displaced internally by drought or conflict in recent years, Ethiopia’s refugee population has also soared to more than 900,000. At the Barahle refugee camp in northern Afar, many residents hail from neighboring Eritrea, where Afari people from the same ethnic group as those living in Ethiopia face high levels of government persecution.

Among them is Mohammed Hassan Mohammed, an Eritrean refugee who made the dangerous border crossing as a teenager and – now married with two young children — has lived in Barahle ever since. He says despite the U.S. food suspension in 2023, his own family always had just about enough to survive, since a refrigerator he owns allows him to earn some money by storing and selling food to his neighbors.

Other families were not so lucky, he says. “I saw many children die,” he told me. “In Afar, when children died, they said it was part of God’s plan and would not accept they had died due to hunger.” The Ethiopian authorities have welcomed refugees from several neighboring countries, including Sudan, where another violent war drags on into its second year. But with a series of domestic challenges, including fresh violence in other regions, the country’s capacity to help these arrivals is often limited, and so it is typically international aid agencies that provide refugee groups with much of their food.

Clusters of children stood outside Mohammed’s home, shyly staring at his visitors, and occasionally laughing. Many carried tell-tale signs of malnutrition, like stunted growth and light colored hair. Such long-term physical manifestations of hunger were a reminder that — despite their smiles — survival in this region still frequently relies on outside support.

Willem Marx is a London-based journalist.