Fikre Mariam Worku, founder of the NGO Misericordia Ethiopia

[Paris, November the 20th 2000]

LNA. -- Misericordia Ethiopia is a center of formation for social workers and a center of study for development. How do you lead the two activities together ?
FMW. -- If there is no development, social work is not important. If you have to solve the problems of people, you have to work for development as well as for social work. What I mean is that social work to be effective has to be sustainable. People have to be self autonomous, they have to help themselves, and that is development. In social work, you give them a support, you give a guidance, you facilitate the development process. So for me, social work is the other side of development. You have to bring these two, to solve problems of people for the long time. If you say social work, my perception of social work is different of perception of social work in Europe. In Europe you might have to work with psychological people, but in Africa social work has to focus on the poverty, the problem of people. If you work on poverty, you work for development so there is a strong link. So in fact I hardly see the difference between social work and development in Africa and in Ethiopia. So that’s why I came to associatial worker. It is my experience, that’s how I came to development because I worked with associatial workers treating people only when after it is supposed to the child is mal nurished. You can give medecine, but again the child will come back. And you can still give medecine. If you don’t solve the problem, if you don’t feed the mother and the child very well, you will have the malnurished child everytime and you have to give food everytime. You don’t have to treat only the street children, you don’t have to treat only the people who come to the street, who are in the institutes. You have to cure the causes. And the causes are poverty, social crisis. The social crisis has to be solved by development education. By studies, by education. Litteracy, education is a solution for the long lasting development. For that you have to give an education cursus, education training. That’s how I link social work and development.

LNA. -- What are the programs in progress and the developments in the mid time ?
FMW. -- Until now, what I have done is that I have gone a study on what are the major problems areas in the country. We have not people who are trained social workers. Who understand the economic, social, health problems of the country, political problems of the country. To make people to understand the reality, we have to prepare them to be critical thinkers. It is a person who understands what is going on with economy, with social problems, with all the political situation of the country. For that social and development training is important. What I have done until now is that done a study where there is a need, the need of training of social workers in the country. I have designed a support program, a curriculum design. We have dessiminated informations about the magazine to more than two hundred forty five NGOs in the country and we have established a center, a small center, with ten computers because we want to integrate computer courses in the social work trainings. And we are looking for a funding organisation to cover the salary of people who will be the trainers and who will be our staff.

In the mid time I want to train social workers, grass level social workers. People who work with the community. Not in the offices, we have enough inoccupated people in the offices. But we have not people working at the grass level. That is why we have the problem of aids, poverty, street problems, increasing dispite of the intervention of social workers organizations. So that is the training part we have in the institute. We have the computers, the studies.

Financial means for the orphan children and numerous families

The other part is the sponsorship program. With this program we have got about 75 children in our center. We give about 150 birr a month per an orphan child ; per family of numerous children, it ranges from 600 to 800 birr a month. Because we want to help the families to become a middle-class. We don’t want to give fifty, sixty birr, so that is not enough for the families to live, to eat, to educate. To be secured they need enough monney. Our sponsorship program is a little bit different. We try to help them to satisfy all their needs. The educational, the basic needs of food, health. We try to give them. We have also repaired houses for the families who had broken houses. So we have 75 children exposed in that program. For this program, we gave a full amount of monney and we had twelve youngsters that are enrolled in education, vocational training. That is computer training, mechanic training, hair dressing. After they complete the training, we try to help them to stand by themselves. That is the sponsorship program.

Educational and media supports

We have other programs in the social media. We try to advocate for the poors, the marginalized, through the electronic and the printing media. The electronic media is the video. We have a video program which doesn’t exist in the country. There is no social media center in the country. Some organizations might have a video center, but with what we do is totally, exclusively focused on the significant problems affecting the country, like Aids, like women’s problems, like child’s abuses, educational problems. We want to make a documentary film, educational films for training materials, and we want to make features films like on Aids, we have to have artists to makes films and distributed to the schools, industries, different places. For that we have built a mini studio, video making films studio, at the moment we have one old camera, a digital camera and are going to have a computer editing machine. And we have two staffs working on it. We have got a film director, and a computer video editor. Presently, we have got also a donation which hasn’t come yet but we have this in the video. We have done a documentary film on Addis-Abeba, and a sponsorship film on Addis-Abeba. What we have in our program.

The other program we have is a printing media, a magazine called “Synergy”. That magazine is important in the country because it is not going to be profit oriented, it is going to facilitated the development process existing in the country. That means different organizations are going different development programs, we will try to publish that and expose it to the public, it will have it. And we will try to have new informations on development from internet, from people and then publish that also. The major objective of this magazine one is the public target, the second is the people working in NGOs. We will try to facilitate the development process. The magazine will have thirty two pages and it will be on nine columns. It will focus on children, women, health problems, development, organizations what they are doing, interviewes of development personnalities and other people who are active in the country. We want to increase them, so we will interview them and we will publish it in our magazine. So that is the objective.

To inform the government and the public about the work of the 245 NGO

LNA. -- So, the video media is morever for the formation, the education, and the magazine is dedicated to the diffusion of the experiences in the public ?
FMW. -- The magazine is to encourage transparency with NGOs. What are doing NGOs is not coming to the public. They don’t show to the public what they do and most of the NGO are confined in their own system. We want to create a synergy, to bring them together. That’s what we want. And then it will facilitate the government and NGOs programs. We will ask for the policies of the government and policies of NGOs as well. How do they work to bring together ? The magazine’s objective is more of the people working and the development program. And there will be also people who doesn’t know that there are organizations functing in different areas. The public doesn’t know what NGO is doing what. So reading that, they can say OK, I know this NGO is working with children and what are they doing ? They can go and receive the service.

About the video, it has three purposes. One is a documentary film, it can be used for research, to show it to the public that is what one organization is doing with the children and this documentary film is also to show the significance of different problems in the country. Like the street children, we have a documentary film on them, it is on the TV, people will be sensity. The people will think, the governement will think.

We have educational video film. It will be fifteen or ten minutes. It will be for training programs apply. It can be on communication, on leadership, different training programs. That video material will be useful to the people who give trainings in these areas. It is educational work.

LNA. -- You speak like an intelligent minister. Wouldn’t you become Minister of Social Affairs and Development ?
FMW. -- Oh no ! I want to make my contribution in my small level, first. I want to make a difference. The more I become bigger, the more I will be attracted to the political side. There will be political influences always. When you are effective in your work, the people will approach you, joining the political system. At the moment I feel that the political system is not worse to the country as much as the development and the social work. People get educated, people will choose whom they want. People are not educated, poor, they are starving so the political system is corrupted. Because people who have not to eat , don’t think to politics. I try to see my people free from poverty and hunger.

The financial means of the programs

LNA. -- What are the financial means of your programs ?
FMW. -- At the moment, programs for children, it is about one thing I haven’t explain, it is about school. School social work, we want to intervene at elementary level with the kids, in government schools, to support the deteriorating education in the country now. Almost we have got about sixty personns by stage. If we don’t change that, the country’s future will be vain. We cannot dream development without having basic education for our children. And the majority of children are subjectived to these kinds of schools. Schools that have not enough facilities, enough educational services, the teachers are not trained, there are not enough services for most of children. So we want to intervene in government schools to assist the educational system, to develop. We have a partial sponsorship for the children at the beginning of the year, about five hundred chidren we want to help, that’s my dream. It will be bying educational materials and uniforms which is the major problem for most families at the beginning of the year.

We are also looking for funding agencies who can support our school social work programme. The support we require includes financial aid for sponsoring school going children, to buy uniform and exercise books once in a year. We also appreciate an assistance in terms of donations of educational materials, puppets, sport materials and teaching aid materials.

Contact. Misericordia Ethiopia, Center for Social Work and Development Studies, P/O. Box 18087, Addis-Ababa (Ethiopia). -- Tel. : (251-1) 55 28 67 or 56 47 71. -- Fax : (251-1) 56 47 72. -- E-mail 1 : miseth@telecom.net -- E-mail 2 : fikre20@hotmail.com