Study of A Glimmer of Hope’s Impact

By Donna Berber

Recently, students from Harvard, UT and Gondar University completed a major impact study in the village of Burbax in northern Ethiopia. Burbax was one of the two villages selected as a beneficiary of our Let There Be Hope, event held towards the end of last year.

Construction is already underway in the village but, before those wells, schools and clinics go into operation, we wanted to create a baseline against which we could measure the impact of those projects in the future.

Using criteria such as food security, child mortality, income levels and incidence of disease, we also wanted to learn how we can continue to deepen our impact throughout rural Ethiopia.

The impressive team was led by our programs director Norma Van Horn. Over five days, Norma and her team interviewed more than 150 villagers to gain an appreciation of the most intimate details of their daily lives.

Here is her account of the time she and her team spent in Burbax, gaining a true appreciation of the extreme poverty that exists in rural Ethiopia:

“Having just returned from spending five days in the dusty hills of Burbax kebele (village) in the Amhara Region, I am struck by the paradox of Ethiopia: that a country that has so little, owns so much joy.

Students from Harvard, the University of Texas and Gondar University get their instructions from A Glimmer of Hope’s Norma Van Horn (not pictured).

The purpose of the trip was to conduct a baseline survey of the area before A Glimmer of Hope constructs water points, schools, health posts, and veterinary clinics there – a model called integrated area development.

We went to speak with the villagers and to gather metrics on what their lives are like and the nature of their poverty. Glimmer’s integrated model goes deep rather than broad within a community creating the infrastructure needed for people to pull themselves out of poverty. We have just begun construction in Burbax and this baseline information will allow us to measure the impact of our work in the coming years.

Participants in the study wait to be interviewed.

We collected data about the village’s illnesses, crop yields, child mortality, school absenteeism and enrollment rates. Helping conduct this field work was a team of 11 joint Harvard Business School-Harvard Kennedy School graduate students, three LBJ School of Public Policy Students (University of Texas) and 14 Gondar University students. This team tirelessly interviewed more than 150 villagers to gain an appreciation of the most intimate details of their daily lives.

The information was haunting. Ethiopia is the 11th poorest country in the world and, with limited funding available, it faces difficult choices when it comes to investing in the welfare of its people. Every choice comes with a consequence and a cost.

If they construct a clean water source in one village, someone in another village will continue to suffer from water-related diseases. If they construct a school in this community, children in that community will not have an opportunity to get an education. Who wins? Who loses? What is the cost? How can anyone choose who to help and who not to help when what we all want is to help every one of them?

In A Glimmer of Hope’s case, our Ethiopian NGO partners are highly skilled at maximizing the amount of benefit achieved through every investment. And, the information gained through this study will allow us to further refine our implementation practices to achieve even greater impact and ultimately, to save more lives.

Children squat behind makeshift desks in the existing Minziro Elementary School in Burbax. Photo by Lynne Dobson.

The lives of remote, rural Ethiopians are hard. They experience food shortages and regular recurrences of what are easily preventable diseases by Western standards. They love their children every bit as much as I love my children, yet nearly everyone I spoke to had lost a child, sometimes two, before the age of five.

Jambarie Teshale (61) has three children who will attend the new Minziro School for grades 1-8 (under construction in background).

Students frequently miss school because their families need help to gather crops or collect water; it’s a vicious cycle from which it is difficult to recover. Livestock – the measure of wealth in rural Ethiopia – is just as susceptible to preventable diseases as their owners are. The death of one of these prized animals can have a devastating effect on a family.

By May, fetching dirty water from a hole in the ground will be a thing of the past for these women.

Added to all of these problems, soil degradation is causing the land they depend on for their livelihoods to lose abundance at the same time as the costs of staple goods are increasing. The hardship they bear – all the while maintaining a quiet dignity – is inconceivable.

A Glimmer of Hope has found that integrated rural projects have tangible impacts on people’s lives. They are the best way to help people move themselves out of poverty.

I greatly look forward to returning to Burbax next year and speaking with the same villagers to learn of the improvements in their lives. In the meantime, I have returned from Burbax a changed person. Beautiful friendships, joyful dancing and laughter, and shared hard work are the memories I carry in my heart.

The efforts of the impact study team will have an impact that is felt throughout Burbax and beyond.

Fossils tell us that our earliest ancestors came from Ethiopia; in a very real way, we are all Ethiopian. The bones that lie in those hills are our ancestors. It is incomprehensible to me that such poverty can exist side by side with such prosperity in this day and age; that the country of our forbearers can be one of the poorest countries on Earth.

Ethiopia and its people do not have any easy choices. And, the world doesn’t have all the answers either. Surely, if it did, something would have done to put an end to this level of extreme poverty by now.

The information we gathered on this trip will help us understand what impact our work is having and enable us to make more informed decisions in the future. It will allow us to impact more lives, more quickly and help us to find partners with strengths that complement our own to have an even greater impact.

In the meantime, what Ethiopia needs from us is not our sadness. It needs our passionate hearts, our strength and our outrage that there are those among us who are not able to speak for themselves.

And until they can, we must be their voices.”

Norma Van Horn
Programs Director

Follow us on