While the various Middle East powers jostle with the Ethiopian and Eritrean governments and Tigray forces are still encamped in Afar Region the grim reality of anticipated conflict as expressed in mid- November continues throughout the northern Afar society. Armies are still present, market access and feasibility remain pressured, the communities at the mercy of political whim.
Having said all that, APDA with the communities must bolster itself as we enter 2026 with even stronger resolution to respond timely and to determine the means whereby Afar can stand and direct their future. To that end, we all immensely appreciate the amazing partners that stood with our organization through the difficulties of 2025 wishing you all your own resolution to stand firm in a world thwart with contradictions of human justice and willingness to facilitate the passage to development security. Even to know the cost of fuel in a world driven to exploit one from another is dearly affecting those living/ eking out a living in the simplest possible way such as Afar people.
Please accept our sincere thanks. As we sit on one of the world’s ‘hot-spots’, the Horn of Africa bordered by the Red Sea passage from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean, we literally treasure your interaction, being alone and being supported is worlds apart.
Some of us celebrating New Year on January 1st, the start of our quarterly/ year – end review and planning meeting, 120 members’ gathering
Our plans for 2026 – middle term
Realizing education to be THE leading element as well as the right of the person yet the greatest deficit in the Afar community development process, APDA is committed to making every effort to see that the Afar language is used to its fullest capacity in child learning and adult understanding. Already having a group of voluntary linguists, educationalists including from Samara University, Bureau of Education and the one Assayita teachers’ college, Afar’s effort in the whole strategy will be to mobilize creative elements of learning through the many cultural means of expression (proverbs; songs; drama to film-making; traditional stories and histories); assist with working the curriculum and texts into cultural and livelihood relevance aiming to diversify learning from the blackboard to the needed expressions that literally generate the intellect and creativity of the learner.
All Afar desperately need this realizing it is only in the past 25 years and less they have begun to absorb more than tradition had told them for centuries: UNESCO Peer then setting up 20 APDA teachers in 1996, Afar literacy began; in 2005, a system of alternative basic education started, teachers moving as the clan moved for grazing and water – learning under the shade of a tree. Tradition held brilliant understanding of the Region’s almost uninhabitable landscape, Afar surviving by condensing steam rising from subterrain rivers passing through volcanic lava – their thinking and practice based on the survival of their fragile environment through their movement as nomads. However, their understanding of human physiology till today in parts dances with death – for example, their wish to literally bleed out of the birthing mother as much blood as they can manage lest it forms clots on her spine troubling her for life and much more…
That the community agree to the reason to stop harmful practices takes the time of change, the mechanism being a literate brain that can discern. Now, Afar need to emerge into a digital era while navigating all the changes to their environment; the economy and even governance.
Food insecurity in the Afar must find a solution. While the herd has greatly reduced from 30 years back, IF veterinary health services and animal feed sustaining the milking and breeding goat existed along with a reasonable market, Afar herding communities in the far remote locations can live without malnutrition. Milk in the house needs guarding. Left to a mono-diet of bread for 5 to 7 months in the year while the milk has dried up sentences Afar children to grow up stunted without intellectual capacity. Where food crops are now growing and can be grown, the market must be stretched to meet these remote areas that the household have micronutrients.
Afar are still in the process of learning the market: the value of money; finance planning at the household level; market – linking and value – chain in production. Thirty years ago, rural Afar hardly used money and certainly did not have a bank account. Still the Region’s town markets are mostly highland dominated for the benefit of those living in the adjoining Regions.
Our urgent concerns
As written up in our November 2025 update, the earthquake in Barahale and Konnaba, northern Afar Region continues to shake and quake up to 3 times weekly. First forcing 54,000 people to abandon their stone houses as 70% of them tumbled down on the evening of October 11th 2025, even yesterday, January 6th, a quake has shattered more houses in Konnaba.
These uprooted people’s main concern is now to re-adapt to houses built from dry palm leaves as they once did a generation ago. The stone houses they repaired and re-built have cracked again.
On the Afar western border with Tigray, as of November 11th, 18,111 people still live in displacement, quite frankly, a very ugly site. They actually have no hope of returning to their homeland in Tonsa, Magaale since the Tigray forces still rely on their land as a military base and are infiltrated into their rural habitats. 780 households of the 3,000 that displaced lost every single animal to this emergency: either hyenas ate their livestock or the Tigray army confiscated them for their own benefit. While there is a small stream of water where they are living in 3 displacement camps, there is no grazing for the animals. Then those who were able to rescue their herds are grazing them in distant hills, the remaining family members in a dry camp waiting for food relief. This is the ugliness. Since as of APDA’s last truck of food in mid – December that they literally shared among themselves, they have no food, our coordinator reporting it is only days before there will be nothing left despite the promise of food assistance from a more indirect system – households registered in early December but still no food.
The immediate solution that APDA can afford is to send them the little food in the store lasting them a few more days and to get animal feed to them that 3 to 5 milking goats per household can return from distant grazing feeding the family.
The third current frightening story is that of people trafficking. In recent days, news of young Afar dying in Tripoli, Libya has brought much sadness and extreme anxiety while knowing there are others, even girls in this predicament. The traffickers work in the main towns of the Afar – this, APDA must unveil as the situation is deadly – the extortionists are asking up to 15,000 USD that their relative in Libya can live, that paid, they are still dying. A further payment is needed to board a boat across the Mediterranean. Here our cry is more a world alert of the desperation that Afar town youth are facing – many them having failed their exams to go into tertiary learning. This horror is repeated through the Region walking people into Djibouti dangerously crossing the Red Sea to Yemen, young Ethiopian girls mainly, all desperate to reach household work in the Arab States.
Houses back to mats…. The architecture of Afar women..
Afar, like many Sahelian nomadic communities construct dome-shaped houses from a frame of bent, thin branches then cover the frame with mats woven from the throngs of dried palm (domma palm). These thousands of years tradition allows them household mobility as well as protecting them from wind, dust and even rain, the inside smoked to water-proof the mats. The actual domma palm only grows in a handful of locations and, in recent times does not reach 25% of the households needed. What APDA dreams to do is to facilitate community – access widely to the raw material so that women such as the earthquake and the Magaale displaced communities can make the houses they want as well as marketing them and again, rather than seeing plastic sheeting from humanitarian support covering the dome or scraps of torn clothing, women can re-gain the house – pride. This needs the purchase of truck – loads of dry palm leaves from the actual three sites where the domma palm is indigenous.
Local women helping APDA to construct a demo ‘daboyta’/ traditional house in the organization field compound, Samara: rolled mats behind to cover the frame, so far half the dome. Ladder and barrel added ‘office’ equipment. The organization is at speed now to welcome 50 guests in 2 weeks coming from Amhara Region, Sudan, Kenya, Burkina Faso, Bangladesh – all in the name of community driven development. In the background is the board describing who APDA is