Regional Reports - the European External Action Service

The Major characteristics can be summarised as follows:
• The Civil Society is relatively young: most of the Civic Associations met have been
established in the last ten years;
• High level of mushrooming of CBOs: many Iddirs and Afochas are being created or
revived in the effort to mobilise the communities in the development effort. These
two kinds of organisation at their origin where mostly gathering the Muslim for the
Afochas and the Christians for the Iddirs, but nowadays there are Christians who join
the Afochas and Muslim who join the Iddirs, mostly according to territorial
characteristics. This sector of the Civil Society is showing a high level of vitality and
has made an effort for joining the activities to achieve a critical mass and to scale-up
their activities in relationship with the government and the other sectors of the Civil
Society. Even if this process appears rather top-down it has to be considered that two
regional unions have been created the first one clustering 52 Iddirs and the second
one clustering 44 Afochas. All the 96 organisations form a Regional Network of
Iddirs and Afochas. These CBOs have 18.900 members and 300 executive members ;
• High number of associations working on highly related issues (e.g. HIV-AIDS):
the very recent growth dynamic has mobilised the youth to create associations and
clubs but the disordered growth of these organisations has produced some
overlapping between associations who work in the same territorial area. This
condition generates some concurrency effect which is likely to hinder the creation of
regional networks or thematic platforms and the merging of some organisations with
the aim of strengthening their constituencies to produce a higher impact at territorial
level;
• Specific phenomenon of young professional who create professional association
to work on development and search opportunities for employment: Harar is a
region where unemployment is an important problem and the issue of unemployment
appears more critical for the youth. So there in different cases young professional
have created an association with the dual scope of engaging in the development
process and at the same time find employment opportunities. Evidences from the
field work ( findings of the FGDs) show that the emulative effect has produced the
formation of some of these associations
• Gradual transformation of Iddirs and Afochas from the traditional role to
Social Welfare or Self-Help CBOs: as found also in other situations this is an
outstanding trend which qualifies these organisations as potential development
partners. In this case some elements have to be modified because in some of these
organisations backward-minded approaches are still adopted (for example the
practice of restricting the access to the organisation for those who have not yet
formed a family). This change has also been ratified by a recent Regional By-law.
Profile and distribution of NSA at Regional Level
b. Profile of NSA
The Organisation registered and licensed by the Bureau of Justice of Harari People Regional
State are a number of 269. The following tables show their distribution in the different
categories:
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