Ambassador Vicki Huddleston Visits South Omo Zone, SNNPR

As part of her regular working and familiarization trips to different parts of Ethiopia, the
U.S. Chargé d’Affaires,  Ambassador Vicki J. Huddleston, visited the South Omo Zone of the Southern Nations, Nationalities and People’s Region (SNNPR) from March 18 to 22. The purpose of the Ambassador’s trip was to learn about how local communities interact with the protected areas in the zone and with each other, and how conflicts over natural resources like wildlife, grazing lands,  water can be addressed.

Ambassador Huddleston was accompanied by the Department of State’s Regional Environment Office for East Africa based at the embassy in Addis Ababa and a representatives from USAID.  The party flew to Jinka on March 18, where they met with Zonal Administrator, Ato Kaydaky Gezahegne, the Mayor of Jinka, Assegid Adera, and town elders,  to discuss development needs in the area and activities being undertaken by communities and the local administration.  The group next visited the South Omo Research Center  for a briefing on the area's rich ethnographic diversity .

The following day, the party traveled overland through Mago National Park and the Tama Wildlife Reserve, then crossed the Omo River into Omo National Park.

During the journey, the group stopped in the Mursi community of Hailoha (or Haile Woha) to visit an alternative teaching center administered under the TEACH (Transforming Education for Adults and Children in the Hinterlands) Program supported by USAID and implemented by PACT. PACT is a U.S. based private voluntary organization that has been carrying out development projects in Ethiopia for over ten years (see website http://www.pactet.org.) 

Ambassador Huddleston made a donation of books and educational materials to the center.  USAID supports another project, also implemented by PACT, called SELAM-C (Stability for Ethiopia’s Lowland Marginalized Communities), which aims to resolve local conflicts in the vicinity of Mago National Park. 

In Omo National Park, the Chargé was hosted by African Parks Ethiopia (PLC) and the Omo Park Warden, Ato Gemedo Osolo. In January of this year, African Parks took over management of Omo National Park under a 25-year contract with the SNNPR and the Federal Government. In Mago National Park, Ambassador Huddleston and the group reviewed the outputs of a grant from the US Fish and Wildlife Service, from its African Elephant Conservation Fund, to assist in protecting elephant populations in the park.

South Omo is an area of tremendous diversity of cultures and wildlife , where local communities have an essential role to play in managing and conserving this heritage, and where donors, NGOs, academia, and local government can  come together to help achieve this goal.

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