Caritas Ethiopia is known nationally as the Ethiopian Catholic Secretariat. It is committed to helping people build better lives despite being in a country plagued by disasters, especially acute food shortages and famine.

Ethiopia's economy is based on agriculture, but the sector has been severely hampered by recurrent droughts and poor cultivation. With five major droughts in two decades, many families have not had time to recover and hundreds of thousands of people live on the brink of survival every year.

Caritas Ethiopia’s approach is to link emergency work to rehabilitation and sustainable development, and a food security coordination unit has been set up to promote this strategy. The unit includes the following areas:

• Developing a framework for drawing up food-security proposals;
• Developing disaster-preparedness strategies, including early warning system;
• Improving technical capacity of diocese staff secretariats through training;
• Preparing and coordinating rehabilitation and/or food security programmes.

A social rehabilitation programme includes providing homes for sick and elderly people, vocational training for children of destitute families, and arranging adoption services for orphaned children. Other initiatives range from water supply schemes, benefiting more than 100,000 people, to jointly setting up a micro-financing institution providing loans for small enterprises.

Caritas Ethiopia is active in projects addressing:

• Peace-building, reconciliation and social justice;
• Education;
• Community health;
• Access to water and sanitation;
• Environmental management;
• Care for the elderly.