An underappreciated aspect of the HIV/AIDS crisis in Africa is the need for affected families to secure the basics of life: food and livelihoods. HIV/AIDS-stricken households are frequently sucked into a vicious cycle in which poverty leads to reduced food security, in turn causing malnutrition and a propensity to engage in risky behavior for survival, which further spreads the disease and deepens poverty.

For example, such households often suffer diminished access to food because—with family members sick or caring for the sick—there is less household labor to grow crops or earn wages, just as the family faces escalating medical or burial costs.

The Ethiopia Urban Gardens for HIV Affected Women and Children Program, like its predecessor the Urban Agriculture Program for HIV/AIDS-Affected Women (UAPHAW), improves household nutrition and income by distributing gardening inputs and irrigation drip kits, and by providing HIV/AIDS care and nutritional and health education to affected households.

Since 2004, DAI has set up 15,000 household, school, and community nutrition gardens in Addis Ababa. HIV/AIDS-affected people who had never held a trowel are producing kale, spinach, carrots, and other vegetables to eat and sell. Plots previously strewn with garbage and litter have been transformed into urban gardens.

The Ethiopian Minister of Health, Dr. Kebede Worku, called the program, “one of the excellent examples of partnership against HIV/AIDS.”

“The urban gardening project in Addis Ababa is the kind of effort USAID Administrator Henrietta Fore would like to see expanded,” wrote USAID in its FrontLines publication in January 2008. This current program represents just that expansion. Four times larger than UAPHAW, it will serve 24,000 new households with drip irrigation kits and technical assistance, reaching 84,000 women and orphans and vulnerable children (OVC) in the first three years alone. The program will also expand educational modules in nutrition, food preparation, AIDS treatment, OVC care, and garden-to-market linkages—while adding livestock, poultry, and fruit tree training.

Other aspects of the expanded program:

Children under age 18 will be measured to see if their improved diets lead to healthier bodies and growth;

Communities with especially bountiful gardens will form communal savings and lending programs from the proceeds of their work;

Drip irrigation kits – a tank, valve, regulator, and hose – will be manufactured locally, reducing the cost and improving the availability of replacement parts; and

Community conversations will enhance linkages with nutrition, education, and other support services.