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Partners for Change Ethiopia began during the Ethiopian Famine of 1984/5, when it set up orphanages looking after over a 1,000 children orphaned by the famine and civil war. Thirty years later Partners for Change has helped hundreds of thousands of orphan children through enabling the poorest communities to find ways of supporting them. 

Now in 2015, Partners for Change is working with the Gende Tesfa community where every family has been affected by leprosy - 200 orphans need help and a further 600 live in desperate poverty. 

Estubdink and brother Mikael featured in Michael Buerk’s Radio 4 Appeal live with their aunt. Despite struggling to feed them, their aunt Adelesh says,

‘I will look after these children until I die.’

Partners for Change want to help her and other carers to look after orphan children and give them a future.

Partners for Change provides school uniforms, helps orphans catch up on education they might  have missed, and provides assistance to poorly resourced schools. It also trains these schools how to set up small businesses to fund further improvement.

In the poorest communities like Gende Tesfa there is little water and no toilets.  Partners for Change constructs community run toilets, showers and water points to ensure children grow up in a safe and healthy environment. Partners for Change also teaches orphan carers how to grow food and set up small businesses so that their children have sufficient, nutritious food and are enabled to grow to realise their full potential.