Healthy Village Ethiopia works with the Government of Ethiopia to end child stunting, and in 2025 its integrated model was adopted as the national blueprint for reaching every district in the country.

From a programmeto national policy

In 2025, the Healthy Village approach was integrated with the government’s own model into a single national framework, the Malnutrition-Free Healthy Village, and adopted by the Federal Ministry of Health as the official village-level unit for the Seqota Declaration, Ethiopia’s strategy to end child stunting by 2030. Its national implementation guideline is now being finalised. From 2026, the model scales across the whole country.

Scale-up phase, 2026 to 2030, across all 1,050 woredas.

A nationalcommitment

In 2015, Ethiopia pledged to eliminate child stunting by 2030 through the Seqota Declaration, a government-owned, nationally-funded strategy. At the time, more than a third of children under five were stunted, and the country was losing a large share of its economy each year to the effects of undernutrition. The task was to make an integrated model work at national scale.

How themodel works

The Healthy Village model integrates what matters at household level, nutrition, safe water and sanitation, and maternal and child health, delivered together rather than in parallel. A village is declared Healthy once almost everyone meets and keeps the key standards. It is designed for scale from the start, so it can be carried by the systems already in place.

What the programmedelivered

Alongside shaping national policy, the programme kept delivering on the ground in Amhara and Tigray, where operations in Tigray resumed in 2024 and accelerated through 2025.

Alongside these, 10,000 farmers were trained, and two technical staff were seconded to regional and national government to help carry the model forward.

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