Walelign Yilak, 28, starts each day at 6:00 am at a spring in the middle of yellow teff fields outside her village in Tej Bahir Kebele, Goncha Woreda, East Gojam, Ethiopia. She makes the trip twice a day, collecting 50 litres in total. Thirty-two households depend on the same spring. Goats drink from the upper section where the water collects. It is the community’s only water source. “If we lose this spring, we don’t have any water source. Let alone raising our children, we can’t go by a day without this spring,” her husband Wale said. 

After fetching water, Walelign prepares breakfast for their four children: Demeku (10), Habtamu (5), Shewanesh (3), and Atinkut (6 months). The daily meal is shiro stew — made from chickpea powder, spices, onion, and garlic — served with injera. Some evenings they eat boiled potato, lentil stew, or beans. Walelign buys cabbage and beetroot from the market once a week and gives the children kolo (roasted sorghum) as a snack. They have two chickens, so eggs are also part of the children’s diet. 

Walelign breastfed each child until age two and began solid food at six months — a mixed porridge of teff, sorghum, fenugreek, and peas. She completed grade 8 and learned about child nutrition from a poster at the local health centre. 

“I learned what I should feed my children from a poster at the health centre,” she said. Wale has no formal schooling and cannot read. “I can’t even read a sign at a health centre. I always have to ask people for information,” he said. Water collection and childcare are considered women’s work in Tej Bahir; Wale helps Walelign with both when farming allows, and she helps him with seed planting and weeding. 

For seven years, Wale farmed his parents-in-law’s land under a sharecropping arrangement — covering all costs for fertiliser, seeds, and labour and sharing a portion of the harvest in return. Last week, without stated reason, they took the land back. The couple have two oxen, two cows that supply milk for the children, two calves, and two chickens. They have no land to farm. 

“Those who have land have an easier life. Those of us without a land struggle a lot. I don’t have land, and I am not certain of my future,” Wale said. His immediate concern is water access: with more reliable sources, he believes the household could grow vegetables in their backyard to sell at the market. His longer-term aspiration is his children’s education. “I want to send all my children to school so that they will have a better life,” he said.