Saving Ethiopia's forest, and its cutters

The World Bank also hopes to train up to 500 women per year in sustainable forestry practices, to prevent depletion of forests and help steer some women out of the more grueling aspects of the fuel-wood trade into marketing and sales. Some women may be encouraged, for instance, to start selling more efficient wood stoves door to door.

World Bank officials applaud the association for its methods, but say that its impact was too limited. But old-timers like Wubalem Tefera say the association has given her something more than just a life skill – respect.

"The public didn't respect us as wood carriers," says Ms. Tefera, a former wood-carrier and now bookkeeper at the association's shop, which sells scarves and baskets made on site. "If we ran out of money, no shopkeeper would let us buy something on credit. But now, we can buy anything we want from the store on credit."

Members say they recognize that their previous work was destroying the fragile eucalyptus forests around Addis Ababa. The trees, originally from Australia, were planted in the 1880s by Emperor Menelik II to provide fuel and building material for his new capital.

Etenesh Ayele, manager of the association branch in the Addis Ababa neighborhood of Shiromeda, says that she cried when she registered to become a member nearly two decades ago. She had been detained by local authorities for illegally chopping wood, and was afraid that she would be sent to the Somali war front by the then-military government of President Mengistu.

"We were considered troublemakers, and it is true that we cut down trees, but we had to make a living," says Ms. Ayele, who is now married, with two children. She was elected manager because she had completed high school. She says that women faced the prospect of sexual assault even 20 years ago.

"One day, when I was in eighth grade, I went into the forest with some friends," she recalls. "Guards ran after us, and they caught one of my friends, and they raped her. She got pregnant, and she dropped out of school."

In the shadow of the Entoto Hills, the association members ply their new trade at a dozen looms in a concrete-floored workshop in Shiromeda.

At one of the looms, Abebech Gurmu weaves a mint-colored scarf and recalls the financial distress that sent her into the forests in the early 1970s. A widow with two children, Mrs. Gurmu remarried and had four more children with a man who is now a guard for a local government council. "It was challenging to feed all those children, so I had to go to the forest," she says.

"Thank God we have quit that work, and now we are doing this," she adds, passing a shuttlecock of green thread through the warp of the loom. "But every day, young girls are going to the forests and are being beaten and raped."

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