The African Exponent profiled Abebech Gobena, often called “Africa’s Mother Teresa,” who built Ethiopia’s oldest modern orphanage after decades of taking in children others rejected.
Her story runs through famine years, social stigma, and a stubborn insistence that abandoned children were a public obligation, not a private shame. Family rejection and personal sacrifice sit beside institutional founding in the telling.
Ethiopian charity histories are often flattened into NGO English. Gobena’s work is local, older than many donor cycles, and tied to how society treats girls, orphans, and disability.
Keeping the profile in the archive honors a civil-society thread that outlasts cabinets. Care infrastructure is politics too, especially when the Ethiopian government later claimed modernization while social safety nets frayed.
Sources: The African Exponent
