Message from the Executive Director of GSA

Good Samaritan Association /GSA/ is a local non-governmental organization established in 1996 and re-registered as Ethiopian resident charity by the FDRE Charities & Societies Agency with a registration number of 0169 on March 12st, 2016. GSA works with a vision of seeing Ethiopian women and marginalized sections of the population free from poverty and with acceptable standard health and education services. In order to realize this vision, GSA with its meager resources is thriving in ways that could be of help to pull out women from poverty.

GSA provides shelter based accommodation and health services in its Addis Ababa and Gonder (established in May 2019) shelters, and carries out reunification with families and reintegration activities to migrant returnees who returned to their country on voluntary basis or who had been deported. Some of them are trafficked on the way to Europe, South Africa and Arabic country; the others are detained due to illegibility of their residence in the respective countries.

GSA assists stranded migrants who are in distress and often destitute, to return back to their residential areas in a humane and dignified way. In addition to accommodation (food, clothing and other basic services), primary health care, counseling, therapeutic activities, psychiatric services for victims of human trafficking, referral linkages to hospitals, awareness creation about HIV/AIDS among the returnees and Voluntary Counseling and Testing (VCT) for HIV/AIDS are provided. Reunification and reintegration activities are carried out by conducting family tracing/home visits and reunifying the victims with their families, providing trainings for women/girls with Basic Business Skills and Life Skills, and by providing seed money for women and girls to start business of their choice in order to regain their social and economic status.

Using this opportunity, I would like to express my gratitude for the cooperation, financial and technical support that has been provided for GSA for the past several years and also call up on all development actors to work with GSA in a spirit of partnership.

Hirut Yebabe

A/ Directress