A Human View
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The Mursi live in the lower valley of the River Omo in southwestern Ethiopia and number around 10,000. This website was launched in 2007 in hopes of correcting the exoticised view of the Mursi found in guide books and travel articles. It was to do this by providing accurate and reliable information about Mursi history, culture and environment and about the pressures they and their neighbours are under today. In the past decade, however, the Mursi have faced a number of new challenges, and the website’s goa
The challenges stem in the first instance from the construction of the Gibe III dam (completed in 2016). The upstream dam has profoundly altered the flow of the River Omo, eliminating the annual flood on which the Mursi depended: the Omo flood provided water and nutrients for river-bank farming, which constituted the main source of staple grains. These problems are compounded by the Ethiopian government's plans to devote large parts of the lower Omo to commercial irrigation development . If these plans are
A Human View