FreshandGreenAcademy

As you drive down the streets of Addis Ababa, down the road from the goat market, there is a little cobblestone side street. Hidden behind the brightly colored walls is Fresh and Green Academy and its Mothers' Cooperative.

This is where Muday Mitiku's organization is bettering the lives of women and children. With an education in teaching and business and experience teaching at the Baha'i center, Muday opened a for-profit kindergarten in 2000. Unable to turn away the children who came to her from the streets, her non-denominational school began to lose money. That's when she partnered with Friends of Fresh and Green Academy to turn Fresh and Green Academy into what it is today, a school that provides both free education and three meals a day to children who normally would not have this experience.

Twenty years later, Muday is serving hundreds of students from kindergarten to eighth grade. She has also become a source of hope for their mothers with the Mothers' Cooperative. While some of the mothers work at the school in the kitchen or as security, many others work in the Cooperative, just down the street from the school.

These women have found a sense of empowerment as well as a way to feed their other children, some of whom may simply be too young to attend the school. It's here they produce their beautiful handmade products, including the scarves sold here as well as dresses, baskets, bags, shoes, and wallets. Some of their designs even made it onto Ethiopia's Next Top Model! It's a joyful place where the mothers work together chatting while they make their products as their young ones toddle about, under the watchful eye of the group.

Here at the Fresh and Green Mothers' Cooperative, the future is as bright as the Ethiopian sun.