The Arbore Women’s Association is an organization for mutual aid initiated by women of the Hor in southwestern Ethiopia. The organization has developed and continued its activities for 20 years. The Women’s Association brought the members financial profits through retails of commodities and cash crops in local markets. By participating in such activities, members learned how to earn profits in business. Financial profits that they earned themselves and opportunities for learning enabled them to gain self-confidence, and empowered them.

The conditions under which the Women’s Association was organized and continued were as follows: 1) Women felt discontented with their patriarchal tradition, which inhibited them from accessing the wealth brought by the highlanders and the money economy penetrated to the Hor. 2) Slackness of the state rule seems to have induced them to begin a new project. 3) They could combine the two networks, which had different features. The one is a bonding network based on women’s age system, and the other is a bridging network that a male mediator had. 4) Though the aims of the organizers and followers differed, the organizers incorporated the aim of the followers into their frame. Consequently, the Association has been keeping in touch with what the members desired. 5) The Association took a low profile strategy, and did not affiliate with external organizations such as NGOs and the government. Not owing any accountability and responsibility to external organizations, the Association could change its aims, plans and activities flexibly as the local situations changed.

This paper aims to explore the daily lives of the elderly living in the Aari community in southwestern Ethiopia by describing the social relationships that support their lives. Although the role of the elderly in household livelihood strategies has been mentioned, few studies have focused on their daily lives. The purpose of this study is to examine the daily interactions and mutual relationships between the elderly and other people who live in the same community, with a special focus on the livelihood activities and living arrangements of the elderly. The results reveal that the elders’ living arrangements, such as choices regarding where and with whom to live, are deeply related to social norms. However, there are also cases in which elders lived with or received support from those who were not the expected caretakers. Relationships between persons who required help and respondents were not always fixed in supporting a person’s livelihood activities or daily needs. People helped each other and met their daily needs in consideration of individual circumstances such as physical conditions, existence of relatives, and residence arrangement. The acts of shedin (seeing face to face) contributed greatly to the understanding of each other’s situations, and the elders were able to maintain their livelihood supported by responsive relationships.

Women play a fundamental role in Mozambique’s agricultural production. Nevertheless, they have rarely been the main focus of study in the research on agricultural production in the country. This article explores the matter by examining the case of Makua women in a village located in the interior of Nampula Province in northern Mozambique. Through a local-level analysis, this article presents a picture of women’s agricultural work in present-day Mozambique.