The earth shook below Zahab Mohammad’s feet while rocks began rolling down the foothills of the volcanic Mount Dofan, where she lived in Ethiopia’s northern Afar Region.
After a 5.8-magnitude earthquake hit Afar last December, a series of tremors continued to shake Mohammad’s village of Mugasa. After two weeks she left along with 400 other families. “The ground split near my house and that was the moment we decided to leave,” says Mohammad (22), who was three months pregnant at the time. “We think it’s a punishment from god; that god is angry with us.”
Boru Tedecho (36), a village leader from Mugasa, remembers a tremor when he was a child but nothing on the scale of the recent earthquake. He says members of his village cannot return to Mount Dofan as the volcano is emitting noxious gas.
“The smell that’s coming out of the volcano is very toxic and nothing is growing there,” says Tedecho. “We will not have grazing land for our cattle ... animals are struggling to survive in that area. Even the birds cannot fly over.”
Some 55,000 people were displaced by more than a dozen earthquakes and tremors which began in September 2024 in Afar, according to local authorities, while 20,000 were displaced in neighbouring Oromia, where Tedecho and Mohammad now live in a camp.
Dr Ameha Atnafu Muluneh, a geology researcher at the University of Bremen, says the earthquakes and tremors were caused by movement beneath the Earth’s crust caused by magma intrusion which also reactivated other faults in the surrounding region, intensifying the scale of the earthquakes.
“Nobody knows what will happen in the future, so nobody can assure the people that it’s safe to go back home, because this can happen anytime,” says Muluneh. “We know that this region is quite active.”
Mount Dofan is the location of one of two dozen volcanoes which lie across the Afar region, a meeting point for three tectonic plates and one of the world’s most active rift systems.
Eventually, in millions of years, scientists say that these three plates will pull away from each other, cleaving East Africa off from the rest of the African continent while forming a new ocean basin.
While this process slowly takes place, cracks deep in the Earth’s crust in Afar can occur through which magma rises up, either erupting through volcanoes or cooling beneath the crust’s surface. These plate movements mostly occur at a pace of a few millimetres annually, occasionally causing tremors.
Muluneh says one way to manage therisk from earthquakes in Afar is to have a dense network of seismic and GPS stations which would closely monitor the movement of magma beneath the surface. If properly implemented and resourced, such a monitoring system could provide communities with up to several days’ warning if an eruption is likely to happen. “But this is logistically quite difficult for Ethiopia,” says Muluneh.
December’s earthquake struck as the Afar region was already struggling with drought, flooding, civil war and resource-based conflict, and pushed many communities into aid dependency.
At Da-Ido camp, which houses 3,500 families in Awash-Fentale, Hadjera Mohammad Aleeyu (40), says she never needed aid until the earthquake forced her to leave her livestock and home in Adi Haboor.
Barnabas Asura, the area manager for the Norwegian Refugee Council, says the NGO has introduced a cash support programme which provides households with certain vulnerabilities with about €90 for a three-month period. So far, 580 households displaced by the earthquake have received the payment, but Asura says the Norwegian refugee council has identified 4,735 households in extreme need of cash assistance based on criteria including malnourishment of children, number of elders and household size.
A camp outside Awash town called Adis Ra’ey houses 4,500 displaced families. The camp has poor water and sanitation services, with about one toilet for every 230 households.
Meanwhile, water shortages mean residents have reduced the number of times they wash themselves, clothes and utensils to conserve water for drinking in Afar, one of the world’s hottest regions.
Aid workers from the Norwegian Refugee Council, say they are concerned about the risk of cholera spreading across the camp, particularly when it floods during the rainy season.
Three of the camps in Afar and Oromia received funding from the Rapid Response Mechanism (RRM), a €12 million partnership funded by the EU humanitarian aid office and Irish Aid designed to quickly respond to humanitarian crises in Ethiopia.
RRM funding for the three camps is due to end this month, but the mass displacement created by the earthquakes has become a protracted problem, with affected communities living in poor conditions in camps but unwilling to return home without assurances regarding their safety.
The Ethiopian parliament introduced a new tax on all workers in March to fill the gap created by the cuts imposed by US president Donald Trump on USAid, Ethiopia’s lead partner for development and humanitarian effort.
The cuts have sent a shock through Ethiopia’s aid sector, which received more than €1 billion in US funding in 2023, including financial backing for an estimated 5,000 health workers.
“Everyone is reviewing their capacity for 2025,” says Olivier Beucher who leads the EU humanitarian aid office in Ethiopia. Beucher says the US aid cuts go far beyond any reductions imposed following the global financial crisis in 2008. “I’ve never seen this before.”
