Awra Amba is a community in the highlands of northwestern Ethiopia. Its significance does not come from a monument, a landscape, or an ancient tradition preserved unchanged. It comes from a set of questions its members have chosen to address through everyday life.

How should work be divided between women and men? What responsibilities does a community have toward children, older people, and those who cannot work? Can cooperation replace competition as the organizing principle of collective life? How can people live together without allowing religion, ethnicity, gender, or inherited social roles to determine their value?

Awra Amba began developing its answers in 1972, when Zumra Nuru and a small group of companions founded the community around principles that included equal rights for women, respect for children, care for people who are sick or unable to work, honesty, cooperation, and the belief that all human beings belong to one human family. These ideas remain central to the way the community describes itself today. (Awra Amba Community)

They are not presented only as declarations.

They enter the distribution of work, family life, education, collective decision-making, care, production, and the management of shared responsibilities. In Awra Amba, tasks are intended to follow ability rather than gender.

Children’s opinions and rights are treated seriously. People who are elderly, ill, or unable to work remain part of the community’s responsibility. (Awra Amba Community)

Awra Amba is sometimes described as a utopia. The word is attractive, but incomplete.

A community is not an abstract model. It is made of people, disagreements, limitations, changing circumstances, and daily work. Awra Amba’s value lies less in perfection than in persistence: the attempt to turn a set of ethical convictions into ordinary practices and to continue examining those practices over time.

Its experience cannot simply be copied and transferred elsewhere. It can, however, be studied, discussed, questioned, and shared. That is where Ayzoh! enters the story.

What It Means to Be an Ambassador

Ayzoh! serves as a global ambassador for Awra Amba. The expression does not mean speaking in place of the community. It means helping create the conditions in which the community can speak beyond the geographical, linguistic, and economic boundaries that often determine whose ideas become visible.

An ambassador listens before interpreting.

An ambassador builds connections without claiming ownership. The work involves photography and writing, but also translation, editing, design, publishing, digital tools, international relationships, and the patient organization required to move a story from one place to another without detaching it from its source.

This distinction is fundamental.

Awra Amba is not a subject discovered by Ayzoh!, and its members are not supporting characters in somebody else’s account of social change. The community possesses its own history, philosophy, internal knowledge, and ways of explaining itself.

Ayzoh!’s responsibility is to work alongside that knowledge: to give it editorial form, help it circulate, and protect the connection between what is published and the people whose lives and ideas it represents.

The community’s official platform follows the same principle. Its members describe their values, work culture, social organization, educational practices, cooperative life, approach to care, and relationship with the environment in their own terms.

The project was developed because visitors repeatedly argued that Awra Amba’s philosophy had educational value and should be recorded by community members themselves. (Awra Amba Community)

Publishing as a Shared Space

Over the course of this relationship, Ayzoh! has created a series of publications intended to introduce Awra Amba to audiences in Ethiopia and abroad.

The aim is not to produce promotional material in which every difficulty disappears. Nor is it to turn the community into an exotic exception: a distant village displayed as evidence that another world is possible.

Publishing can do something more useful.

It can create a shared space between people who may never meet. It can preserve words and images without freezing the community in time. It can allow readers to encounter a philosophy through the daily structures that sustain it: the weaving cooperative, the school, the library, the homes, the systems of care, the division of labor, and the meetings in which collective decisions are made.

A photograph records a gesture, a room, a face, or the relationship between bodies and work. A text can remain with an idea long enough to understand its origins and consequences. Design creates the rhythm through which those elements are encountered.

Together, these tools form a public archive.

The publication embedded below is part of that archive. Its texts bring together the voices of the Awra Amba Community, Zumra Nuru, and Claudio Maria Lerario. The photographs were made by Claudio Maria Lerario for Ayzoh!, with design and production by Ayzoh! Media Lab and logistical support from Amlaku Yaregal Teshome and Baregota Travel. (Awra Amba Community)

The book should be read as a meeting place rather than a definitive explanation. No publication can contain an entire community. It can open a door, establish a first vocabulary, and encourage the reader to continue looking.

The Role of AFAR

Projects of this scale depend on relationships. Research, fieldwork, photography, translation, design, publishing, digital development, and international distribution all require time and resources. They also require partners willing to support work whose value cannot be measured only through immediate commercial returns.

AFAR is one of the principal sponsors of Ayzoh!’s work with Awra Amba.

This support belongs to a broader relationship between AFAR and Ayzoh!, developed through projects in which objects, materials, work, travel, and community life are understood as parts of the same cultural landscape.

AFAR makes bags, but the company’s relationship with Ayzoh! has also created space for stories that extend beyond products. The Awra Amba project is one of them.

Supporting this work does not give AFAR ownership of the community’s story. It helps sustain the editorial infrastructure through which that story can travel: publications, digital platforms, visual research, and the connections that bring Awra Amba into conversations with readers, educators, researchers, travelers, and other communities.

This is the difference between sponsorship used as decoration and sponsorship understood as participation.

The first places a logo beside a good cause. The second accepts a responsibility: to make useful work possible while leaving its meaning in the hands of the people who produced it.

A Story That Continues

The publication below is not the conclusion of the relationship between Awra Amba and Ayzoh!.

It is one stage in an ongoing body of work. Future publications and stories will examine the community from different perspectives: work and cooperation, education, gender equality, care, environmental responsibility, housing, hospitality, and the systems through which values become daily practices.

They will also document the wider network that supports this work—including AFAR and the other partners who understand that cultural visibility should not be extracted from communities but built with them.

Awra Amba offers no simple formula for a better society. It offers something more demanding: the record of people who have spent decades attempting to align everyday life with the principles they believe in.

The task of an ambassador is to help that record travel without speaking over it. The task of a partner is to help make the journey possible. And the task of the reader begins here: to turn the page, remain attentive, and allow a community in the Ethiopian highlands to present itself in its own voice.