In partnership with local communities, SIL Ethiopia  focuses on developing skills and building capacity for sustainable language development. We provide expertise in the areas of:

Education & Literacy: Education and literacy are foundational to helping communities grow and develop themselves. Through SIL’s Mother Tongue Based Multilingual Education and Literacy programmes, we work to empower local language experts, teachers and government agencies to deliver excellent education and literacy programmes in their mother tongue.

Linguistics: From surveying languages and dialects to determining how languages might best be written, the work of the linguist is to lay the foundation for the development of a language in education, literacy and translation to begin with a stable foundation for the future development of a language.

Media & Technology: We involve ourselves in training and equipping local broadcasters and publishers. Translation principles, authoring, and editing skills are developed through workshops in order to support people’s access to information in the mother tongue.

Training & Capacity Building:  SIL Ethiopia is deeply committed to helping language communities build up the resources and expertise they require to develop and sustain their languages in the future. Each year, training and capacity building is our single biggest investment in Ethiopian language communities.

Translation: Your heart language is the language that communicates most deeply to you. It is your language of thought, prayer and love.
Through translation, SIL makes written and oral materials available to language communities in the language and format that serves them best. We train and equip communities to develop a body of literature in, for example, education, literacy, healthcare, magazines, fiction, local stories and culture, and radio programmes.