ABEBE Sintayehu –Lower Omo Natural Medicine Association –Addis Ababa University

The groups of people in Omo valley, are facing the worst declining of the biodiversity and of indigenous practices, where the higher threat being man-made. Irrigation schemes for large-scale agriculture by the government like Kuraz Sugar Development Project (KSDP), with its planned 175,000 hectares of large-scale farmland and extensive implementation strategies is among the cause. United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID) reported that it will have a profound impact on some of Ethiopia’s most important protected areas, including the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Heritage Site, and the riparian forest along the Omo River. Besides, forced resettlement implementations are raised as the reason for human rights abuse in the area; most of the resettlement place doesn’t bear fertile agriculture and pastures as it is degraded and covered by invasive plant species. Hence ethnobotanical study and documentation of medicinal and wild edible plants used currently or in the recent past by the people of lower Omo valley, became our main objective, planned to collect ethnobotanical data of traditional knowledge of medicinal and wild edible plants, to conduct taxonomic identification and deposit samples of the claimed medicinal and wild edible plants in the National Herbarium of Addis Ababa University, to identify the threats and opportunities of indigenous knowledge and ecological conservation.