In Tigray, budget delays leave Tigray’s schools, hospitals and humanitarian operations in limbo
In Mekelle, the capital of Tigray, 44‑year‑old primary school teacher Yirgalem Weldu folds her notebooks and steels herself for another day in a classroom half‑filled with children. She has taught for over a decade and survived both peace and war, yet this year feels painfully familiar, a grim echo of the hardship she taught have ended following the Pretoria agreement.
For the past two months, she has not received her full salary. The uncertainty counting expenses, relying on relatives for small help reminds her of the difficult two years during the war, when daily life was defined by shortages and worry.
“We survive on whatever little support relatives can send,” she said. “At times it feels unsettlingly familiar, like we are slipping back into the same hardship we thought was behind us. My monthly salary was my only source of income now I don’t know how I will manage.”
A government running out of money
The Tigray Interim administration says it can no longer meet payroll for roughly 137,000 public servants after the Ethiopian Ministry of Finance failed to transfer billions of birr the region says was due under federal budget arrangements.
In a recent letter to the finance ministry, the interim administration said 5,570,604,789.4 Ethiopian birr funds previously earmarked for Tigray’s public payroll and operating expenses had not been released.
“The administration has reached a point where it cannot pay the monthly salaries of civil servants and cover other essential expenditures,” the letter said.
Teachers like Yirgalem are one thread in a tapestry of livelihoods now fraying under financial strain. At Ayder Referral Hospital, the largest medical facility in the region, nurses and doctors have continued showing up for work, treating patients despite the absence of regular pay.
“We came into health care to help people,” said a doctor at Ayder hospital who spoke with us in condition of anonymity “But now many of my colleagues spend more time worrying how to buy food than how to save lives.”
Warnings from the frontlines of public services
On March 9, the Tigray education bureau wrote to the Ethiopian Ministry of Education and other partners, warning that years of progress in rebuilding the education system after war “faces a serious risk of reversal” without stable funding. The letter singled out the federal government’s decision to withhold Tigray’s allocated budget subsidy since October 2025.
Earlier, on March 5, the region’s health bureau issued similar appeal of its own, saying the health care system faced an imminent operational collapse due to severe fuel shortages, a halt in pharmaceutical supplies, and mounting financial restrictions.
“Immediate intervention is required to prevent avoidable morbidity and mortality among millions of civilians,” the bureau said adding that Ambulance services and the distribution of medicines & medical supplies from central warehouses to health facilities has become impossible due to fuel shortages.
Tigray’s Trade and Export Agency has also announced that fuel supply to the Tigray region has been completely since January, warning of severe disruptions to public services, infrastructure projects, and healthcare delivery.
According to the bureau the monthly supply of fuel and diesel to Tigray had already sharply declined in recent years, dropping from between 12 and 15 million liters per month to just 850,000 liters since February 2025. However, it noted that the supply has now been entirely halted since January 2026.
For communities still recovering from the devastation of the two-year war, such warnings are far from abstract. Across Tigray, families are still rebuilding lives shattered by war, homes destroyed, farms abandoned and local economies left in ruins. Many schools and health facilities only resumed limited services after suffering damage, looting, or prolonged closure during the fighting.
In many areas, following the signing of the Pretoria agreement teachers and health workers were among the first to return to work in the fragile recovery period, often with minimal resources.
Any disruption to their salaries or the budgets that sustain basic services now threatens to undo fragile progress made since the guns fell silent, raising fears among residents that the slow and painful path toward recovery could stall once again.
In Yechila, near the border with Amhara, Tsege Gebrehiwot (name changed), a health extension worker, describes clinics running short of basic medical supplies and fuel for generators. “We are patching what we can,” she said, “but communities can’t be treated with hope.”
From war to recovery but funding halted
The financial crisis has its roots in the war that devastated Tigray from late 2020 to late 2022.
The war, which pitted federal forces and allied militias against fighters aligned with Tigray’s former regional leadership, devastated the region’s economic infrastructure and severely weakened the government’s ability to generate revenue.
By the time a peace agreement was signed in November 2022, much of Tigray’s formal economy had collapsed. Many businesses had closed, banking services were disrupted and tax-collecting institutions had been dismantled or rendered ineffective.
Much of the economic activity that resumed in the aftermath has taken place through informal and unregulated trade that operate largely outside the formal tax system. With its local revenue base diminished, the Tigray Interim administration has become heavily reliant on federal budget transfers from the Ethiopian Ministry of Finance to finance salaries and basic public services.
Officials in Mekelle say the federal government’s decision to withhold federal subsidies since late 2025 has choked the administration’s ability to run government functions.
Speaking at a mass gathering in Aksum during the Hidar Zion celebrations, Lieutenant General Tadesse Werede, President of Tigray’s Interim administration said Tigray is under serious strain as a federal budget freeze has left the administration unable to pay civil servants or maintain essential services.
Lives on hold
In schools across Tigray, classes continue, but teachers like Yirgalem say morale is low. Some have taken side jobs, teaching at private schools or giving house to house tutoring just to scrape by. Others have left the profession altogether.
“We teach because we love our profession and our children,” Yirgalem said, “But love can’t buy food and pay for rent.” Yirgalem said her colleague, had resorted to borrowing from relatives to pay rent.
“It’s embarrassing to ask,” she said, “but what choice do they have?” At Ayder Referral Hospital, Doctors, surgeons and nurses say they work longer hours with fewer resources.
“We are used to hardship, but when you struggle to retain staff or buy basic supplies, something fundamental is broken.” said a doctor at Ayder Hospital
Impact beyond paychecks
The financial squeeze has consequences beyond individual hardship. The effects of the funding shortfall extend far beyond unpaid salaries. In clinics and hospitals, across Tigray shortages of medical supplies and delays in staff salaries are taking a tangible toll on patients.
People with chronic illnesses who rely on regular monthly medications including treatments for diabetes, hypertension and other manageable conditions are now going without. Health workers report that even common, preventable illnesses are becoming harder to treat, as clinics struggle to maintain essential stocks.
“We have patients who used to come for monthly prescriptions, but now they go home empty handed,” said a pharmacist in Ayder hospital. “Every day without enough medicine supplies, more people suffer from conditions that could be easily prevented or managed.”
The cascading effects are particularly severe for vulnerable populations children, the elderly, and those recovering from the war who are now facing heightened risk of complications from illnesses that were previously under control.
In this way, the fiscal crisis is translating directly into human suffering, underlining that the disruption of government salaries is not just an economic problem but a public health emergency.
Aid agencies on alert
Humanitarian groups operating in Tigray say they are struggling to deliver assistance amid cash and fuel shortages, which have hampered operations across the region.
During a discussion held in Mekelle on March 4 with officials from the Tigray’s Interim administration about the situation of internally displaced people (IDPs), Lokuju Peter, head of the OCHA Tigray Sub-office, said aid organizations face severe operational difficulties due to limited cash availability in local banks. Stressing that the shortages have constrained their ability to provide essentials such as food, medicine, and shelter to IDPs.
Despite the signing of an agreement promising to return IDPs and refugees Tigray continues to host hundreds of thousands of internally displaced people, many of whom fled their homes during the 2020–2022 war and have yet to return due to delayed implementation of the agreement, insecurity and continued occupation of their homes.
According to the Tigray’s interim administration, nearly one million IDPs are still living in makeshift camps, unfinished school buildings, and damaged public facilities. Many families rely entirely on humanitarian support, and prolonged delays in assistance are leaving them exposed to food insecurity, poor sanitation, and limited access to healthcare.
Humanitarian actors warn that unless the financial and logistical challenges are addressed, vulnerable populations could face worsening situations, compounding the already fragile humanitarian situation in the IDP camps.
What’s at stake?
For families like Yirgalem, the crisis is not measured in budget figures or policy debates, but in daily calculations. How to pay rent, how to buy food, how to continue working without pay. What was once a stable government job which was seen as reliable sources of income, has become uncertain.
She said she still loves her job, her students and her community. But each week without pay is slowly eroding the sense of stability that returned after the war.
“I wake up thinking maybe today something will change,” she said. “But the months pass and nothing changes. We keep working, but we don’t know for how long.”
Across Tigray, the uncertainty is repeated in classrooms, hospitals and government offices, where civil servants continue to work despite not knowing when or if their salaries will come. Many say they feel caught between a sense of duty to serve the public and the growing pressure to provide for their own families.
The crisis is now testing not only the region’s finances but also the resilience of its public institutions. Teachers remaining in classrooms, nurses continuing to treat patients and civil servants keeping offices open have become a quiet but critical pillar of Tigray’s fragile recovery. If those institutions begin to falter, residents fear the consequences will be felt far beyond government offices in schools that cannot function, clinics that cannot treat patients and communities that lose basic services.
For many residents, the situation is worrying not only because of the immediate economic hardship, but because of what it could indicate.
After the peace agreement, many in Tigray hoped the worst was behind them that stability would slowly return, institutions would be rebuilt and livelihoods restored. But the current situation is now stirring a different kind of fear, that if public institutions weaken and basic services begin to fail, the fragile peace could come under strain.
Residents say functioning schools, hospitals and local administrations were among the first signs of normal life returning after the war. If those institutions begin to falter because they cannot pay staff or operate properly, some fear the region could slide back into instability.