I arrived home on Sunday from a week in Ethiopia. It was a pleasure to travel with Hugh Jackman and his wife Deborah Lee Furness, who are both World Vision Ambassadors.

Though it's summer in Ethiopia, Addis Ababa was quite cold and thankfully, raining. The short rains from January to February failed this year meaning great crop failure and hardship for the Ethiopian people.

Ethiopia is the home of coffee. Some 3,000 years ago in Yirgacheffe, coffee was first grown and consumed.

We travelled down to Kochere, the coffee producing area, some six hours south of Addis Ababa.

Hugh teamed up with a coffee farmer for half a day of hard work. Like many coffee farmers, this farmer was desperately poor, with four kids and another one on the way.

Ethiopian coffee farmers are receiving as little as 30 cents per kilogram of coffee. A kilogram is 75 cups, with each cup selling for $3.50 on the streets of Melbourne and Sydney. Someone else is making the money.

The impact of seeing how hard coffee farmers work without getting ahead saw us become emotionally committed to fair trade coffee, where a premium - and fair - price is paid to the coffee farmer.

World Vision is also working with this farmer to break the cycle of environmental damage in Ethiopia. He was chosen because he has an alternative source of energy available - his cow.

World Vision has provided the farmer with a methane digester. To use this, the farmer shovels manure into an igloo-shaped dome. The methane from the cow poo rises to the top, where it is then piped into the farmer's mud-walled hut, and used as fuel for cooking and for lighting.

In return, the farmer will provide his next calf back to the community. This cow - and a methane digester - will be provided to another farmer to create a sustainable cycle.

This has huge benefits for several reasons. Firstly, kids aren't breathing in smoke from the wood. We saw smoke billowing out of thatched roofs because they have no windows, making children cough and splutter, and leaving them with stinging eyes every time a meal is cooked.

Secondly, using gas instead of wood means farmers are not cutting down forest. Ethiopia has already lost 97 percent of its forest. If communities continue to cut down trees for firewood the destruction of Ethiopia's small remaining forest will not be too far away.

We arrived home, deeply moved by the courage of 80 million Ethiopians living in a country with serious land shortages, but really finding entrepreneurial solutions that are consistent with climate change outcomes.