US-based North Holdings to build cement factory in Ethiopia

December 28, 2013 Addis Ababa, Ethiopia - An Ethio-American company based in the US, North Holdings Investment Inc., is to build a new cement factory with an outlay of USD 800 million in the Amhara Regional State near Dejen town. North Holdings Investment Inc president, Temesgen M. Bitew, told The Reporter that his company is planning to build the factory in east Gojam, Dejen wereda, Menda

locality. Temesgen said with two production lines the factory will have the capacity to produce 8.4 million tons of cement The idea of building the cement factory was conceived in 2006. According to Temesgen, the feasibility study was completed. The company is to hire a Danish contractor called FLS that would build the factory, supply and install the machineries.

Ethiopia's 'Festival of a Thousand Stars' Celebrates Diversity In The Cradle Of Humanity [PHOTOS]

Ethiopia's 'Festival of a Thousand Stars' Celebrates Diversity In The Cradle Of Humanity [PHOTOS]

Ethiopia plans $250 Million expansion project at Bole International Airport (ADD)

Addis Ababa Bole International Airport Terminal 2 Ethiopia plans $250 Million expansion project at Bole International Airport (ADD) Source: Reporter The Ethiopian Airports Enterprise is going to undertake a major expansion project at the Addis Ababa Bole International Airport passengers' terminal at a cost of 250 million dollars. The newly-appointed CEO of the Ethiopian Airports Enterprise, Tewodros Dawit, told The Reporter that in line with the Ethiopian Airlines Vision 2025 development strategy the enterprise is undertaking various airport development projects. The Addis Ababa Bole International Airport Passengers' expansion project is one of them.

U.S. and UN Prepare Troops as Violence Grows in South Sudan

December 24, 2013 10:50 AM EST The U.S. and the United Nations are preparing to make more peacekeeping troops available for the growing conflict in South Sudan, as President Salva Kiir opened the door to talks with his deposed vice president.UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon asked the Security Council to add 5,500 soldiers to the peacekeeping mission of 7,000 already there. The U.S. is positioning troops in the Horn of Africa area to assist in any additional evacuations in South Sudan, Pentagon spokesman Colonel Steve Warren said yesterday.At an emergency meeting yesterday in New York, all 15 members of the UN Security Council showed a “positive reaction”

Ethiopia: EEPCo divided into Two Separate Entities

18 December 2013Category: The Ethiopian Electric Power Corporation (EEPCo) is divided into two separate entities, the Ethiopian Electric Power and Ethiopian Electric Service, Ethiopian Press Agency reported. The corporation's power supply and electricity delivery services will be divided between the two new companies.“Accordingly, the Ethiopian Electric Power (EEP) will be responsible for the power supply while EES will be responsible for delivering electricity services,”

Ethiopia brings home 140 000 migrants from Saudi

2013-12-18 14:40 Addis Ababa - Ethiopia has brought home close to 140 000 citizens from Saudi Arabia, the International Organisation for Migration said on Wednesday, a month after the oil-rich kingdom started deporting undocumented migrants.Thousands are continuing to arrive daily from Saudi Arabia, where a seven-month amnesty period for migrants expired in November and where Ethiopia says three of its nationals were killed in police clashes as the migrants prepared to leave. "Ethiopia and IOM are now looking at an additional 35 000 migrants expected to arrive from the cities of Riyadh, Jeddah and new arrivals from Medina," the IOM said in a statement.

Gilgel Gibe III Near Completion - to Go Operational in September

17 December 2013 , Source: Ethiopia Government One of the biggest power generating projects in Ethiopia, the Gilgel Gibe III, is expected to go fully operational on September 2014. H.E. Ato Alemayehu Tegenu, Minister of Water, Irrigation and Energy said that so far 80% of construction work has been completed. One of the power projects planned to be commissioned within the GTP period, the Gilgel Gibe III will add 1,870MW electric power to the national grid upon its completion in September. The Minister also said that concurrent projects like the Genale Dam and the Adama II wind farm are progressing satisfactorily. Projects such as the Gilgel Gibe III project are expected to go a long way in providing energy for the domestic market, the demand of which has been expanding rapidly owing to the extensive infrastructure construction and increasing base of industry. However, power projects currently under construction are also expected to service the regional energy market. Ethiopia has already begun exporting electricity to Djibouti and Sudan and has started installing power transmission lines to Kenya. The energy policy of Ethiopia pictures development of energy sources that would be an instrument in enhancing co-operation and regional integration. Ethiopia's ambitious plan of generating 10,000 MW of energy within the GTP period was crafted, accordingly, with plans to provide energy to neighbouring countries

Ethiopia: ECX to Launch Online Trade Operation

17 December 2013 , Source: Addis Fortune The Ethiopian Commodity Exchange (ECX) is making preparations to introduce online trading that enables market players to participate directly in the trade wherever they are. Online trading is envisaged to increase access to ECX and its service; build capacity of various stakeholder groups; and increase efficiency.The Ethiopian government is implementing the online trade project in collaboration with Investment Climate Facility for Africa (ICF) in order to enhance the activates of ECX by creating a modern commodity trading platform which will introduce online trading, and establishing Remote Trading Centers in key locations across Ethiopia. The ICF is providing 2.2 million dollars of the total of 3.8 million dollar project cost and the Ethiopian government through the ECX is matching the remaining balance.The ECX information technology team is currently working on software design, development and other related functionalities to run a testing online trade platform.

What the Somalis can Learn from Ethiopian Cultural Festival?

By: Mohamed H.Bahal Somalilandsun - The Cultural Festival that held in Jigijiga was an immaculate efforts undertaken by both people and Government. It was human expression depicting the unity of people of 70 tribes of different culture, different region, different languages, and different religions, but under one nation.In a period of twenty one years, Ethiopia has shown remarkable transformation from feudal system into a capitalistic nation that embarked on economic and social success in urban improvement, modern highway system, transformation of peasant agriculture into commercial farming, and attracts foreign investment in industrialization projects.The core of such successes came from people who believe in the shrine of nationhood and the unity of their country.While Ethiopia was undergoing such economic transformation, Somalia was heading towards disintegration into a governance system so alien to a united Somalia. The present system of federalism was crafted by unholy alliances of UN, IGAD, and Europeans who after many years of negotiations came to believe that the Somalis have more pledges to clanism than nationhood.The medical subscription given to them happened to be a bitter pill that can't be swallowed.Right on the eve of forming federal system in different regions, it is apparent that clan feuds among the people living in the same districts came to the surface. This shows that the system has so much loophole that it can never result cohesive national government. It is a hodgepodge system that promotes clanism, lacks economic vitality, puts the regions on the mercy of central government for financial handout. Majority of the regions that will embody federalism, their people have no market economy, because they are either pastoralist or subsistent farmers. Despite this fact, the formation of regional governments emulate that of central government headed by president, cabinet ministers, and parliament.The constitutional wrangle that pops up every now and then and the challenges erupting from regional leaders, like Farole, is a clear indication that the system is elusive and inapt that can't function unless the constitution is subjected to review for amendment.If federalism works in Ethiopia why it doesn't work in Somalia? Ethiopians are people who subjected to rule and law for more than hundred years. They are zealous and patriotic. If even there are particular groups who oppose the government their dedication to their country remains unchanged. In the case of Somalis, if the head of the state is not their clan, they have no loyalty to that government. There is an anecdote that says two men who attended Friday pray came out of the Masjid. One of them said that he was impressed by the message of the Imam.The second one asked " What is Imam's clan?" This shows how clanism is embedded in minds of Somalis and if the Imam is not your clan you turn deaf ear to Allah messages.Regional Dignitaries at Jigjiga festivalIn the absence of national government much have been done in regions and districts that development never reached in the past. All by the efforts of clans, cities grew by leap and bound, educational institutions were built and managed by private people, and water wells were dug in areas that never had accessibility of water with the incomes came from Somali Diaspora.The district authorities have no financial sources to run social services, like dispensaries, hospitals, cities sanitations, and security. The spirit of self-reliance is so apparent in Somaliland where good governance and democratic elections held through out the years despite some deficiencies. Dependable security apparatus that exists in Somaliland is worth of emulation.All in all, the major deterrent to national unity is the abhorrent belief jn every Somali unless his/her clan gets a lion's share in the political power, they withheld their recognition to that government.

Mohamed H.Bahal

http://somalilandsun.com/index.php/opinion/4489-what-the-somalis-can-learn-from-ethiopian-cultural-festival

New Horse Species that Lived 4.4 Million Years Ago Identified in Ethiopia

By James A. Foley

Dec 12, 2013 04:29 PM EST The 4.4 million year old fossil of a newfound horse species fills a missing piece of the evolutionary history of horses in the fossil record, according to the researchers who discovered the specimen at a site in Ethiopia. Renowned Ethiopian geologist Giday WoldeGabrie, whom the newfound horse is named after, is pictured. The 4.4 million year old fossil of a newfound horse species fills a missing piece of the evolutionary history of horses in the fossil record, according to the researchers who discovered the specimen at a site in Ethiopia.The horse was about the same size as a small zebra, the researchers determined from the fossils, which were found in 2001 in the Gona area of the country's Afar region. Research co-author Scott Simpson, a professor of anatomy at Case Western Reserve's School of Medicine, said the fossils not only shed light on the evolutionary history of the horse, but also reveals data about the age of other fossils at the dig site.SHARE THIS STORY   "This horse is one piece of a very complex puzzle that has many, many pieces," Simpson said. The fossil horse was among many animals the lived in the region at the same time as Ardipithecus ramidus, the ancient ancestors of humans."The fossil search team spreads out to survey for fossils in the now arid badlands of the Ethiopian desert," Simpson said. "Among the many fossils we found are the two ends of the foreleg bone-the canon-brilliant white and well preserved in the red-tinted earth."It took Simpson and his colleagues several years to unearth the horse skeleton, finding pieces of it over time. Based on observations of a full-length leg bone, the researchers determined that the ancient horse was an adept runner, a conclusion drawn by the length of the leg bone, which was much longer than horses dated to be 2 million years of more older. An analysis of its teeth revealed it relied heavily on eating grasses."Grasses are like sandpaper," Simpson said. "They wear the teeth down and leave a characteristic signature of pits and scratches on the teeth so we can reliably reconstruct their ancient diets."The three-toed grass eating horse is called Eurygnathohippus woldegabrieli - named for renowned Ethiopian geologist Giday WoldeGabriel, a principle scientists on the Middle Awash project in Ethiopia."Giday oversees the sedimentology, geochronology and volcanology and how the Middle Awash Valley in the Afar rift is changing shape," Simpson said. "And he leads by example, in terms of working hard. He's not afraid of a very long walk in the heat, carrying a 5-pound hammer to collect samples."Simpson and his colleagues report their finding on the new ancient horse in the Journal of Vertebrate Patheology.

D.C., Meet Your New Sister City: Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

Tomorrow, D.C. will add a new sister city to its roster: Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.Mayor Vince Gray and Addis Ababa's mayor, Diriba Kuma, will sign a Sister City Agreement tomorrow evening at the Wilson Building, a press release states. The Sister City Agreement will "facilitate cultural and educational exchanges for the benefit of residents in both cities."D.C.'s "vibrant Ethiopian community" inspired the agreement with Addis Ababa, which is the capital city of Ethiopia. Indeed, as the BBC reported, as many as 250,000 Ethiopians live in and around Washington. A part of Shaw is unofficially referred to as Little Ethiopia.This partnership, says a press release, will provide an opportunity for both cities to "exchange information and collaborate on mutual priorities in many areas, including public health, urban development, transportation and youth engagement."Addis Ababa is now the fourteenth sister city for D.C., the others include Bangkok, Thailand; Dakar, Senegal; Beijing, China; Brussels, Belgium; Athens, Greece; Paris, France; Pretoria, South Africa; Seoul, South Korea; Accra, Ghana; Sunderland, U.K.; Rome, Italy; Ankara, Turkey; and Brasília, Brazil.

http://dcist.com/2013/12/dc_has_a_new_sister_city_addis_abab.php

Ethiopia opens Africa's biggest windfarm

Ashegoda windfarm outside Mekelle in Tigray state cost €210m and builds on plan to create 'climate resilient' economy by 2025

 Monday 28 October 2013 09.07 EDTA boy stands near one of Ashegoda's 84 wind turbines. Photograph:

Reuters..David Smith, Africa correspondent

A windfarm billed as the biggest in sub-Saharan Africa has been opened by Ethiopia's prime minister, Hailemariam Desalegn, a potentially crucial step for the continent's renewable energy industry.The €210m (£179m) Ashegoda windfarm consists of 84 hi-tech turbines towering above an arid region where villagers herd cattle and ride donkey-drawn carts as they have for generations.The project, outside Mekelle in Tigray state, about 475 miles north of the capital, Addis Ababa, has a capacity of 120MW and will produce about 400m KWh a year. It was completed in phases over three and a half years and has produced 90m KWh for the national grid.The farm, inaugurated by Desalegn on Saturday, was supervised by German company Lahmeyer International and implemented by France's Vergnet with French funding. But the Ethiopian government insisted there were also local spin-offs."The project has provided very important experience-sharing for Ethiopia's national companies, who have been involved in the construction of civil works such as geotechnical investigations, roads, turbine foundations, sub-station erection and electro-mechanical erection works," it said.Media reports in 2011, however, noted that about 700 farmers had lost some or all their land to make way for the turbines. They were given financial compensation but some complained the money was too little.Ethiopia aims to become the region's leading producer of renewable energy. In the past two years it has built two smaller wind farms near Adama, south-east of Addis Ababa, with a capacity of 51MW each. It urgently needs new energy to feed economic growth that has averaged more than 10% over the past decade. Power cuts are still a regular occurrence in major cities and about half the country still has no access to mains electricity.The government plans to build a "climate resilient" economy by 2025(pdf), with adequate energy even if hydro power runs short because of reduced rainfall. A study by Chinese firm Hydrochina confirmed the high potential for wind power in the northern and southern parts of Ethiopia, particularly in the Somali region, with a huge estimated wind energy potential of 1.3m MW, according to Reuters.Ruth Mhlanga, a climate and energy campaigner for Greenpeace Africa, welcomed the Ashegoda windfarm development. "We need an increase in renewable energy access on the continent, so the fact Ethiopia is investing is really good," she said, adding a cautionary note that measures are needed to ensure the use of more local manufacturing and expertise.More than two-thirds of the population of sub-Saharan Africa is without electricity, and more than 85% of those living in rural areas lack access.In June, Barack Obama announced a $7bn (£4.33bn) initiative to double access, citing the potential to develop clean geothermal, hydro, wind and solar energy.

http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2013/oct/28/ethiopia-opens-africa-biggest-windfarm

ethiopia-land-of-dust-eucalyptus-and-hope

By MICHAEL SNYDER

October 11, 2013

I had already spent the last few hours watching Haftay hopscotch up the gravel path toward whatever it was that lay on the other side of the ridge. My guide, Mulualem Gebremedhin, and I had spent most of the day — the first of three we would spend hiking together in eastern Tigray on Ethiopia’s northern border — lagging several steps behind Haftay, a local villager accompanying us on the first leg of our trip.Haftay sang tunelessly as he lunged on long, sinewy legs and struck brisk, almost yogic poses — mostly, I think, for my benefit. He skipped up the path in the same flimsy plastic shoes that practically everyone wears in that part of Ethiopia (opaque, brightly colored jellies), and every so often cracked a joke at me in Tigrayan. I nodded dumbly; Haftay and Mr. Gebremedhin, who goes by the name Mulat, laughed.“I love this guy, he’s crazy,” Mulat said.The air was dry and dusty in early May, when the hard red soil waits for rain that may or may not come by June. We were already more than 8,000 feet above sea level and still climbing toward the escarpment. A work crew crushed large stones into small ones, presumably to pave the road winding up the hillside from the city of Adigrat in the valley below. Three men shoveled the stones into a large truck, heaving in rhythmic unison to pass the time. As the path wound higher, its edges became ragged until it faded to dust at the top of the ridge. Haftay had led us, quite literally, to the end of the road.THE NEW YORK TIMESWe stopped to rest while Haftay, with energy far exceeding his 50 years, continued to pose and joke and sing. I asked Mulat what Haftay — whose full name is Haftay Gidey Welihet — was singing.“Oh,” he said with a shrug, “he’s making it up. Something about Adigrat.”His timing was appropriate. We could see the town, although aside from the curve of a silver church dome — a burnished thumbnail of light in the valley behind us — it was hardly distinguishable from the ground. We’d come to an edge of Ethiopia. From Adigrat and the surrounding plateaus, the highlands drop southeast into the Danakil Depression, among the lowest points on earth. Just 22 miles north lies the long-embattled Eritrean border, and beyond that the Red Sea coast. Due west is the city of Aksum, with its 1,000-year-old granite monoliths and the chapel that, according to the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, houses the ark of the covenant.For most visitors, Aksum is the northern point in the so-called Historic Circuit, a rough circle inscribed on the ancient volcanic dome of the Ethiopian highlands. The circuit contains the stars of the country’s nascent tourism industry: the celebrated rock-hewn churches of Lalibela, the source of the Blue Nile at Lake Tana, the medieval castle complex at Gondar and the Unesco-protected Simien Mountains National Park, known as “The Roof of Africa.”Heuml, boy from the village of Enaf, who beat the author at jacks.MICHAEL PASCHAL SNYDERAlthough Adigrat and the ancient cluster of churches carved into the surrounding cliffs lie just a couple of hours from Aksum by minibus, few travelers along the Historic Circuit venture into eastern Tigray, preferring instead to hop among Aksum, Gondar and Lalibela on cheap internal flights.The churches here are not nearly as impressive as the monuments in those more popular towns, but their age, their relative isolation from tourism and the virtually untouched scenery that surrounds them lend a distinctive air of mystery, even sanctity.Before reaching any of the churches (Mulat and I did not enter one until the final day of our trek), we continued along the narrow track between fallow fields and makeshift traps for wild fowl, arriving at the Enaf community lodge by early afternoon. Perched high on a bluff nearly 10,000 feet above sea level, the lodge overlooked another valley to the south: a serpentine patchwork of fields in green and dun, confined by steep walls of red sandstone and plateaus that push out like coral reefs, crowned here and there by flat-topped stone houses and silvery stands of eucalyptus swaying like anemones under the shadows of clouds.The Enaf lodge was built in 2010 by Tesfa Tours (the name comes from Tourism in Ethiopia for Sustainable Future Alternatives), an organization founded as a nonprofit and now operating as the country’s most prominent community tourism company. Tesfa began its first projects in a cluster of villages outside Lalibela in 2003, expanding in 2010 to four villages in eastern Tigray.Women in white cotton robes walk past the 1,000-year-old granite monoliths at Aksum.MICHAEL PASCHAL SNYDERWith increasing international interest in Ethiopia as a destination, both the villages in Tigray and outside Lalibela have seen a steady rise in visitors. Mark Chapman, an Englishman who founded the company, has begun the process of expanding the Tigray program into five more villages, but for now Tesfa’s four Tigray lodges attract a modest 200 visitors annually (compared to the 1,000-plus visitors who pass through the Tesfa lodges outside Lalibela).So it’s no surprise that I was the only guest on that first night. When we arrived at Enaf, the local family tending to the lodge that day greeted us with cups of thick, bittersweet coffee (coffee, I learned the next day, is always served in threes, perhaps my favorite Ethiopian tradition). I spent the rest of the afternoon on the roof reading in near silence, interrupted only by Heuml, an 11-year-old boy from the village who beat me over and over again at a game of jacks played with pebbles. A donkey wandered into the courtyard of the lodge and Haftay continued to sing as I watched him descend to his home in the valley. Heuml, far quieter, seemed to speak in suspirations; when I asked his name, he used a long stick to scratch its letters into the dust.That night, Mulat and I dined on fresh injera and shiro, the sour fermented flatbread and simple bean stew that are the staples of the Ethiopian diet during the vegetarian Lenten period preceding the Orthodox Church’s Easter celebrations. The Tesfa lodges have neither electricity nor running water, so we enjoyed our home-cooked meal and reasonably cold bottles of beer by candlelight while listening to the wind cut across the cliffs. Walking to my room, I saw white flashes under a starless sky, lighting the thunderclouds that opened silently over the Red Sea to the north.“The white flag means it’s a bar,” Mulat told me, pointing to a small house surrounded by prickly pears and eucalyptus that looked more or less exactly like every other house we had passed. At 10 a.m., about two hours into our second day of hiking, we’d emerged onto the valley floor. The rocky soil atop the plateaus supports only grasses, grains and legumes, but even 100 feet below, bushes of prickly pears grow 8 feet high and stalks of aloe tower 12 feet or more over the stone-lined paths. On the more fertile valley floor, farmers plant their fields with garlic, onion, corn and cabbage.Inside the bar, a clutch of laborers hefted brown clay goblets overflowing with murky soam, a lightly fermented drink brewed in nearly every household in the region, either from barley, millet, sorghum, maize or wheat. On Sundays, whole villages gather to drink together, rotating from household to household over the course of weeks. In the troubled days of the Derg — the repressive military regime that governed Ethiopia and Eritrea, then a single nation, from 1974 to 1987 — most people in Tigray allied themselves with revolutionary associations like the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front. (The T.P.L.F would later become the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front, the party that still rules the country.)In villages like this one, revolutionaries would use these Sunday gatherings as covers for political meetings. If the military or police authorities interrupted, the villagers would explain simply: “Soa Sambat” — Sunday soam.In Tigray, contemporary turmoil and ancient tradition tend to nest like this, one inside the other. It was from its base in Tigray that the Aksumite Kingdom reached its fourth-century apogee, stretching across the Red Sea into southwestern Arabia. And it was from here that King Ezana first declared Christianity his state religion in 330 A.D., fully half a century before Rome. In 1868, the British Expedition to Abyssinia passed through Adigrat on the way toward Lake Tana. Thirty years later, Italy’s Abyssinian campaign met its final defeat in the Tigrayan town of Adwa, between Aksum and Adigrat, the same town where Meles Zenawi, the late prime minister and freedom fighter, was born in 1955.Tigray was also, until barely a decade ago, the site of a costly border war with Eritrea. Though violence mostly ended following a peace agreement in 2000, the road that I traveled between Aksum and Adigrat still marks the southern border of a State Department restricted travel zone, perhaps one explanation for the relative dearth of travelers here. You would never know that sleepy Adigrat, hunched quietly beneath its rampart cliffs, had so recently seen United Nations peacekeeping troops, but Mulat said he remembered well the sounds of bombs falling and the unsilent flashes in the night sky.Yet little if any of this modern tumult registers on the landscape, subsumed (though certainly not forgotten) in the sheer physical and temporal scale of the place. More recently, a tentative optimism has begun to emerge, the firm hope that development and prosperity may finally reach the region. Roads creeping slowly into the remote interior villages, like the one we followed to Enaf on our first day, are but one sign of change. Near the bar where we stopped on our second day, a substantial school building was nearing completion. Later that day, our second village guide pointed out sites for planned hydroelectric dams that will, at least in theory, supply these agricultural communities, long vulnerable to drought, with access to water throughout the year.On that second day, Mulat and I hiked for seven hours past children playing in fields and, disconcertingly, at the edges of cliffs. We walked past humble churches dwarfed by the mountainsides that abutted them and hiked up and over a plateau into another eucalyptus-scented valley, where we stopped for a lunch of roasted barley with a sweet and smoky sauce.Our host, Giday Gebre, chatted happily while she poured soam into plastic cups. After lunch, she set to the elaborate ceremony of preparing coffee: lighting incense, roasting the fresh beans over open coals, wafting the heavy brown aroma across the room, pounding the beans into powder with a high-sided mortar and pestle, brewing the grounds in the bulbous clay pot and pouring each of us three cups, right to the brim.Ms. Gebre told us about a visit she had made once to a church where the nuns told all the coffee drinkers that they were sinners and would go to hell. Ms. Gebre said she would give up coffee when she died.Later that afternoon, after another steep climb, Mulat and I arrived at the Erar lodge, built at the edge of a cliff that drops 1,300 feet straight down to the terraced fields below. When the rains come, he told me, these fields would turn green and the obscuring dusty haze would lift to reveal the distant peaks of the Simien Mountains spearing the southern horizon.Thus far, Mulat and I had yet to step inside a church. On our way to Erar we had walked by one of the cave chapels, tucked behind a nondescript white building, but the priest in possession of the only key was away at the time. The only other church nearby was the fourth-century Maryam Kiat in Kiat Village. We could reach it, Mulat told me, if we started walking before dawn.So we began our third day in darkness, the cliffs in gray scale beneath the moon. For a while, we walked in silence, eyes on the ground as we edged along narrow shelves of rock barely a meter wide. Eventually, the cliff chats began to call and the sky started to turn pale. As the sun rose, we descended through a steep gorge toward Kiat’s amphitheater of green terraces. Near the bottom, an old man dressed in white smiled at me and offered his hand in greeting, back of the hand toward me so I wouldn’t touch the rock dust coating his palms.“Almost there,” he said, and nodded toward the church.Past small plots green with garlic shoots and stalks of corn, an unassuming stone building leaned against the cliff face. Two men in shabby white shawls stood alongside the doorway. Just inside, a turbaned priest read in Ge’ez — Ethiopia’s liturgical language — from a leather-bound Bible. Beside him, a low opening led into the church’s dim, high-vaulted interior, carved from the rock more than 1,000 years ago.Inside, Mulat showed me the drums used in Ethiopian Masses He explained that their two faces represent the cheeks of Christ, and that the ropes of animal hide that pull those surfaces taut represent the flayed flesh of his back. Mulat lifted a cloth to reveal paintings of St. George and the Virgin Mary. A young priest stood in the door to watch us: we were the only ones there.It was Holy Thursday on the Ethiopian Orthodox calendar and a small group had gathered near the base of the steps that lead up to the church. Two old women — hair braided into rows over their scalps and flaring at the neck, small crosses tattooed in dark blue ink on their foreheads — repeatedly prostrated themselves, then stood, tossing their palms over their shoulders, an Abrahamic gesture of humility and faith.The sun had risen high enough to flood the valley with light, but Kiat remained dark and cool in the shadow of its cliff. Mulat and I began our walk back toward the gorge. The steep path carried a surprising flow of traffic: women climbing up with oversize bundles lashed to their backs and old men in white robes using walking sticks to negotiate the rocky terrain. They were climbing, like us, to reach the road.Really just another gravel path, albeit a wider and flatter one than we had started on with Haftay two days before, this road, in the year since it was built, had already spawned a cluster of shops selling coffee, tea, bread and snacks. Men, women and children waited with chickens and goats and produce they would take into the nearest towns on cramped blue-and-white buses.With our own bus ride back to Adigrat, Mulat and I inscribed another, far smaller circle on the landscape, another historic circuit that, who knows, might soon be absorbed into the larger one.“Almost there,” the man had told me as we came into Kiat. The same could be said for eastern Tigray.For now, though, most of the region’s many treasures remain, like Maryam Kiat, draped in shadow, hidden in the folds of the cliffs.

http://mobile.nytimes.com/travel/2013/10/13/travel/ethiopia-land-of-dust-eucalyptus-and-hope.html?client=ms-android-hms-tmobile-us&hl=en&v=141400000&tbm=nws&ei=ECxfUp2SDtS4qQHnkoHgDg&start=10&sa=N&biw=320&bih=508&dpr=1.5&#modal-sharetools

Ethiopian utopian village goes against the grain

In the middle of Ethiopia, a country with strict religious and cultural mores, a village where women plough and men sew has become a model for development and poverty reduction.For decades Western governments and NGOs have been trying to find ways to break the aid dependency that has dominated much of post-colonial Africa. So when Awra Amba, a small village of just under 500 inhabitants in northern Ethiopia, found a way, on its own, to reduce poverty and increase development, they sat up and paid attention

"I saw a special on Awra Amba on the BBC and how different their tradition is," said Fikir Abraha, a 22-year-old research student who came from the US state of Maryland to see this extraordinary place. Her parents are Ethiopian and she is interested in how culture can help or hinder development."If you have a culture that is willing to change and that is willing to adapt to new things like the Awra Amba community is, I feel like that would bring about better development," she said.And indeed, Awra Amba does things differently, which has been both a curse and a blessing. In a very traditional country with strict religious and cultural mores, it goes against the grain.Zumra Nuru is the founder and a co-chair of Awra AmbaFounded in 1972 by an uneducated Ethiopian farmer, Zumra Nuru, as a better alternative to mainstream Ethiopian society, Awra Amba is a community where gender equality is crucial, where organized religion is banished, and where work and development are of the upmost importance.The elderly and the young enjoy rights that aren't accorded outside the village. The village is run by way of committees where 50-percent-plus-one vote majorities decide all bylaws and decisions concerning the community.Down a dirt track from the paved road, about a nine-hour drive northwest of the capital, Addis Ababa, lies Awra Amba - a clutch of wattle and daub houses and shared buildings, including weaving and textile workshops, a grinding mill, a tourist hostel, a school and a library. Most of the village's labor force works communally, so money is ploughed back into the village and the profits are split evenly.This way of doing things has helped lift the village out of poverty and now, some 40 years after its founding, family income, literacy levels, life expectancy, gender equality and economic growth are far exceeding the national average.Consultants from the Ethiopian government, the World Bank and development NGOs, such as Oxfam, frequently visit the village in a bid to discover what Awra Amba is doing right so as to replicate it elsewhere.Attacks from neighborsBut "rethinking the wheel" has brought Awra Amba its fair share of trouble. Since day one, the project has been met with hostility and attacks from very conservative Christian and Muslim neighboring communities who have considered Awra Amba pagan or heretical, according to 65-year-old Nuru."They threw a grenade right into the center of the village once, but luckily, no one was hurt," he said. "They have tried shooting members of our village. They have sabotaged our harvest on occasion."In 1989, the neighboring villages denounced Awra Amba as insurgents to the communist Derg regime in power, leading to the community's exile to the south of Ethiopia for four years. When the Derg fell, the community returned in 1993 to find most of their land confiscated by the neighboring communities. They now only have 18 hectares (44 acres), a disaster for an agricultural community.The village offers training to locals, such as this spinning workshopBut the crisis was also a door of opportunity. It forced community dwellers to pursue other revenue-making activities and to diversify. So they got into weaving, milling, trade, tourism, textiles - a diversification of labor that is now a key to its development success."Their life principle is to work and their work is the manifestation of their faith or belief, so they don't have a church or mosque or anything," says Ashenafi Alemu, a researcher in the sociology department at Ethiopia's University of Gondar. "They always work and that helped them a lot to get out of poverty, and now we observe that they are really improving."Through word of mouth and significant interest from the media, news of Awra Amba is spreading fast. Perhaps too fast.While Nuru aims to export his idea beyond the village, Awra Amba does not have the capacity to supervise such an expansion. New communities, inspired by the Awra Amba model, have already sprouted up elsewhere in Ethiopia, but it is a spontaneous, erratic growth - unmanaged by Nuru and his community."We need to see these villages," he says, "but I can't go check them out because we don't have a car and it is not feasible to travel there by bus."Inter-village bridge-buildingStill, the village is at a crucial crossroad. Because it can't acquire more than the 18 hectares it currently has, the community must find ways to expand off-site and manage that expansion. Also, it must continue and complete its process of acceptance by the very conservative culture of the villages that surround it.Children from the area go to school together at this kindergartenTo this end, the various services Awra Amba offers help build bridges. It has several mills to which locals bring their grain to be ground for a small fee. It has constructed a junior high and high school where children from the entire area are educated together. The village sees the key to moving forward as a combination of revenue-generation with inter-village bridge-building through trade and services.On top of that, every month, the University of Gondar brings together a growing number of people from Awra Amba and the surrounding Christian and Muslim communities. Around the same table, they talk it all out."Now there is a sort of understanding and improvement regarding the image of the Awra Amba community," said Ashenafi Alemu, the researcher.With government, NGOs and individuals borrowing from its model to create development projects elsewhere, one could say that Awra Amba is already a success. However, as an ideological project, the village risks losing control of the spread of its core ideas. The question now is: will Awra Amba remain a fascinating yet small exception to the norm, or can it manage to export its ideas and bring about much-needed change to Ethiopia and beyond?

DW.DE

http://www.dw.de/ethiopian-utopian-village-goes-against-the-grain/a-17152619

People in Lalibela – another life in Ethiopia

12 OCTOBER 2013

By Masumi Koizumi

Flying to Lalibela from Bole International Airport in Addis Ababa with my friend, I was going to observe that Addis Ababa is not the only representation of Ethiopia in terms of the lifestyle of the indigenous people in particular.Touching down at Lalibela airport, I felt like we were left alone at the runway – no aircraft were in sight waiting to take off. All the artificial dins seemed to be absorbed by a strip of greenery and a beautiful mountain ridge in the region. Near the exit of the airport, young locals were shouting at tourists to draw their attention to the accommodation they provided. Walking down the hill with bundles of straw in light clothes, was a small kid. I wondered if he traveled all the way up from the mountain with no bathroom stops or even occasional breaks in his lengthy and exhausting trip. Waiting for us with a beam in the midst of the bumpy road were two young children who then uttered, “Welcome to Lalibela!’’ in excitement.Lalibela is one of the popular tourist destinations in Ethiopia with local people and foreign travelers weaving the geography of Lalibela together. It was not hard to imagine that numerous people in Lalibela are making a living through the tourism business as our local guide, Abie, told us that prices here are comparably high because of its position as a tourist attraction. In fact, we had no choice but to call off a visit to a UNESCO World Heritage site, the eleven churches, which were hewn from the living monolithic rock during the reign of King Lalibela (13th century) due to the dearth of money on hand. Just in one hour, I noticed two things about the people of Lalibela that struck me as a surprise: fluency in English and hard-working nature. After some ten minutes on foot from Lalibela Hotel, we reached a busy district around our accommodation which was full with souvenir stores and cafeteria. When looking around the grocery stands, two young boys, who appeared to be 10, approached us and walked side by side to have a chat with us in English. The chiseled looking boys spoke astonishingly fluent English for their age, pointed at the sight where men and women of a wide range of ages working under the evening sunlight were constructing what they described as “a priest office’’, using primitive instruments such as a stick with a cylinder-shaped stone at the end in order to level the ground. They were not the only boys who came up to us. Indeed, everyone who walked past us struck up conversation when we replied hello back to them. People, mostly boys rambling on the streets, would start off the talk usually by guessing our nationality (I was shocked that a number of people had succeeded in guessing my nationality, Japanese!) or how we had been up to in Lalibela. They would carry on the conversation on their school life, the eleven churches, and so forth. Even children aged three to five knew how to greet people in English and to attract foreign visitors with their innocent charms. Lalibela, as a holy sightseeing site bringing in a great deal of travelers and pilgrims from overseas, must have enabled locals to communicate well with them. Walking further down the road which overlooked a village full of mud-thatched houses with a pointed woven-hay hat, we found a woman looking to be in her late forties growling in a muted tone. She was carrying piles of sticks of wood on her back which had pinned her down in the spot. We helped her stand up on her own feet by lifting the bundle of sticks, though they were unexpectedly hefty for us. A passer-by ran up to us and pushed up what was on her back; the sticks made a pop and crackle sound as she squeezed out her last voice to get up. I wondered how she had made her way down the hill with the heavy load on her back. The people in Lalibela living in a primitive fashion were astonishingly hard-working regardless of their sex or age. On our way to Asheten Mariam Monastery, a 13th century rock-hewn monastery located at an altitude of 3150 meters, the indigenous people with their hands occupied with the construction materials rushed their way up whilst I was struggling not to slip over the slippery hill. An old man carrying a long, thick piece of wood around his neck struck an exquisite balance and readily descended from the mountain. Our guide, Abie, encouraged us that we would be able to walk as fast as the locals after climbing up and down the same route three times. I landed off with the front of my feet as advised. However, my feet started to feel sore after five steps. I certainly needed more time to learn the knack without hurting myself. There was no motorized transportation but mules that could take us to the destination through a rugged and angular path. I was looking at the people overtaking us and fading in the distance. Although Lalibela is a tranquil countryside monastery which preserves a traditional way of living, it offered us a surprisingly good internet service. I received a phone call from my friend near Asheten Mariam Monastery. There was also a wifi connection at the hotel where we stayed. It further set apart from the lifestyle of the people in Lalibela. It was a beautiful rural town which thrives on tourism business and which still retains the traditional lifestyle in which people spend much time and effort on a daily chore

Source...ethiopianreporter.com

Ethiopia: IBM Plan to Enhance Ethiopia's Trade and Streamline Governance

3 October 2013 , Source: CIO IBM experts have recommended strategies for strengthening Ethiopia's livestock industry -- the primary source of income for the majority of citizens -- and making government more efficient.Making the recommendations was a twelve - person IBM team hailing from 8 countries that spent 30 days in Ethiopia working with three government ministries as part of an IBM Corporate Service Corps engagement. This initiative sends IBM's top talent to provide pro bono problem solving services to non-governmental, government and small business groups in the developing world on issues that intersect business, technology and society

Ethiopia: Govt Signs Landmark Deal with Geothermal Plant

3 October 2013 , Source: USAID New York

1000MW Facility will be Largest Geothermal Plant in AfricaPrime Minister H.E. Hailemariam Desalegn and Deputy Prime Minister H.E. Dr. Michael Debretsion were both in attendance today to announce the first independent power project in Ethiopia's history. The 1000MW Corbetti geothermal plant will be built in two 500MW stages and is expected to be the largest geothermal facility in of Africa, at a cost estimated at $4 billion over an 8-10 year construction period. Reykjavik Geothermal, a US-Icelandic private developer, will build and operate the power plant, located at Corbetti Caldera, considered a top geothermal resource by the team of Icelandic and Ethiopian geoscientists that have investigated the region.The Corbetti project is part of the Power Africa Initiative announced by President Obama this past summer which seeks to add more than 10,000 megawatts of cleaner, more efficient electricity in six priority countries in sub-Saharan Africa. A key thrust of the Power Africa strategy is to accelerate the development of the vast and renewable geothermal potential in the Rift Valley which extends through both Ethiopia and Kenya. Corbetti was identified early on by USAID as a priority transaction that could showcase the innovative Power Africa model: combining private sector expertise and investment with U.S. government tools to mitigate risk and build local government expertise. USAID technical advice at the transaction level has been instrumental in moving the Corbetti project towards agreement. At the same time, the USAID-sponsored Geothermal Risk Mitigation Facility (GRMF), funded by KfW and managed by the African Union, will provide the Corbetti project with grant funding to defray the costs and risk of exploratory drilling. The Corbetti agreement is also a significant signal to the private sector and international investors that the Ethiopian energy sector is looking at new generation models beyond the dominant role that the public sector has played until now. This is also a critical objective of Power Africa: compelling African governments to institute appropriate reforms to create the right enabling environment for private sector activities.Reykjavik expects the first 10MW of power to be on-line in 2015, with an additional 100MW in 2016, and the balance of the first phase 500MW on-line in 2018. Power Africa is a Presidential Initiative to double electricity access in sub-Saharan Africa. Although more than 69 percent of the population of sub-Saharan Africa is without electricity, the region has significant potential to develop clean, geothermal, hydro, wind, and solar energy. Launched with six partner countries, Power Africa employs a transaction-centered approach that provides governments, the private sector, and donors with incentives to collaborate on near-term results and systemic reforms that facilitate future investment. Ultimately, Power Africa will leverage government and private sector commitments to add more than 10,000 megawatts of cleaner, more efficient electricity generation capacity and enable new electricity access for up to 20 million households. Power Africa will also work closely with the African Development Bank and other donors and investors to enhance the tools and resources available to the energy sector.

Ethiopia: First Phase Construction of Tendaho Sugar Plant 80% Complete

on 01 October 2013

CommentsConstruction on the first phase of the Tendaho Sugar plant located in Afar regional state is being finalized. Over 80 percent of the construction work has already been completed, Ethiopian News Agency reported.Abreham Berhe, the project's office manager told Ethiopian News Agency on Monday that the project includes construction of a reservoir which has a capacity to hold 1.86 billion cubic meter water and 14,000 hectares of land has be covered with sugarcane plantation, the Manager said.  Works have been carried out to develop 23,000 of the total 25,000 hectares land planned to be developed in the first phase of the project.Construction of the plant has created jobs for 35,000 people, according to Abreham.In its first phase, the plant is planned to produce 13,000 quintals of sugar per day. When the plant goes fully operational, it will have a capacity to produce 600,000 ton of sugar per year.

Source: Ethiopian News Agency

Ethiopia nile dam 30% completed

Ethiopia's government has completed around 30 per cent of the Renaissance Dam on the River Nile. Sources in the government say that the administrative and technical work at the site of the dam is almost ready for the second phase to begin with the construction of the main body of the structure.It is estimated that the hydro-electric project will produce approximately 6,000 megawatts of electricity when it is commissioned in 2016. Ethiopia is expected to earn around €2 million a day by exporting electricity to neighbouring countries.On the political front, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Addis Ababa has called on both Egypt and Sudan to activate the tripartite committee to implement the recommendations made by international experts to ensure that the construction of the dam will not damage the countries downstream."We accepted the experts' report as it stands," said Dina Mufti, a spokesman for the Ethiopian government. "Egypt should accept it as well and move forward."-

Addis Ababa Light Rail's Civil Work to Be Completed This Year

23 September 2013 , By Nesru Jemal, Source: ERTA

Completion of civil works for the first light rail system in Ethiopia is expected this year, according to the Chinese Railway Engineering Corporation, the contractor for the project.Construction of the light rail transit system, which will cover a total of 34 kilometers with two major lines, began in January 2012. It was expected to be completed within three years. The timetable was put in question when the project faced a number of difficulties, particularly associated with issues of right of way.The Ethiopian Railway Corporation says securing rights of way has made progress, and 43% of the overall project has now been completed.The ERC hopes to start the electromechanical element of the project this year once the civil engineering work is finished.The budget for the light rail transit system is set at US$475 million, of which 85% percent is provided by loans secured from the Chinese Exim Bank.Source: Ministry of Foreign Affairs

Hydro-Powering East Africa

23 September 2013 , By Nesru Jemal, Source: ERTA

President of Djibouti, Ismail Omar Guelleh, stated "This (Djibouti-Ethiopia Power Interconnection Project) is to reduce significantly the cost of the energy bill that weighs as much on the competitiveness of our economy as on the living standards of our households."The development objective of the project was to improve electricity access in Ethiopia and Djibouti at affordable prices through regional cooperation in power trade.The AfDB has been an active partner in implementing the connection by providing USD 95 million for the project. The 283-km Ethiopia-Djibouti transmission line was officially inaugurated in October 2011.The 230-kV line, enabling Djibouti to import up to 60 MW of electricity, is estimated to be earning Ethiopia at least USD 1.5 million per month, and has eased Djibouti's reliance on fossil-fuel power plants and generators.The project also provided short-term employment for about 1,190 people in Ethiopia and 460 in Djibouti. Also, it generated opportunities for jobs and transfer of skills to sub-contractors in Djibouti and Ethiopia. In Djibouti, import of the low-cost hydropower would help to suppress the costly thermal generation resulting in cost savings through reduced oil import.The interconnection also enables the two systems to support each other during emergencies. ADF 11 has invested a loan of USD 42.89 million for Ethiopia and loan/grant of USD 54.79 million to co-finance the project with the Ethiopian Electric Power Corporation (EEPCo) and the Ministry of Economy, Finance and Planning Electricité de Djibouti (EdD).Source: AfDB

Turkish industrial zone planned in Ethiopia

Turkey is preparing to create a Turkish industrial

zone in Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Ababa, as part of its African policy which started in 2005 and has been showing marked development of its business assets.Speaking at the opening of the African Strategies Sectoral Evaluation Meeting in Ankara on Monday, Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu said that the Ethiopian prime minister had proposed the assignment of some land to establish a Turkish industrial zone in Addis Ababa, and that Turkey hopes to implement this plan.“They [the Ethiopians] know that we don’t go to Ethiopia with a passing fancy and calculations of temporary profits. We also know that they don’t only offer a business opportunity but that they opened their hearts,” Davutoğlu said, stressing that between Turkey and Ethiopia there are not only economic relations but there are also thriving social relations as well.Commenting on the new diplomatic steps, Davutoğlu stated that Turkey has come a long way in the last ten years. Davutoğlu explained that a Turkish firm invested $50 million in Ethiopia in 2005 while there are now 341 Turkish companies with a total investment of $3 billion in the country.The Turkish foreign minister also mentioned the results of the Turkish government’s public diplomacy in Africa. “The amount of Turkish aid to the African continent, particularly to Somalia, has reached $750 million. If we hadn’t spent billions dollars of in public diplomacy and activity, we wouldn’t have the positive image and perception that we got from our humanitarian aid in Somalia,” Davutoğlu said, reiterating that Turkey is reaping the rewards of its humanitarian foreign policy.Saying that Turkish companies can take advantage of numerous opportunities in fields such as construction and trade, the foreign minister also drew attention to important attempts in the business sector by the African Union, which ranks as one of the most active international organizations in the world.In the African continent, there are 30 offices of the Turkish Cooperation and Development Agency(TİKA) and 25 trade offices of the Undersecretariat for Foreign Trade, aiming to strengthen economic and bilateral relations between the two countries. The number of Turkish ambassadors in Africa has risen to 34 from 12 in 2005.Turkey has a Free Trade Agreement (FTA) with four African countries, as well as agreements to prevent double taxation and support mutual investments, and Turkey has also established a business council with 17 African countries. Turkish Airlines (THY) has flights to 35 African destinations to improve links between Turkey and African countries as part of the African policy.

Source: Today’s Zaman

Norway partners with World Bank to support Ethiopia in scaling up climate-smart land management

Source: World BankADDIS ABABA, August 30, 2013 - Ethiopia, a country highly vulnerable to extreme weather events, land degradation, deforestation and food insecurity, is stepping up its efforts to fight climate change, promote sustainable rural development and build resilience. Today, two agreements were signed between the Government of Norway and the World Bank to provide significant financing for sustainable land management, climate-smart agriculture and forest protection in the country.The first agreement injects an additional US$50 million grant funds from the Government of Norway through a trust fund to co-finance the Sustainable Land Management Program (SLMP II) aimed at reducing land degradation and increasing land productivity of smallholder farmers.In the second agreement, Norway provides US$13 million through the World Bank’s BioCarbon Fund (BioCF) to support Ethiopia’s Climate Resilient Green Economy (CRGE) Facility and to promote climate-smart agriculture, forest protection and land rehabilitation at the landscape level. Norway’s contribution complements initial funding of US$5 million from the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development (DFID), and ongoing financing from the Forest Carbon Partnership Facility (FCPF)."Norway is pleased to collaborate with the World Bank in supporting Ethiopia's ambitious efforts to fight land degradation, deforestation and climate change while promoting sustainable development in the land use sector. The two complementary programs have the potential to protect the natural resource endowment and to promote climate-smart land use in order to adapt and mitigate climate change and increase food security and resilience in a vast area of the country," said Tove Stub, Charge d`affaires a.i., Royal Norwegian Embassy in Addis Ababa.Under SLMP II, the Government of Ethiopia is building on the remarkable progress achieved during implementation of the program’s first phase in reducing land degradation and increasing sustainable land and water productivity. Under SLMP I, which started in 2008, over 190,000 hectares of degraded communal and individual farmlands have been rehabilitated and agricultural productivity has improved in areas that were hitherto found to be less productive. SLMP II, a blended IDA credit (US$50 million) and GEF grant (US$14 million) with co-financing from Norway (US$50 million), scales up earlier achievements.The ongoing process to reduce deforestation and forest degradation (REDD+), a key pillar of Ethiopia’s fight against climate change, will be significantly strengthened with support from the BioCarbon Fund. This program will enable Ethiopia to fully finance its ongoing REDD+ readiness process and to develop a REDD+ pilot program at a Regional State level. It will also provide advisory services to the CRGE Facility, in particular to enhance access to climate finance for REDD+ and other land-based activities."These funds will allow Ethiopia to become ready for REDD+ and will provide for an ambitious landscape-level program to address the causes of deforestation in the most forested region of our country, while also promoting social benefits to local communities,” said H. E. Sileshi Getahun, State Minister, Ethiopian Ministry of Agriculture.The BioCF’s new initiative provides an important boost to the activities of the CRGE Facility, which was established by the Government of Ethiopia to spearhead national efforts to reach carbon neutrality by 2025."The World Bank expects that these two initiatives, including others not mentioned here, will contribute significantly to Ethiopia's efforts to deal with three of the most daunting challenges of our times: land degradation, deforestation and climate change. It is also a good opportunity for the Bank to share its global expertise on climate finance to provide advisory support to the CRGE Facility. These two initiatives strengthen the Bank's partnership for Ethiopia's sustainable development,” said Guang Zhe Chen, World Bank Country Director for Ethiopia.

New diaspora 40/60 housing registration to be conducted by embassies in October 2013

by Selamawit BEWKET ABEBE, Addisfortune.net* New Strategy Penned For Diaspora Housing Registration The first round of Diaspora registration saw many challenges caused by the lack of adequate guidelinesThe Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MoFA) and the Ministry of Urban Development & Construction (MoUDC), together with the Commercial Bank of Ethiopia (CBE), are finalising a new strategy following the controversies surrounding the registration of Ethiopian Diasporas in the 40/60 housing scheme, last week.The registration for the 40/60 housing scheme for the Diaspora community, ran from August 12 to August 23, 2013. It was marked by numerous challenges, caused by a lack of guidelines to identify qualified Diaspora for the registration.The strategy is expected to help determine who qualifies as a member of the Diaspora, remove double registration issues and identify those who are avoiding paying in foreign currency. In addition, it will enable Diaspora members to register in embassies and consulates, according to an official from the Diaspora Affairs desk at the MoFA.This new registration period for the Diaspora community is expected to start on October 11, 2013.So far, during the registration that ended this Friday, August 23, 2013, Diaspora members could either register in person, or send a legal representative to the CBE.“We have been trying to stop this, so as to make the registration consistent,” claimed Mohamed Woleye, an expert at the Diaspora Affairs desk of the MoFA.The new registration process will allow the Diaspora to register directly with their respective embassies.Prior to that, however, the new strategic document will be presented to ambassadors and other concerned bodies so that they can fill any gaps based on observations at their embassies, according to Mohamed. During the past registration process, the number of Diaspora members seeking to prepare the documents giving legal representation in Ethiopia overwhelmed the embassies and consulates.Those who have already registered through their legal representatives will have the right to either remain registered, or to cancel the first registration and newly-reregister in their respective embassies.“Though I have not yet received the exact data from the branches, registration was being undertaken as expected,” said Ephrem Mekria, communications director at the CBE’s head office. In the first three days of the registration period only, 3,000 Diaspora members were registered.Registrants from the Diaspora community are expected to save 145 dollars for a one-bedroom unit, 223 dollars for a two-bedroom and 344 dollars for a three-bedroom, respectively, each month. Those who can pay in full, on the other hand, are expected to pay 8,700 dollars, 13,380 dollars and 20,640 dollars for one, two and three bedrooms, respectively.Out of the 50,000 houses to be built in the 40/60 housing scheme, 10,000 are planned to be completed and transferred during the 2014/15 fiscal year. The construction of the houses in the sites selected for this project has only begun in two of the eight sites: Sengatera, in Lideta District, and Crown, in Bole District.

Ethiopia Signs the Second Half of 1.6 Billion Dollar Mobile Network Deal

August 22, 2013

Ethiopia'sEthio Telecom signed an $800 million deal with China's ZTE on Sunday (August 18) to expand mobile phone infrastructure and introduce a high-speed 4G broadband network in Addis Ababa and a 3G service throughout the rest of the country. The agreement with ZTE is half of the $1.6 billion project; the agreement with Huawei Technologies Co Ltd, the world's second largest telecom equipment maker, was signed last month. Both firms will provide low interest loans to implement the projects. Ato Andualem Admassie, acting chief executive officer of Ethio Telecom, said the agreement would enable Ethiopia to double subscribers to more than 50 million. This, he said, was vital to attain Ethio Telecom'sobjective to increase access and coverage across the country as well as upgrade existing network to new technology. Ethio Telecom is the only mobile operator in the country, but the government has given approval for private companies to provide value-added services. According to Reuters, the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology has received applications from more than 200 firms to provide such services; and South Africa'sMTN Group, Africa's largest mobile phone company, has already been granted.

Source....Global Data Point

Solar cooking???

On sunny days people passing by on Gløshaugen can spot Asfafaw Haileselassie next to his test rig on wheels. The equipment with the noticeable mirrored disk is a large solar concentration system with heat storage. With the help from the sun, Haileselassie generate steam at the receiver of the concentrating system and use this to transport heat from the receiver to the heat storage and then storage store it, like a battery. Exactly this technique has not been used before.- When this storage unit reaches 250 degrees, it will keep the us

http://www.ntnu.edu/web/ept/news-and-activities/-/asset_publisher/5iMu/content/something%E2%80%99s-cooking-outside-the-thermal-energy-building

Gebrselassie to enter Ethiopian politics

The two-time Olympic gold medallist and multiple world champion in the 10,000 metres says he wants to "reach more people" through politics, a topic most Ethiopians avoid in a restrictive society with few civil liberties.Used to breaking barriers having set over two dozen world records from 5000 metres to the marathon, the 40-year-old Gebrselassie said on Monday that he will run for a seat in parliament as an independent candidate in 2015.And although the next presidential election in September is probably too soon, Gebrselassie also is considering a future run for that office

Source
:http:/theaustralian.com.au

CEO: Record profit for Ethiopian Air despite 787 woes

ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia (AP) - The chief executive of Ethiopian Airlines says that his company has pocketed a record profit despite the temporary grounding of its Boeing 787 Dreamliner planes.

http://m.usatoday.com/article/news/2483635

Obama annouces a new power initiative for Africa

Obama said the U.S. government would spend at least $7 billion toward the goal of doubling access to electric power, bolstered by investments from private sector partners. Obama, painting a portrait of a rising Africa, argued that the U.S. should get more involved in its success -- for its own benefit. "My own nation will benefit enormously if you reach your full potential," he said

Read More.. http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/06/30/obama-to-announce-new-power-initiative-for-africa/

U.S. Officials Highlight Opportunity for Ethiopia's Future

27 June 2013  Source: State Department Washington Ethiopia is "an important partner" of the United States in the East Africa region and one of the fastest-growing economies in the world, a senior State Department official told a U.S. House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Subcommittee June 20.Donald Yamamoto, the acting assistant secretary of state for African affairs and a former U.S. ambassador to Ethiopia, told the lawmakers that the Ethiopian economy has been growing by double-digit percentages over the last five years. <!-- more --> However, he cautioned that Ethiopia-U.S. business relationships have been limited because of investment climate challenges.He also noted that Ethiopians in the United States are returning to their homeland to expand political and economic ties between the two countries and to provide humanitarian support. Ethiopia is a major recipient of U.S. aid, primarily for development in the health, agriculture and education sectors, and Ethiopia is one of the U.S. Peace Corps' largest host countries.In development, Ethiopia "has emerged as a leader on the push to end preventable maternal and child deaths," Yamamoto said. As part of its leadership, in 2012 Ethiopia co-hosted the global Child Survival Call to Action with India, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the United Nations children's agency UNICEF. The meeting was held in Washington.Yamamoto stressed that the United States wants to increase cooperation with Ethiopia in key areas, including security, counterterrorism and bilateral trade and investment. He said that as chair of the African Union, Ethiopia "will play a key role in determining AU priorities on peace and security and development and governance."On August 12-13, 2013, the United States will partner with Ethiopia to host the 2013 U.S.-Sub-Saharan Africa Trade and Economic Cooperation Forum in Addis Ababa. Also known as the AGOA Forum, this year's theme is "Sustainable Transformation through Trade and Technology." The event will bring together senior officials from the United States and AGOA-eligible African countries to discuss a range of trade and investment-related issues. The U.S. African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) offers incentives for African countries to continue their efforts to open their economies and build free markets.Yamamoto said the United States will "encourage Ethiopia to work toward greater market liberalization, including progress toward World Trade Organization accession." He added that recent successes on the economic front include a May trade mission to Ethiopia sponsored by the state of Illinois and a November 2012 agricultural investment conference in Ethiopia sponsored by the Corporate Council on Africa.Yamamoto further noted that the United States is working with a major U.S. company to secure multimillion-dollar deals aimed at improving Ethiopia's infrastructure.Following Yamamoto, USAID Assistant Administrator Earl Gast testified that to fuel development in health, education and growth, Ethiopia wants to boost its power production capacity fivefold by 2015. The United States in early June signed an agreement with Ethiopia's Ministry of Water and Energy that will serve as the basis for the government to negotiate project deals with private-sector developers.Yamamoto also said that U.S. companies have signed letters of intent to make investments in support of Ethiopia's country plan under the Group of Eight's New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition. The alliance, introduced in May 2012, aims to form partnerships between investors and local companies in Africa to accelerate progress in mobilizing private capital, taking innovations to scale and managing risk.Gast said Ethiopia is one of the United States' key African partners in countering the effects of climate change and promoting food security. "USAID's programs in Ethiopia have seen remarkable results," he said.But, Yamamoto said, Ethiopia wants to eventually eliminate the need for donor assistance.

The Renaissance Dam V. Fallouts of the Nile Water Agreement, 1959

In fact, all disputes of the Nile Basin nations over the past 50 years resulted from this unfortunate agreement. This article is aimed at discussing this issue and shedding light on the positions the 1959 Nile Water Agreement attempted to impose on the other Nile Basin nations and how this has recoiled against Egypt and the Sudan in the form of decisions by the source nations to build their projects, including the Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, in absolute disregard and defiance of this agreement.Ethiopia knew that the Sudan and Egypt had decided to conduct negotiations on distribution of the Nile water since their first meeting in 1954 and sent messages to both countries in June 1955 demanding participation in the negotiations.

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The new Diaspora Policy and engagement of Ethiopians in the Diaspora

(Mof)The Government has long been aware of the importance of the knowledge, experience, skills, and financial resources of Ethiopians in the Diaspora as a vital contribution to national growth. Indeed, the potential role of the Ethiopian Diaspora in development efforts has been given unprecedented recognition by the government in recent years. And to activate maximum use of Diaspora resources the Government has been aware that the relationship must be institutionalized. It has therefore established formal mechanisms to encourage and facilitate Diaspora engagement, setting up specific departments within Ministry of Foreign Affairs, mandated to assist and cooperate with the Diaspora.

Ethiopian Graduates 26 MPL Pilots

Friday, 07 June 2013 -  Ethiopian Airlines Aviation Academy is pleased to announce that it has graduated 26 pilots trained with Multi-Crew Pilot License (MPL), which is a first in Africa, on June 6, 2013.Leading the way past, present and future, Ethiopian Aviation Academy, has been the first in Africa and among the few in the world to start the ICAO certified training in July 2011.The MPL training was kicked off in partnership with Flight Path International. The MPL training is a response to the ever changing and technology driven aviation industry. Ethiopian Aviation Academy is now one of the few in the world and the only one in Africa providing these training.Today, in addition to the 26 MPL pilots, Ethiopian also graduated 68 cabin crew trainees on the same day."Ethiopian investment in the Aviation Academy has always been the back bone of the success of Ethiopian Airlines creating the necessary skilled and dedicated aviation personnel. Today's graduation of the first 26 MPL cadets in the continent is part of the continued milestones of Ethiopian fueling the fast, profitable and sustainable growth of Vision 2025," said Tewolde Gebremariam, CEO of Ethiopian.Ethiopian Aviation Academy is well on its way to become one of the seven profit centers of Ethiopian as outlined in its Vision 2025 to become the leading aviation training center in Africa. Historically, the academy has opened a third of its capacity to trainees from other African countries contributing to the growth of the aviation industry in the continent.

Sudan reiterates support of Ethiopian dam plans

June 9, 2013 (KHARTOUM) – Sudan’s information minister and government spokesperson Ahmed Bilal Osman insisted today that Sudan would benefit from the controversial Ethiopian renaissance dam and stressed that Ethiopia has engaged Sudan in all operations associated with the dam building.Sudanese Information Minister Ahmed Bilal Osman speaks during a joint press conference with the chief of Sudan’s intelligence service . At a press conference in Khartoum, Osman announced that Sudan’s minister of water resources and electricity Osama Abdalla Mohamed al-Hassan will travel for Cairo early next week.He said that the ten-member committee which includes representatives from Sudan, Ethiopia and Egypt as well as international experts has dispelled all concerns raised about the dam, adding that Sudan is ready to send experts and technicians to help in the construction of the dam.The Sudanese official also downplayed fears of a possible collapse of the dam which could lead to flooding Sudan and said that construction technology has improved and added that the Italian company which is building the dam would not risk its reputation, noting that Khartoum is keen on strengthening relations with Cairo and Addis Ababa.Osman mentioned that several dams such as Al-Rusairs dam in East Sudan and the Aswan dam in Egypt which accommodates 162 billion cubic meters of water have survived for tens of years and did not crumble.He said that Sudan sacrificed 22 villages and a million palm trees and an entire civilization in the far north in order to allow the Egyptians build the Aswan dam in 1964.Osman demanded those whom he said do not comprehend the sanctity of the relations between Egypt and Sudan to stop "muddling".The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, formerly known as the Millennium Dam is being constructed on the Blue Nile 40km from the Sudanese border.Egypt and Sudan had previously argued that the construction of the dam would negatively affect their water shares and insisted the project should be blocked, calling on international donors against funding it.However Sudanese president Omer Hassan Al-Bashir announced his support to the project in March 2012, saying his government understands the mutual benefits the project could offer Ethiopia and Sudan.Khartoum’s stance have aggravated Egypt in recent weeks with many political figures blasting Sudan’s "treachery".Egypt believes its “historic rights” to the Nile are guaranteed by two treaties from 1929 and 1959 which allow it 87 percent of the Nile’s flow and give it veto power over upstream projects.But a new deal was signed in 2010 by other Nile Basin countries, including Ethiopia, allowing them to work on river projects without Cairo’s prior agreement.The first phase of construction of the $4.2 billion dam is expected to be complete in three years, with a capacity of 700 megawatts.Once complete, the dam will have a capacity of 6,000 megawatts. (Sudantribune)

Nyota Minerals discovered New Gold Anomaly in Western Ethiopia

Thursday, 06 June 2013 - Energy and Mining Nyota Minerals, the dual listed on the AIM Market of the London Stock Exchange (AIM:NYO.L) and the Australian Stock Exchange gold exploration and development company, has reported the discovery of a new gold anomaly at the Boka-West target in the company's fully Northern Block exploration license areas in Western Ethiopia.The company reported that, the gold-in-soil anomaly extended for 2.0KM in length and was up to 500 metres (m) wide. The company said that it was also coincidental with anomalies for copper (Cu), zinc (Zn) and bismuth (Bi).Richard Chase, Chief Executive Officer of the company said, “The delineation of a large target at Boka-West is testament to the success of our systematic exploration program in the Northern Blocks. The continued exploration  of our greenfield exploration assets is an important facet of Nyota’s development strategy, complementing our advanced preproduction project at Tulu Kapi.""Subject to the first renewal of the exploration licenses and the requisite funding, we anticipate a first phase of drilling at Boka-West during the 2013-2014 field work season.” he added.

Source: Nyota Minerals 

Ethiopia: Nile Basin Framework Set

22 April 2013 , Source: Addis Fortune The House of People's Representatives discussed the draft proclamation that would ratify the Nile Basin Cooperation Framework Agreement, on Thursday, April 2013.The House then referred the draft proclamation to the Natural Resource and Environmental Protection Standing Committee of the Parliament for further assessment.The agreement was signed by Ethiopia, Kenya,Uganda, Rwand aand Tanzaniain May 2010 and by Burundi a year later. The signing of the agreement was kept open for an additional year in order to give time to the Sudan and Egypt. According to the agreement, ratification by six countries will allow an equitable utilization of Nile River between all the riparian states. The 1959 agreement between the Sudan and Egypt allocated the entire average annual flow of the Nile to be shared between the Sudan and Egypt at 18.5 and 55.5 billion cubic meters respectively, but ignored the rights to water of the remaining eight Nile countries.Ethiopia contributes 80pc of the total flow of the Nile, but according to the 1959 agreement, is entitled to none of its resources.The agreement enables the establishment of the Nile Basin Commission (NBC) through which member States will act jointly to manage and develop the resources of the famed river.

Ethiopia trying to restore lost heritage

Mar 31st, 2013 // AddisAddis Ababa, Ethiopia  - Ethiopia is battling to bring back more than three thousand artifacts scattered around the globe, a substantial part of its historic heritage.According to Wolde Darsema from the Heritage Authority, thousands of historic items, ranging from the monumental to the miniscule, are to be found in museums or in private hands in France, Israel, Vatican, Germany, Italy, the UK and elsewhere.The Authority said that in addition to the more obvious and better known items in museums it is also working to bring back artifacts in the hands of individuals through diplomatic channels: it is also trying to purchase articles or persuade people to present them as a gift.Efforts so far have managed to recover the Axum Obelisk, the gold Lalibela cross and a handful of other historic items.Wolde Darsema said that the task of recovering many of these items was particularly difficult as many are in private hands, and museums remain reluctant to part with items however obtained.The Ministry of Foreign Affairs is cooperating with the Heritage Management Authority, and the MoFA Spokesperson, Ambassador Dina, says the Ministry is working to obtain the return of various artifacts through bilateral channels.(MoFA)

Ethiopia gets $1 billion fuel from Sudan

Ethiopia receiving massive oil imports from Sudan.ADDIS ABABA: It comes via Djibouti and has the Ethiopian government optimistic that energy needs in the country are to be met. According to some here in Addis Ababa, the move by Sudan to export some one million metric tons of petrol to their East African neighbor is part of efforts to help reduce the need to move fast on building the massive Renaissance Dam project that has left much of the Nile Basin tense.“I think this is a positive step on both sides,” an Ethiopian government consultant told Bikyanews.com. “It shows that we as a region are willing to compromise and meet goals without causing unduly harm. Considering the dam project and the anger from Khartoum and Cairo over it, helping give us energy needs is positive.”Officials reported the amount of fuel that has been imported equals $1.12 billion over the past 6 months.And it isn’t expected to curtail in the near future, the consultant said. He argued that over the next 6 months, Ethiopia expects to receive a similar amount of fuel to help meet the growing economy of the East African country.The fuel imported during first half of the Ethiopian fiscal year was a rise of 21 percent in comparison to the same period last year.According to EPSE’s spokesperson, Alemayehu Tsegaye, the imported 1,091,823 metric tonnes of fuel surpasses the initial planned target of 1,093, 073 metric tonnes.Ethiopia imports up to 85 percent of its annual oil consumption from neighboring Sudan, largely due to its geographic proximity. This recent report shows that Sudan is making a push to increase the total in order to dissuade the country from continuing to move fast on its dam project, which Khartoum and Cairo say threatens their water availability.The Horn of Africa nation saves at least $10 million in transit related costs per year by using Sudanese oil sources rather than importing from markets further afield, such as the Middle East.During the stated period of the budget year, Ethiopia has also imported over 125,000 metric tons of coal and spent over $20 million on maintaining sustainable energy supplies for manufacturing and industry.Over 50 percent of Ethiopia’s imports are to meet the nation’s fuel demand.BN

ews HortiFlora Expo Ethiopia 2013 To The Next Level

HortiFlora Expo Ethiopia 2013 To The Next Level - PerishableNby HortiFlora Expo Wednesday, March 27, 2013 at 3:17PM EDTAddis Ababa - The 5th edition of HortiFlora Expo Ethiopia closed its doors last Friday and concluded satisfactory results for most of its exhibitors.

President Obama Meets with First-Ever Ethiopian Crowned Miss Israel

A few weeks ago, more than a quarter of all Israeli TV viewers watched the judges announce the new Miss Israel of 2013.Titi is her name, short for Yityish Aynaw. She was the only black finalist in this year’s beauty pageant and she has become Israel’s first black beauty queen. She’s tall, commanding, and outspoken.“It’s time that someone from my community, someone with my skin color, who is Israeli just like everyone else, represent the country,” Aynaw said.What captivated the judges was not only her beauty, but also her life story.Born in a small town, Titi was orphaned by the time she was about 10. She moved to Israel to live with her grandparents, who had already left Ethiopia for a new life here.Titi said as an Ethiopian Jew, she grew up with stories about the Land of milk and honey, but her new life in Israel wasn’t all milk and honey.

President Obama Meets with First-Ever Ethiopian Crowned Miss Israel | PRI's The World

Samsung Set to Open Assembly

18 March 2013 ,
Source: Government of Ethiopia

Samsung, today (March 18), announced that it has concluded an agreement with the Ethiopian government to establish a laptop and printer assembly plant in the country over the next few months. The announcement was made during the Fourth International Samsung Conference in Cape Town, South Africa. Samsung Electronics East Africa's Chief Operating Officer, Robert Ngeru said "We have finalized the agreement with officials from the Metal and Engineering Corporation and officials from other government bodies". According to Ngeru, Samsung has also finalized agreements to assemble television sets and refrigerators in the country. Additionally, by partnering with MultiChoice Ethiopia, Samsung plans to offer consumers purchasing Samsung Televisions an inbuilt decoder. Accordingly, Samsung customers will get a free decoder with every purchased television set, thereby enabling them to enjoy the benefits of digital TV immediately

Ethiopia Considering Additional Dry Ports

Tuesday, 19 March 2013 A study commissioned by the Maritime Affairs Authority (MAA) has recommended the construction of 12 additional dry ports. The number of ports recommended may vary when the final study is completed in two weeks and submitted to the Ministry of Transport.Construction of additional dry port is in line with the Ethiopian  government’s target to build 35 ports by the end of the Growth & Transformation Plan (GTP) period in 2014/15, according to Ahmed Tussa, chief executive officer of the Ethiopian Shipping & Logistics Services Enterprise (ESLSE).Construction of the new dry ports could begin as early as next year, if the MoT approves the proposal, according to Ahmed, who spoke to journalists during a press conference on port expansion activities on Tuesday, March 12, 2013.Four of the 12 suggested dry ports will be located in Amhara region,  Oromia, Somalia, Gambella and Southern regions.Ethiopia started developing dry ports following a 2007 study by the then Ministry of Transport & Communication (MoTC), which suggested that the country could save foreign currency from seaport expenses at Djibouti, by building an in-land port within the country. Such ports handle the customs inspections, documentation of cargo and packaging for import and export. The saving, according to the study, could be seven to eight dollars for every container that’s transported through Djibouti.

Source: Fortune