Monday, October 28, 2013

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

Wednesday, October 16, 2013

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

Sunday, October 13, 2013

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

Thursday, October 03, 2013

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.

Tuesday, October 01, 2013

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

Ethiopian can not afford a prolonged war.

Ethiopian can not afford a prolonged war. Ethiopia as the poorest country in the world is dependent on aid. A prolonged war simply depletes ...