Ethiopia Archives - Humanosphere

Ethiopia

If a journalist is arrested in Ethiopia and jailed for 18 years, does he make a sound? |

Eskinder Nega was arrested after raising questions about arrests under Ethiopia’s anti-terrorism legislation in September 2011. Now he serves an 18 year sentence thanks to the very law he questioned.

“The Ethiopian government is treating calls for peaceful protest as a terrorist act and is outlawing the legitimate activity of journalists and opposition members,” said Amnesty International‘s Ethiopia researcher Claire Beston at the time of sentencing.

Rights groups raised attention to the use of the law to circumvent speech and dissent. Nearly a year later, Nega remains in jail. His attempt to appeal the ruling two weeks ago failed. The judge upheld the sentencing decision, saying it was correct.

“The truth will set us free,” said Nega to the public following the ruling. “We want the Ethiopian public to know that the truth will reveal itself, it’s only a matter of time.”

A year and a half of truth later and Nega is still in jail. He is not the lone victim of Ethiopia’s crackdown of opposition figures and abuse of its terrorism law. Ethiopia is one of the worst places in the world to be a journalist. 79 journalists fled Ethiopia between 2001 and 2011, the most of any country in the world. The press freedom index categorized Ethiopia among the most difficult countries for press. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Justice, Politics, Bill Easterly, Committee to Protect Journalists, CPJ, Eskinder Nega, Ethiopia, Patrick Leahy, Vermont

April 5, 2013 | 12:15 PM | By Tom Murphy |

How to get from watching a famine to actually doing something about it |

: Digging for drinking water in a dry riverbed; DfID

Experts knew it was coming. In March of 2011 the Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS Net) warned that low rains in the Horn of the Africa would make parts food insecure through June.

“A poor season could result in a major crisis. Therefore, these areas require especially close monitoring over the coming months,” warned the report.

Despite the warnings of a potential crisis, little action was taken. When the rains did not come and the drought led to famine in parts of Somalia by July it was too late for some people. Food and fuel prices spiked. An estimated 11.5 million people needed immediate humanitarian assistance, said the UN, and tens of thousands died.

In just a span of 90 days, an estimated 29,000 Somali children died.

“The greatest tragedy is that the world saw this disaster coming but did not prevent it. Across Ethiopia, Kenya, Djibouti and Somalia this crisis has played out very differently, but common to all of them was a slow response to early warnings,” said former UN Emergency Relief Coordinator Jan Egeland last year. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Basics, Ethiopia, famine

March 26, 2013 | 11:20 AM | By Tom Murphy |

African agriculture threatened by funding drought & bad trade policies |

: Morgana Wingard

African countries are making promising agricultural gains, but the progress remains in the balance due to a $4.4 billion funding shortfall, warns a new report by the ONE Campaign. That is in addition to $11 billion in agriculture funding pledged by G8 nations that has yet to be disbursed.

The ONE report cites 2013 as an important year for agriculture in Africa because it is a time when international and domestic funding agreements come to an end.

“African leaders have the opportunity to deliver on their goals of lifting millions from extreme poverty and hunger and preventing chronic malnutrition by meeting these commitments,” write the report’s authors.

Edward Carr of the University of South Carolina was generally supportive of the report, but noted that the problem of agriculture may be one that is about markets rather than production.

“There is no discussion on the massive rate of loss between farm gate and market in this region,” said Carr. “The report raises further questions. Is there really a production shortfall or a marketable crop shortfall?” Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Basics, Africa, agriculture, AU, Ethiopia, food, Nutrition, ONE

January 19, 2012 | 10:58 AM | By Tom Paulson |

Land grab: Ethiopia boots 70,000; Brits displace 20,000 in Uganda |

Flickr, IRIN

Displacement action enforced by soldiers

Aid organizations are trying to call attention to a little-noticed but massive plague spreading across Africa that is destroying communities, throwing many deeper into poverty and perhaps causing the deaths of many thousands.

Not AIDS or malaria.

It’s an outbreak of property seizures and community displacements known as the land grab. The forced displacement of 70,000 people in Ethiopia is the latest example of this phenomenon. Human Rights Watch reports that this is being done illegally, and for the benefit of large-scale commercial agriculture.

The news media has a few reports on this, such as UPI’s Thousands Driven Out or BBC’s oddly he-says-she-says report pitting Human Rights Watch against Ethiopian official deniers.

Why doesn’t the BBC just go there to find out for itself? Oh yeah, staff cutbacks. As I’ve noted before, humanitarian organizations are increasingly doing the basic reporting of issues for the incredibly shrinking media overseas.

Last fall, Oxfam International did much the same thing in Uganda, drawing media attention to an ongoing reforestation project operated there by a British firm that the advocacy organization said had prompted the brutal and illegal displacement of 20,000 peasant farmers.

Now, due in part to Oxfam’s criticism and the resulting loss of World Bank support for the development project, the London-based New Forests Company has decided — after displacing the 20,000 farmers and employing some 500 other Ugandans as foresters — to close up the operation and leave.

This is a serious problem. But Oxfam knows you get tired of big, serious problems. So here’s a funny (and somewhat pointed) video on the African land grab from Oxfam, which is one of the leading humanitarian organizations trying to draw attention to this disturbing trend:

For a more serious and focused video report showing Oxfam’s critique of the reforestation project in Uganda, go to this link.

Another organization working to help smallholder farmers and poor communities hold on to their land is Seattle-based Landesa. I’ve written before about Landesa, which tends to take a more low-profile and diplomatic tack to solving this problem.

Landesa has done an excellent overview here describing what’s driving this land rush in poor countries and how we can work to both protect the poor without discouraging commercial investment.

The first step, as always, is to recognize we have a problem. Here’s hoping this issue rises up on the media radar screen. It’s big and it’s not getting the attention it deserves.

FILED UNDER: Justice, British, Ethiopia, land grab, Landesa, Oxfam, Uganda

May 30, 2011 | 12:06 PM | By Tom Paulson |

“On the ground” reality vs rhetoric regarding Obama’s Global Health Initiative |

I wonder if anyone, other than those who want money from it, is paying that much attention to the Obama Administration’s once-ballyhooed grand vision known as the Global Health Initiative.

So far as I can tell the vision seems to be still a bit blurry and shrinking, from the original pledge of $63 billion over six years to maybe more like $55 billion, give or take a billion. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Health, Politics, Chris Elias, Ethiopia, Global Health Initiative, GlobalPost, Kenya, Lois Quam. Kaiser Foundation, Obama

November 23, 2010 | 2:06 PM | By Tom Paulson |

Courageous Ethiopian journalist honored |

CPJ

Dawit Kebede

It’s easy for Westerners to decry corruption overseas and to demand more “transparency” from nations that receive U.S. aid and strategic assistance, but not always so easy for those on the ground or in-country expected to serve as the watchdogs on this front.

The trials and tribulations of Ethiopian journalist Dawit Kebede are a case in point. Kebede is being honored as one of this year’s press freedom recipients by the Committee to Protect Journalists for his perseverance in pursuing the truth and reporting it in the face of government retaliation.

Ethiopia is one of the U.S. government’s most valuable strategic partners in Africa and the biggest recipient of U.S. foreign assistance on the continent. Yet it has been criticized for its authoritarian approach to governance, for using foreign aid as a tool of political retribution and for generally not acting like the democracy it claims to be.

As the Obama Administration and other governments are now looking at ways to improve the effectiveness of foreign aid, perhaps the criteria should include some measure of how aid recipients engage in (or suppress) public criticism and dialogue.

Bill Easterly of AidWatch also had some kudos for Kebede, noting that individual bloggers often have even less protection than established journalists.

FILED UNDER: Politics, Committee to Protect Journalists, Ethiopia, foreign aid, Obama Administration

November 19, 2010 | 4:34 PM | By Tom Paulson |

Seattle’s Ezra Teshome, World Citizen & Polio Warrior |

World Affairs Council

Ezra Teshome

Full disclosure: Ezra Teshome is one of my favorite guys.

Apparently, I’m not the only one who feels that way. Tonight, the World Affairs Council will honor Teshome as the 2010 World Citizen, along with a Nathan Hale HS teacher, Erin Lynch, for broadening her students’ minds. Lynch is being honored as WAC’s 2010 World Educator.

Teshome is perhaps best known for his many years of work getting kids in Africa (and elsewhere) immunized against polio. He’s a leading member of Rotary International, which has done more to fight polio than any organization — including even the Gates Foundation, which quotes Bill Gates here as saying so.

Teshome regularly visits the country of his birth, Ethiopia, where he participates in the vaccination campaigns and many other projects aimed at improving health and welfare. Here’s a profile the Seattle Times‘ Nicole Brodeur did after he returned from his latest trip to Ethiopia. And here’s an oldie-but-goodie column from my former colleague Robert Jamieson at the Seattle PI. And here’s a recent one in an Ethiopian newspaper (I like the fact that it’s based in Addis Ababa yet reports on Ezra as “local news.”)

We could all go on and on about Ezra. Yeah, I do know him well enough to call him Ezra. Turns out, he is also my insurance agent. I knew him before this, having written about him as a champion of global health and a leader in the local Ethiopian-American community. He became my agent by accident when my previous agents either retired or moved on and transferred our household account to other offices.

So, like a good neighbor Ezra is there. And there. And there. He’s all over the place, being a good neighbor to everyone in neighborhoods all over the world. Congrats Ezra! It’s recognition well-deserved.

Here’s a video interview with Ezra about him being named this year’s World Citizen:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=11_DHyFTV70

FILED UNDER: Basics, Ethiopia, Ezra Teshome, polio

October 25, 2010 | 9:32 AM | By Tom Paulson |

Book: Ethiopia as a case study of how not to do foreign aid |

Wikipedia

I haven’t yet read the book, but it’s getting lots of attention for making the case that governance trumps all other factors when it comes to development.

We have a large and vibrant Ethiopian community in Seattle and I’d be interested to hear what they think about all this. Ethiopia gets a lot of aid from the U.S. and has recently been criticized for using it as a political weapon rather than helping its poor.

The book is “Famine and Foreigners: Ethiopia since Live Aid” by Peter Gill. Live Aid was the event organized in 1985 by the much-heralded and much-maligned musician Bob Geldof in response to a famine in Ethiopia.

The development skeptics at Aidwatch have a post on it, noting both Bill Easterly’s review in the Wall Street Journal and another by David Rieff in the Atlantic. Here’s what Easterly says:

If it were possible to sum up in one sentence Ethiopia’s struggles with famine over the past quarter-century, I’d suggest this: It’s not the rains, it’s the rulers. As Peter Gill makes clear in “Famines and Foreigners,” his well-turned account of the country’s miseries since the 1984-85 famine and the Live Aid concert meant to relieve it, drought has not been as devastating to Ethiopians as their own autocratic governments.

And Rieff says:

There are fundamentally two views of development aid, and they are incompatible. The first … is essentially that, after many false starts, we now know how to do development, and that what is lacking is political commitment and money from the donor side, and political commitment and fiscal responsibility on the part of the governments and the elites of the recipient countries. The opposing view is that, no matter our good intentions, and the literally tens of thousands of people in development ministries, relief groups, international and local development NGOs, and popular movements, we still do not know what we are doing.

Hmmm, I’m not sure there are the only two views of development aid.

Another view might be that we don’t quite know, or can’t agree on, what we’re doing in development (which often seems to be the case for most human endeavors) and yet it remains a necessary counterbalance to massive global inequity.

Here’s the author’s blog post on the book.