ONE Web Developer Tsegaye Hidru urges ONE members to give the gift of their voice to those in need for Ethiopian New Year.
I don’t know if you know this, but today is Ethiopian New Year — an important holiday in my culture that holds a deep meaning for me. It’s a day when Christian Ethiopians come together and celebrate the first day of the Julian calendar with food and coffee ceremony, music, arts and crafts, and gift-giving.
My family in Ethiopia will probably spend this special day eating food and getting together with relatives and neighbors. And for me, I’ll be celebrating it here in the States with my friends. While I am grateful that my family and I can afford to do this, this is not the case for all Ethiopians. There are a lot of people in my country who are not able to celebrate in the same way because of famine and high food prices engulfing the Horn of Africa.
Barrett Ward is the founder of fashionABLE, a Nashville-based fashion company that does trade with Africa in order to bolster economic opportunities for the most vulnerable. In this blog post, he writes about one of his workers, Bezuayhu.
Bezuayhu parents died when she was a girl, so she stayed with her grandparents. They wanted her to work as opposed to attending school, so she left for the capital city. Unable to find her way in the city as a teenager, the predators of the sex industry brought Bezuayhu the false promise of hope in the form of prostitution. Her life was having to give herself to dirty men for less than a dollar at best, and facing the threat of being beaten and raped as an occupational hazard.
Has Sesame Street taken over Africa? Well, not quite. We previously introduced you to Nigerian program “Sesame Square,” which included an HIV-positive character named Kami. Now, a similar show has invaded millions of televisions in homes across Ethiopia, entertaining children while simultaneously educating them on things like sanitation and hygiene as well as the importance of culture and honesty.
Dagfinn Høybråten, board chair of the GAVI Alliance, talks about his recent visit to Ethiopia and the status of the country’s child immunization programs.
Dagfinn Høybråten asks questions about health statistics at Adama Udie health post, just outside Addis Ababa
“Vaccines are the heart of our primary care,” Emebet Meshesha, a health extension worker, told me last month when I visited the Adama Udie health post in Ormoia, just outside Addis Ababa.
This is our very first post from ONE’s government relations intern, Zach Kelly. Make sure to give him props in the comments section!
Last week, ONE had the exciting opportunity to partner with the U.S. Department of State to host a luncheon discussion with the African Women’s Entrepreneurship Program.
At the lunch, women from 35 African countries shared their experiences about working in the African business world. Our keynote speaker, Dr. Pearl Alice Marsh of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, provided a congressional perspective of women’s challenges and opportunities and the role they play in commerce and job creation on the continent.
She emphasized that both the public and private sector must make special efforts to remove obstacles that impede the success and growth of African businesswomen because they are proven and effective agents of development in their society.
During our discussion, we learned that African women have difficulties in gaining access to capital and other financial resources when starting and operating a business because of their gender. A participant from Ethiopia said she is working a solution to the problem: partner with other Ethiopian businesswomen to start the first-ever commercial bank owned by a majority of women. This would make it easier for women to access financial capital.
A participant from Nigeria shared her advocacy victory. By teaming up with local cassava farmers in securing assistance and support from the Nigerian government and the USAID, she saved a faltering cassava-processing factory in rural Nigeria. The factory is now fully functioning and ready to supply the beverage industry with glucose-syrup, creating jobs and real economic growth for the area.
These were only some of the amazing stories shared at the event, but each one highlighted the fact that these women are pioneers and leaders in their countries. They are passionate and committed to advancing the role and prosperity of future generations of women in African society, and with the help of global partners and investors, will certainly achieve these goals.
Please welcome Malaka Gharib to the ONE Blog! Malaka joined the ONE New Media team a few weeks ago, and will be regularly contributing to the blog, beginning with this look at an excellent piece in the New York Times. -Chris
Coffee is the second most-traded commodity in the world and prized on a multibillion-dollar international market. Yet coffee bean farmers in Ethiopia – the official birthplace of coffee – earn an average of $1 a day, reports the New York Times in a recent article.
However, the Abyssinian Baptist Church, an African-American church in Harlem, N.Y., founded more than 200 years ago, is working to increase these farmers’ earnings. According to the Times, their international aid and development arm, the Abyssinian Fund, is on “a mission to improve the quality of the farmers’ lives by helping them improve the quality of their coffee beans.”
The Abyssinian Fund is the only nongovernmental organization in Ethiopia formed by an African-American church. It was created partly to help the congregation reconnect with its spiritual and ancestral homeland, says the Times. They are working with a co-op of 700 Ethiopian farmers in the city of Harrar.
It seems so simple, but the ability to export better-tasting coffee could help Ethiopia become more competitive on the international coffee market, creating a vital source of income for the country. Once these farmers’ incomes have increased, the Fund will add part of what they make to local development projects like schools and clinics.
This truly sounds like the start of something great. Economic growth, driven by trade and investment, is the engine that will help end poverty and increase employment and incomes.
Read more about the Abyssinian Baptist Church and their Fund in the New York Times.
As we’re in the midst a campaign calling on the G8 to recruit and train 3.5 million additional healthcare workers, I’m reminded of a video we posted a while back featuring Ethiopia native Liya Kebede, the World Health Organization’s Global Ambassador for Maternal, Newborn, and Child Health.
If you haven’t seen it before, I highly recommend it:
ONE is campaigning to ensure that the Congressional budget does not cut foreign assistance programs like Feed the Future that help people break the cycle of poverty and hunger.
The Horn of Africa is experiencing its worst drought in 60 years. More than 11 million people, mostly nomadic pastoralists and farmers in south-central Somalia, north-eastern Kenya, and south-eastern Ethiopia, are severely lacking access to food.
2011 marks 30 years since the first cases of AIDS were documented. Take a closer look at the specific, achievable goals we must hit by 2015 to make this year the beginning of the end of AIDS.
As aid agencies warn more than 9 million people could be affected by a food crisis in East Africa, world leaders are failing to keep their 2009 promises to tackle the causes of chronic hunger and support farmers in the world's poorest countries.
