Aero vodochody, a Czech company, is to start assembling aircrafts in Ethiopia, which will increase the number of its assembling plants in Africa to three.
The company is going to start assembling AE 270, the model, installed with a ‘tutboprop’, at premises once used by the Ethiopian Airlines to assemble ‘Eshet’, a crop-duster of Eshet Engineering Ltd.
Aero Vodochody is the largest aviation technology manufacturer in the Czech Republic and one of the oldest in the world. It is fully owed by private group, penta, and has two plants in Africa; one in South Africa and another in Kenya. AE 270, with all materials imported from the Czech Republic, on average costs 10 million USD in the European market. It accommodates 8 passengers and is usually owned by investors and tourists for private usage.
Local representative of Aero Vodochody, Getachew Eshetu is owner of Afro-Asia Technical Trading Enterprise and active in the transport business. The representative of the company who seems tired of the lengthy process plans to start producing AE 270, and to further move into assembling larger models.”
He said that the Czech company has chosen Ethiopia to assemble the aircraft and officials of the Ministry of Transport and Communications have written a letter to the management of Ethiopian Airlines to allow the use of their premises, which they are currently awaiting to receive.
Aero Vodochody, commonly referred to as Aero Vodochody is a location. It was a Czech and Czechoslovak aircraft company, active from 1919, notable for producing the L-29 Delfin, L-39 Albatros, L-59 Super Albatros and the L-159 Alca.
After the fall of the Communist dictatorship in Czechoslovakia in 1989 and in the rest of Eastern Europe, the company lost a major portion of its main market in jet trainers the sales of military aircraft declined in the early 1990s in Eastern Europe as well as in the NATO countries where the entry of a new producer was obviously unwanted Aero was controlled for several years by Boeing.
The local representative of the company, Mr. Getachew, has a facility in Debere Markos to produce 100,000 dollar trolley buses.
The first aircraft to be produced by Ethiopian Airlines was ‘Eshet’, but production has stopped. It was produced by Eshet Engineering Ltd, a company founded in 1987 by Doron Oz, a Civil Engineer and graduate of the “Technion” in Haifa, Israel.
ADDIS ABABA (Reuters) – African carrier Ethiopian Airlines plans to buy six aircraft to improve its domestic service, its chief executive said on Monday.
“Our aim is to upgrade our 16 domestic routes throughout the country by adding new aircraft with a capacity between 70 to 80 seats,” Girma Wake told a news conference.
“Such planes would allow passengers to fly in comfort and would also help the airlines to generate more income,” he said.
He said the airline was evaluating offers from Canada’s Bombardier, CATIC International Holdings of China, Embraer of Brazil, French-Italian ATR, Sukhoi Super Jet and Mitsubishi.
With the purchase of the six planes, the number of aircraft servicing domestic routes would reach 13, he said.
Ethiopian is also in the process of acquiring ten Boeing 787 jetliners to be delivered in 2009. The airline owns 32 aircraft and serves 50 international destinations.
In Africa, research and knowledge are far from being ivory-tower pursuits. They are critical to making poverty history and preparing countries to cope with disasters.
However, to achieve this, research should be understood not just as a source of new information. Research is also a process that trains people to create solutions.
Africa needs a strong pan-continental community of researchers to discover resourceful, timely ways to deal with the many causes of poverty. This requires the development of strong research universities – institutions with a strong emphasis on graduate research, as opposed to undergraduate teaching, and where graduates are taught by lecturers who themselves are expanding the frontiers of knowledge.
The neglect of science, technology and innovation when building universities in Africa must be addressed. For far too long this folly has been compounded by a failure to focus knowledge creation on Africa’s research needs: data about biological processes, minerals, public health, water and food.
Only when universities work together on research in biology, geology, water, food and health will they provide relief from – rather than add to – the burden of Africa’s poverty.
There is still a place for more traditional subjects in post-colonial universities, such as studying literary classics. But these should not be a priority. Reform must be concentrated on investment in research geared to solving the continent’s main problems. There have been two significant attempts to create research universities recently.
Addis Ababa University in Ethiopia has opened a campus to train 5 000 PhD students in the next 10 years, with some 60 foreign universities being invited to co-operate in the training.
This vision of changing an existing university into a “pre-eminent research university” is certainly ambitious.
A limitation is that it is to be resourced mainly from donors and with the hoped-for support from other universities in Canada, Europe and the United States.
And a critical problem is that the existing university members of staff are expected to continue to do 70 percent of undergraduate teaching, even though annual intake is expected to expand every year.
Even if these constraints are overcome, it will not lead to the creation of a world-class university geared to solving Ethiopia’s problems unless policies, resources, talent, governance and incentives are co-ordinated to indigence research and knowledge creation.
The second research initiative is the African University of Science and Technology (AUST) in Abuja, Nigeria.
Set up by the Nelson Mandela Institution for Knowledge Building and the Advancement of Science and Technology in sub-Saharan Africa, it has been described as an accredited and independent university, the first of a Pan-African Network of Institutes of Science and Technology and Centres of Excellence.
Its comparative advantage over Addis Ababa University is that it can evolve as a research university from inception, rather than undergoing a painful transition from a teaching-focused to a research-focused institution.
That most of the world’s research universities are based in one country – the US – tells its own story about how difficult it is for poor countries to create research universities.
Some governments, such as those of China and Nigeria, are trying to widen access to higher education and develop research capacity at the same time.
But since the creation of world-class national universities is not easy, we should think in terms of building a pan-African infrastructure for science and technology research.
There is a need for a bold commitment to establish at least five regional science and technology universities with five major laboratories that can focus on specific specialisations such as nanotechnology, biotechnology, environmental technology, medical technology, food technology, energy technology and information technology between them.
I am not asking donors to build a research university for Africans. Africans have to learn to think through their problems and find solutions without blaming others for anything that may go wrong.
It is precisely to change the asymmetric relationship with donors that knowledge and research generated and owned by Africans to solve African problems must be promoted.
This means mobilising talent principally from within Africa, and employing African ingenuity, perspective, foresight and imagination to tackle Africa’s problems.
A research university for every African country may not be possible. But a few world-class universities shared and built by Africans to develop researchers who think deeply, create knowledge and are committed to serving Africa without elitism are absolutely necessary to make poverty history.
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Professor Muchie, a member of the Network of Ethiopian Scholars, is based at the Institute for Economic Research on Innovation at Tshwane University of Technology in Pretoria and director of the Research Centre on Development and International Political Economy at Aalborg University in Denmark. Muchie’s full report is online at www.SciDev.Net
(Mohamed Omar Hussein, Somaliweyn Media Center) — A convoy of Ethiopian Woyanne troops were attacked at Sinka Dheer some 14KM from the Somali capital Mogadishu.
These Ethiopian Woyanne troops departure from the capital Mogadishu and were heading towards the commercial town of Baidoa which is some 245KM from the capital Mogadishu.
Two of the Ethiopian Woyanne military trucks which were among the convoy were burnt to ash as an eyewitness in the area told the press.
The inhabitants in the area were the residents of Mogadishu who fled from their houses due to the frequent combats between the Ethiopian Woyanne troops and their archrivals the Islamists.
These displaced people are very anxious of these confrontations which with intervals take place in the area where they inhabit.
“We were chased out of our concrete houses and now we are living in shanty houses, and from here we don’t actually know where to start our living if we are again chased from here” says Mother Halima a mother of six.
After the attacks the Ethiopian Woyanne troops opened tremendous indiscriminate fire in the neighborhoods, but with fewer casualties.
This is part of series of attacks carried to the Ethiopian Woyanne troops traveling between the Mogadishu and Afgoi district which is some 30Km from the capital, and it was only on Saturday when the newly Somali police force trained Ethiopian Woyanne came under explosion a long Mogadishu Afgoi road.
(Turkish Press) ISTANBUL – A Charity Foundation from Turkey sent aid to 350 families in Ethiopia, which is struggling with famine caused by draught.
The Foundation for Human Rights Freedoms and Humanitarian Relief (IHH) announced Monday that it distributed foodstuff to 350 families.
It sent packages containing flour, legumes, oil and sugar to 350 families residing in Zewaya Dugda one of the poorest regions in the Ethiopia.
The UN recently announced that around 6 million children in Ethiopia faced risk of acute under-nutrition and urged countries to send aids to this country.
After more than two decades on the books, a little-known yet strictly enforced federal law barring foreigners with HIV or AIDS from entering the country is on its way out.
Tucked in a bill pledging $48 billion to combat the disease, signed into law by President Bush last week, was language stripping the provision from federal immigration law.
But that change didn’t fully lift the entry ban on visitors with HIV or AIDS, which applies whether they’re on tourist jaunts or seeking longer stays. The secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services still needs to delete HIV from the agency’s list of “communicable diseases of public health significance,” which includes tuberculosis, gonorrhea and leprosy.
An HHS spokeswoman declined to comment, noting administrators are still reviewing the new law. An April report from the Congressional Budget Office said that, based on information from HHS’ Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, HIV will be dropped from the list and new regulations will be in place in two years.
Both immigrant and HIV awareness advocates, however, say the toughest hurdle has been cleared, that the lifting of the immigration provision has been a long time coming — politics finally catching up with medical knowledge.
“Today everyone knows that you can’t get AIDS from sitting next to someone on an airplane or sharing a bathroom — American policy should reflect this,” said Victoria Neilson, legal director of Immigration Equality, a New York-based advocacy group that has led a years-long campaign against the ban.
In San Antonio, people in the HIV/AIDS community welcomed the new law, but noted that plenty of people here had already circumvented the travel ban, since the area has been a long-standing destination for unauthorized immigrants.
Jan Patterson, an infectious disease specialist in San Antonio, agreed that the ban has no scientific underpinning.
When HIV first surfaced, researchers didn’t know how it was transmitted, but it has long been widely known that HIV is not easily contracted and that even people with full-blown AIDS can live for a long time, said Patterson, who has taught for 15 years at the University of Texas Health Science Center.
In a speech before signing the law, President Bush emphasized that “HIV’s deadly stigma” is still a societal obstacle because patients still don’t receive mainstream acceptance.
Congressional support for lifting the travel ban was bipartisan and strong, but not unanimous. Leading the opposition was U.S. Rep. Lamar Smith of San Antonio, the top Republican in the House Judiciary Committee. He sent a missive to his colleagues titled “The bill threatens the health and lives of Americans.”
The e-mail cited the CBO’s April report predicting that revoking the travel ban would allow an estimated 4,300 immigrants with HIV to enter the country in 2013, increasing to 5,600 by 2018. Smith’s message left out the report’s estimate of the public cost of treating these immigrants and their children between 2010 and 2018: $83 million.
Smith warned the disease has killed more than 500,000 Americans despite improved treatment and that allowing infected foreigners in would increase public risk.
The Family Focused AIDS Clinical Treatment and Services, a 2,000-patient clinic in San Antonio, offers services to anyone diagnosed with HIV whether they’re in the country legally or not, said its director, Tracy Talley.
So immigrants, particularly from Mexico, have made their way across the border for years just to get treatment unavailable back home, Talley said.
Many of them are referred to the clinic through a nonprofit aid group in San Antonio, Mujeres Unidas Contra el SIDA or United Women Against AIDS. The group’s director, Yolanda Rodríguez-Escobar, concurred with Talley that most HIV immigrants here are border-crossers who might never have heard of the travel exclusion.
They’d prefer to enter the country legally for treatment if given the option, said one of them. But in Mexico, the stigma of the disease is so great, those infected have always simply assumed their only immigration option is to go underground, he said.
“Everybody in Mexico knows that if you’ve got HIV, you might as well forget trying to get papers,” said Antonio, 41, an unauthorized immigrant with HIV in San Antoni.
Howard Wallen of New York tried to get papers to bring his wife into the country from Ethiopia, where he met her in 2002, later marrying her and having a daughter. They soon found out Abeba’s HIV status prevented her from coming to the United States with him.
She eventually died from AIDS — an outcome that might have been different had she received therapy in the United States, Wallen said.
“She deserved the dignity of that chance,” he said.
The HIV prohibition issue stretches beyond U.S. borders. The 11,000-member International AIDS Society counts 67 countries restricting the entry or stay of HIV patients.
