Bellissima’s owner, Hayat Ahmed
[Photo: Tesfalem Woldes/IRIN]
ADDIS ABABA (IRIN) — Bellissima, on bustling Gabon Street in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, could be just another upmarket café, except that each order comes with a packet of ‘Sensation’ condoms, and is served in ‘Sensation’ cups by staff wearing ‘Sensation’ T-shirts.
“I wanted to link business with a message for sexually active people,” Bellissima’s owner, Hayat Ahmed, 26, told IRIN/PlusNews. “I am the brand ambassador for ‘Sensation’ condoms in Ethiopia, and I want to spread the message that condoms can protect you from HIV/AIDS.”
Hayat, a former beauty queen, has been involved in HIV/AIDS campaigns since she was crowned Miss Ethiopia in 2003 and subsequently named an HIV/AIDS ambassador.
Her face adorns billboards and she regularly appears on Ethiopia’s only television station promoting condom use. “When I walk down the road even children recognise me,” she said. “But they do not call me Hayat; they call me ‘Sensation’.”
Modelled on ‘condom bars’ in Asia, Bellissima handed out six boxes of condoms, each containing 48 packets of three-in-a-pack, within two days of opening its doors.
The free condoms have elicited mixed reactions, with older patrons tending not to like the idea, while younger ones love it and sometimes ask for a second packet.
“We have had young people come in and ask ‘Is it true that you actually give free condoms?’ and when we say, ‘yes’, their faces brighten up and they quickly order,” said one waiter. “But we have also had people who get shocked when we bring the bill with a condom, some saying we are promoting immorality.”
Guests do not have to take the packs home when they leave the restaurant. “It is your choice to take it or leave it,” Hayat said. “We also plan to set up condom vending machines in the toilets.”
Her campaign is supported by social marketing groups such as the non-profit organisation, DKT-Ethiopia, which sold almost 60 million condoms in 2007 and also launched a coffee-flavoured version of Sensation condoms. Ethiopia is widely thought to be the birthplace of coffee and is drunk nationally.
Hayat intends to open more cafés in the capital and other towns, and continue promoting various anti-HIV strategies, including abstinence and faithfulness. She might even expand the ‘condom bars’ concept to other African countries.
“A lot of people in Ethiopia are ashamed of talking about or using condoms,” said. “Yet some companies put condoms in their toilets and when you go to look, each day, the boxes are empty. I don’t care if the condoms are used behind closed doors or in public – as long as many people use them.”
Ethiopia’s HIV prevalence is estimated at over two percent among sexually active people aged 15 to 49. A report by the Federal HIV/AIDS Prevention and Control Office in March noted that between 2000 and 2005, condom use among males increased from 30.3 percent to 51.9 percent, and among females from 13.4 percent to 23.6 percent.
According to Ethiopian government data, half the public sector institutions and 20 percent of private businesses have mainstreamed HIV/AIDS prevention in their operational policies.
However, Philopos Petros, head of the Ethiopian Civil Service College’s HIV/AIDS management unit, noted that “There are still educated people exposed to HIV and dying of AIDS,” and said greater awareness was necessary.
“One person cannot change the world, but I want to make a contribution,” Hayat said. “I have a name and the will, and I will use that.”
The State Department has suspended a humanitarian program to reunite thousands of African refugees with relatives in the U.S. after unprecedented DNA testing by the government revealed widespread fraud.
The freeze affects refugees in Kenya, Ethiopia, Uganda, Guinea and Ghana, many of whom have been waiting years to emigrate. The State Department says it began DNA testing with a pilot program launched in February to verify blood ties among African refugees. Tests found some applicants lied about belonging to the same family to gain a better chance at legal entry.
The U.S. has responded by halting refugee arrivals from East Africa, where hundreds of thousands of people have been stranded in precarious conditions since civil war erupted in the early 1990s. The temporary suspension has generated panic in African communities in the U.S., where thousands wait to be joined by relatives.
Typically, a refugee already living in the U.S., a so-called anchor, is entitled to apply for permission to bring a spouse, minor children, parents and siblings. The process requires interviews, medical examinations and security screening.
But suspicion has grown in recent years that unrelated Africans were posing as family members to gain entry. “This program is designed for people to reunify with family members” already in the U.S., says Barbara Strack, director of the refugee division at U.S. Citizenship & Immigration Services. “We wanted to have empirical data” to confirm suspected fraud, she says.
In February, the State Department launched pilot testing in Kenya to verify family relationships, mainly among Somalis. When applicants arrived for a previously scheduled appointment, a U.S. official asked them to volunteer for a DNA test.
An expert then swabbed the cheek of those who claimed biological relationships, such as a mother and her purported children.
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The cell samples were sent to labs in the U.S. for analysis.
As word spread, some applicants began missing appointments, and others refused to cooperate.
Laboratory analysis of the samples indicated a large portion of applicants weren’t blood relations, as they claimed. “The results were dismaying,” says Ms. Strack. “This told us we had a problem with the program.”
The results prompted expansion of the testing to other countries. “We had high rates of fraud everywhere, except the Ivory Coast,” says a State Department official.
In late April, the government decided to temporarily halt the family reunification resettlement program for East Africans. A government official confirms that “many thousands of people” are affected by the suspension, particularly Somalis and Ethiopians.
Refugee resettlement agencies report that arrivals have slowed to a trickle.
In Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minn., home to the country’s largest East African population, Catholic Charities hasn’t handled a single family reunification case since March 19. The agency has resettled 35 East African families this year, compared with more than 450 last year and about 1,300 in 2006. “Everyone is calling or walking in here and asking what is going on,” says Angela Fox, a resettlement worker at Catholic Charities.
Some refugees received a notice from U.S. authorities advising them that their case is on hold because relatives didn’t show up for a scheduled interview or they refused to supply a DNA sample.
Those who agreed to take the test are also in limbo.
Abdirahman Dhunkal, who hails from Somalia, petitioned in early 2005 for his father, mother and six siblings who are in Kenya to join him in Minnesota.
Their case was approved in late 2006, but Mr. Dhunkal says that his family was asked to take a DNA test earlier this year. Since the cell samples were collected, “nothing has happened. We are still waiting,” says Mr. Dhunkal, 31, who hasn’t seen his family in 14 years.
The government testing has raised questions about using DNA as an immigration tool.
“No one condones people gaining entry by false means; the integrity of the program must be ensured,” says Bob Carey, chair of Refugee Council USA, a coalition of U.S. agencies that work on refugee issues, and vice president of resettlement for the International Rescue Committee. However, he adds, “DNA is not the only means to assess family relationships.”
Refugee advocates say the definition of family among Africans extends beyond blood relatives, especially when families fleeing persecution are scattered. “Some families are raising children who aren’t their own but whom they call son or daughter,” says Ms. Fox of Catholic Charities.
Refugee slots are precious. The world’s uprooted people are estimated to number 37 million; only about 1% are resettled. As the largest recipient, the U.S. absorbs about half of all refugees who are resettled.
Such demand “creates an incentive to get past the system,” says Ralston H. Deffenbaugh Jr., president of Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services. “Desperation makes people more susceptible to abuse or bribery.”
To be approved as a refugee, an applicant must establish that he or she has suffered persecution or has a well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, creed or origin.
Between Oct. 1, 2007, and Aug. 13 of this year, the U.S. admitted 45,644 refugees. For the fiscal year ending Sept. 30, 2008, the Bush administration set a ceiling for African refugees at 16,000. But by Aug. 13, only 6,780 Africans had been admitted.
Family unity has long been a pillar of U.S. refugee admissions, with relatives accorded priority. U.S. officials say the government must balance a need to ensure the integrity of the program with the desire to let in vulnerable refugees.
The government hasn’t decided whether to expand testing to compare the DNA of relatives in the U.S. with those abroad to verify kinship.
Nokia is customising a range of handsets, including some 3G models for the Ethiopian market by adding Ethiopic text capabilities to their phones. BravoCom, the local distributor for Nokia has ordered the handsets following a surge in sales of PrePay SIMS by the monopoly phone operator, Ethiopia Telecommunication Corporation (ETC).
There has also been a sudden surge in demand which has caught the handset distributors off-guard and lead to handset price rises in the retail outlets due to the shortage of phone stocks.
Levi Girma Wake, General Manager and majority share holder of BravoCom told the Capital Ethiopia that the company took advantage of a duty-free zone in neighbouring Djibouti to ship handsets for sale throughout the Horn of Africa countries. “What we have done is to hold the products primarily in Djibouti. And as demand comes from Ethiopia, we ship to Ethiopia or supplement any other country,” Levi explained.
Levi used to be Nokia’s East Africa Account Manager.
Ethiopian Semitic (also known as Ethiopian, Ethiosemitic, Ethiopic) is a language group which together with Old South Arabian forms the Western branch of the South Semitic languages. Today, the name Ethiopian Semitic languages can be considered a misnomer as the North languages are also found in Eritrea with two of them being exclusively used there; however, the term came into use before Eritrea had separated from Ethiopia.
ZTE recently added 1.2 million GSM lines to the network capacity to cope with demand and also a surge in usage which occurred during the recent celebration of the Ethiopian millennium. A WCDMA overlay is also planed for some parts of the network. There were several serious network failures during the upgrade work, with the mobile operator blaming ZTE for not refarming radio spectrum correctly during the commission of new base stations.
The state owned monopoly ended Q1 ’08 with an estimated 1.6 million subscribers, which according to figures from the Mobile World equates to a population penetration level of just 2%.
GENEVA (AFP) — The Red Cross on Wednesday revised its emergency appeal for Ethiopia to five million euros (7.9 million dollars) as the situation in the drought-hit south of the country got worse.
“Over the past two months the situation has worsened and living conditions have deteriorated. People have exhausted all their resources and are unable to feed themselves.
“We must step up our response,” said Lorenzo Violante, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies’ drought operations manager in Addis Ababa.
The funds would go towards helping over 76,000 people, including providing emergency food aid, as well as improving access to water and promoting hygiene, the IFRC said in a statement.
An aid operation had started in May to help 40,000 people in the southern Ethiopian village of Damot Pulasa, but it has now been expanded to help another 36,000 people in neighbouring Damot Gale.
Ethiopia was hit with severe floods last year which destroyed most of the food crops, while this year a drought has worsened the situation, leading to food prices that soared 330 percent.
Over 16,000 children in the two villages are acutely malnourished, said Fasika Kebede, Secretary General of the Ethiopian Red Cross.
“The situation can only deteriorate if we are not able to intervene efficiently,” he added.
The race by food-importing countries to secure farmland overseas to improve their food security risks creating a “neo-colonial” system, the United Nations’ top agriculture official has cautioned.
The warning by Jacques Diouf, director-general of the Food and Agriculture Organisation, comes as countries from Saudi Arabia to China plan to lease vast tracts of land in Africa and Asia to grow crops and ship them back to their markets.
“The risk is of creating a neo-colonial pact for the provision of non-value-added raw materials in the producing countries and unacceptable work conditions for agricultural workers,” Mr Diouf said.
Financial investors and food companies were also looking to invest in overseas farmland, raising some concerns, officials said.
The pursuit of foreign farm investments is the latest sign of how the global food crisis, which has seen record prices for commodities such as wheat and rice, is reshaping the politics of agriculture.
This year big providers of agriculture commodities – including India, Russia, Argentina and Vietnam – have restricted exports to keep local markets supplied.
Joachim von Braun, director of the International Food Policy Research Institute, said importing nations realised that dependence on the international market made them vulnerable – not only to surging prices but, crucially, also to an interruption in supplies. “They want to secure the supply lines of food,” he said.
The recent drop in agricultural commodity prices had not altered this view, as food prices remained well above historical levels, analysts said.
Middle Eastern and North African countries, which import most of their food, are leading the race to invest overseas. Countries such as Sudan, Ethiopia and Ukraine are opening their doors. Meles Zenawi, prime minister of Ethiopia, said recently its government was “very eager” to provide hundreds of thousands of hectares of agricultural land for investment.
Referring to recent investment, Mr Diouf said: “Some negotiations have led to unequal international relations and short-term mercantilist agriculture.” His warning is important as he has been a strong supporter of joint ventures between countries with money to invest and those with land and water resources. It reflects unease among diplomats about the race to lock in land and food supplies overseas.
The upward trend in leasing such farmland has also caused alarm among western agriculture officials, who worry about countries such as Sudan and Zimbabwe gaining more geopolitical leverage following investment in their agriculture.
The FAO has launched a task force to analyse potential problems connected to this, including land rights and the question of how much food would be left for the host country. Behind closed doors, UN officials are discussing whether a scheme similar to the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative – the programme that helped the oil and minerals industry to tackle corruption and improve governance – could be useful.
A day after the women’s 5000m semi-finals, Ethiopia’s defending Olympic and world champion Meseret Defar and the country’s world record holder Tirunesh Dibaba both say they are still very tired. Dibaba has run two races in the space of four days–the first, the second-fastest 10000m race in history as she won her first Olympic gold–and the second, a pretty-fast 5000m to win her first round in that event and remain on course for a historic 5000m/10000m double. “The 10000m took a lot of energy out of me,” she said.
Defar on the other hand arrived in Beijing just three days ago and says she is exhausted. She reckons her body is finding it difficult to cope with jet lag and the time difference (5hrs between Addis Ababa and Beijing). But when the pair toe the start line for the final on Friday evening Beijing time, they will need little reminding of the importance of their meeting once again.
There is after all that little bit of history that dates back to 2006. During that season, the pair met seven times as Dibaba edged out Defar with four victories (Defar leads the overall head-to-head 12 to 10). But in the all important meeting at the end of the Golden League jackpot chase, Defar beat Dibaba to thwart her in Berlin. Dibaba lost around USD 125,000 that afternoon and although she beat Defar a week later, it was never the same.
It was an incredible time for Ethiopian athletics. Their rivalry had reignited huge public interest in the sport reserved only during the time of the world championships or the Olympics. Every Friday night, diners and restaurants would be filled with people glued to their television sets to watch the battle of the Ethiopians.
For many Ethiopian fans, it is an awkward place to be. Before those epic seven races in 2006, Ethiopians would root for their compatriots in a race no matter where they ran– in big-money European meets or major championships. It mattered little who came first as long as it was a green-vested Ethiopian.
But in the Golden League races, it was either Dibaba or Defar. Everyone knew that no one was capable of beating the two Ethiopians. They were each other’s biggest rivals. Perhaps for the first time in Ethiopian athletics, there was a Dibaba fan against a Defar fan.
The demographics of the fan group fit perfectly with the contrasting attitudes of the athletes. The hippies rooted for Defar, the Addis Ababa city-born who is perhaps the first one in her generation to prove that city girls can take up running as a serious profession. The purists and nature lovers idolized Dibaba, an athlete who is perhaps the most naturally talented athlete in the world. Unlike Defar, who is more open and a relative public figure, Dibaba shuns the media and is also carefree and withdrawn in her demeanor.
For many strange reasons, the pair has not met since those epic races in 2006. The following year, Dibaba pulled out of the 5000m due to abdominal pains aggravated during the women’s 10000m final. That year, Defar went on to dominate the scene with another world record, a world championship 5000m title, an All-African Games title, and the coveted IAAF World Athlete of the Year crown.
This year has been all about Dibaba. Not that Defar is having a particularly bad year, but Dibaba has just been better. She sliced four-and-half seconds off Defar’s world 5000m record in Oslo this year extending her unbeaten streak to one year in all events. Meanwhile Defar went down to Meselech Melkamu, the third Ethiopian in the women’s 5000m final at the African Championships on home soil in May.
But Defar is fighting back. She was just one second off Dibaba’s record (14:12.86) in Stockholm in July and says she is now in the best form of her life.
It will be the most important meeting for the duo, and a slice of history is on the line. Defar seeks an Olympic title defense to give her the first back to back 5000m golds in Olympic history, while Dibaba is hoping for a historic 5000m/10000m title in Beijing, the first such achievement since Miruts Yifter did it 28 years ago in Moscow. A mouth-watering clash awaits!
