UN News
The Ethiopian HIV Knowledge Sharing Network: Community of Practice, a joint initiative of the United Nations Country Team (UNCT) and Federal HIV/AIDS Prevention and Control Office (HAPCO) was launched on May 29 during a one-day workshop held at the conference center of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa. The keynote address by the United Nations Resident Coordinator, Mr Fidele Sarassoro, and an opening speech by HAPCO Director General, Dr Betru Tekle, both stressed that the initiative will enhance the AIDS response through the networking of practitioners from HAPCO, sector responses, academic institutions and other researchers, NGOs, donors, civil society, the private sector and others.
The HIV Community of Practice connects professionals through electronic and face-to-face knowledge-sharing platforms. Its objectives are to enhance collaboration and coordination; to enable individual community members to learn faster, work smarter and avoid duplication; to open up a new channel for government to gauge the value and effectiveness of its policies and programmes; and to capture, synthesize, document and disseminate national success stories and indigenous knowledge.
The network will be moderated and facilitated by full-time staff members. A resource group chaired by Federal HAPCO will provide guidance and support. Membership is open to any practitioner working on HIV prevention, treatment, care and support at any levels. More than 100 HIV practitioners from a wide variety of stakeholder groups participated in the workshop and signed the HIV community of Practice Membership agreement. During the launching, the community began a discussion on “the situation of HIV transmission and the response among young people in tertiary education institutions”. Discussion on this issue will continue in the community e-discussion platform over the next few weeks. Practitioners working on HIV and Development at all levels are invited to join the community and contribute.
Basic Facts about Ethiopian HIV Knowledge sharing Network
Ethiopian HIV Knowledge Sharing Network is a joint initiative of United Nations Country Team in Ethiopia (UNCT) and the Federal HIV/AIDS Prevention and Control Office (HAPCO). Ethiopian HIV Knowledge Sharing Network is a Voluntary Knowledge Management Platform designed to enable individuals working in the area of HIV prevention, treatment, care and support to share useful knowledge, best practices and learn from each other in a spirit of collaboration.
Ethiopian HIV Knowledge Sharing Network: HIV Community of Practice (CoP) connects practitioners working on HIV/AIDS at public and private sector, Academic and research institutions civil society Organizations, Donors and other Stakeholders. Its Oobjectives are:
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to enhance collaboration and coordination;
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to enable individual community members to learn faster, work smarter and avoid duplication;
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to open up a new channel for government to gauge the value and effectiveness of its policies and programmes; and
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to capture synthesize, document and publicize indigenous knowledge and national success stories.
Linked by a common vision, field of practice, challenges and engagement in development activities, HIV CoPs members will meet physically in face-to-face meetings and virtually on the electronic knowledge sharing platform (KSP) to continuously learn from each others’ knowledge, and expertise. The initiative will provide the following services to members and beyond:-
- Post quires and get solutions as a consolidated reply from community members experience and knowledge for challenges that encounter in their day-to-day activities
- E-Consultation for drafters of projects, programmes, plans, policies and legislation to obtain feedback from Community members as an input into finalization.
- E-Discussion to address and gain insights on issues of wide concern to the Community and build a case for further development of policies and programmes.
- Commission Action Group to produce a quick, strategic deliverable such as a project proposal, strategic plan, pilot project or action research.
In addition the initiative will systematically capture, synthesize, document as Consolidated Reply booklets, Best Practice books, Success Story pamphlets and disseminate the knowledge products of the community to wider public use.
The network will be moderated and facilitated by full-time staff members. A resource group chaired by Federal HAPCO will provide guidance and support.
Joining Ethiopian HIV Knowledge Sharing Network: HIV Community of Practice is free, voluntary and open to any practitioner working on HIV prevention, treatment, care and support related development programmes, interested in contributing advice, experience and expertise for use by others, or for adapting others’ advice, experience and expertise for their own use.
Your use of the Ethiopian HIV Knowledge Sharing Network: Community of Practice websites and /or your membership to the Community governed by the Community terms and conditions specified in the community membership agreement.
For further information please contact Dr. Amha Haile, Network facilitator for the HIV/AIDS CoP at [email protected]
ABC News Talks With Aidan Hartley, the Man Behind ‘Warlords Next Door?’
By DANA HUGHES, ABC News
British author and journalist Aidan Hartley has been covering Somalia for nearly 20 years. He recently released a TV documentary called “Warlords Next Door?” which spawned controversy when it aired last month on the Britain’s Channel 4.
“Warlords” focuses on the relationship between the British government and four prominent politicians in the current Somali government, including the provisional president, Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed.
Among other things, Hartley reports that these leaders have been granted British or EU passports that allow their families to live comfortable lives in the U.K., while the horrors faced by Somali civilians continue, under their watch.
Somalia has not had a functioning government since 1991.
The country’s transitional government, along with troops from Ethiopia and backing from Western governments like the United States and Britain, is mired in a guerilla war with Islamic insurgents who supported the previous Islamic leadership.
Thousands of civilians have been killed and hundreds of thousands displaced, and the security situation is so bad that the United Nations calls the country “the worst humanitarian crisis in Africa.”
Few Western journalists even venture to Mogadishu, Somalia’s capital.
Hartley went to the city to interview Somalis who have been victims of the war, and to question Somali politicians about their alleged ties with Britain. He talked to ABC News about his experience.
What drew you to make “Warlords Next Door?”
HARTLEY: I’ve been reporting on Somalia since the beginning of the civil war in 1991. I always felt it wasn’t receiving enough international coverage. I’ve been pushing to get this film made more than a year ago, after the Ethiopian invasion that seized the city and installed the new government. It is very difficult to get Somalia on the international news agenda.
Why do you think Somalia is not covered as much as other conflicts?
HARTLEY: One is a logistical and security reason. It’s incredibly dangerous for journalists to be in Mogadishu — several have been killed in recent years. There’s no international presence or diplomats or aid workers to speak of in the city, so there’s no green zone, there’s no refuge to go to for journalists when they are in the city.
Another reason is that it’s like other African countries. Somehow far away and forgotten, and so it’s difficult to get the international focus it deserves.
How much time did you spend inside Mogadishu?
HARTLEY: Well a relatively short time, only two weeks. But in Mogadishu you count your time very, very carefully.”
“I’d say the average period for a Western correspondent in the city would be one, two, three days at the most, to be safe.”
The problem is when you’re making a TV program, obviously you have to get the pictures … I was a little worried that we weren’t going to be able to get all the material that we needed …
But the fact is some terrible and dramatic things happened while we were there so we were able to get the material.
One of your guards was killed while you were there?
HARTLEY: Yes. Towards the end of January we were exiting villa Somalia, which is the presidential palace complex where we had been interviewing members of the government and we were passing down a road into the old city towards the port.
We were traveling in the lead car and our security escorts were about 100 feet behind us. We passed through an area where there was a lot of build up of rubbish in the street and I heard the loudest bang that I ever in my life…”
“We turned around and although we hadn’t taken any shrapnel, the escort car behind us had taken the full force of the blast, which killed one of our guards, a 21-year-old man named Abdi who’d recently become a father.”
“It also killed two civilian bystanders in the street and wounded three of them horribly.”
“And this is a very common occurrence in Mogadishu. On the same day, there were two other bombs that went off in nearby streets. It is a terrifying aspect of the city at the moment.”
Why would you risk your life to go to Somalia to tell this story?
HARTLEY: “It’s because it’s what I do. I’ve covered the conflict in Somalia since its beginnings.”
“I love Somalia, I love Mogadishu, I greatly admire Somali people and I hope that their nightmare ends at some point.”
And I think that the conflict is based on so many misconceptions that I think it’s the obligation of correspondents, aid workers, diplomats who have had contact with Somalia over the years to try and do everything they can to enlighten the outside world.
It would be very, very dangerous to ignore it because I don’t think Somali people will tolerate for long the behavior that some neighboring countries and perhaps Western countries have inflicted on the country. And I think Somalia is a problem that could bite back.
In what way?
HARTLEY: Well look at Afghanistan, which for many years was like Somalia: a forgotten conflict, people just didn’t care … there didn’t seem to be anything the West could do to help. They provided humanitarian relief, as they are doing in Somalia today, but they didn’t come up with solutions or anything with the urgency that was required.
Look what happened to Afghanistan … Al Qaeda took hold, the country had to be invaded by Western troops. Now you have a protracted and very difficult conflict to resolve.
The West and the international community would be well warned to look at the Somali situation and try to urgently come up with solutions, which many believe should be Somali, but with international neutral support for diplomacy and humanitarian relief rather than military intervention.
Somalia’s been considered a failed state for years with no end in sight. Why should the world care what’s happening?
HARTLEY: It is very true to say in a globalized world that there are no far-away local stories that can be ignored.
First of all you have hundreds of thousands of Somali refugees who’ve had to flee for their lives, many of them live in the United States and other Western countries, many of them have become citizens. And for them it is an important reason why they vote for the government that they do. They are demanding international action to assist with the situation there.
Another reason is because of the terrible events that have happened in the world since 9/11 and the fact that the West has concerns about the growth of militant Islamist forces in Somalia. The United States is deeply involved in this conflict; it’s backing the government there.
We were very aware of the U.S. presence while we were there because at all times of day and night you look up and you can see a spy plane circling in the sky. And there’s been … U.S. air-strike … so it is one of the theaters in the so-called “War on Terror.”
And third it is unacceptable in 2008 to see the kinds of humanitarian disasters that you see in places like Darfur, and now Somalia. And Somalia is a worse situation than Darfur.
You’ve got several hundred thousand people who are in a desperate condition. They’re civilians, they’re victims of war, they’re beyond medical care, and now they’re going hungry, and the world has an obligation to stop it.
NAIROBI, June 17 (Reuters) – The armies of feuding Horn of Africa neighbours Ethiopia Woyanne and Eritrea are “less than a football pitch” apart, risking a catastrophic new war on their border, a think-tank warned on Tuesday. The latest in a string of recent international warnings over tensions between Ethiopia Woyanne and Eritrea — who fought a 1998-2000 war that killed at least 70,000 people — came from the Brussels-based International Crisis Group (ICG).
“Neither regime wants war at present. Both prefer to keep tensions simmering, giving them an excuse to maintain authoritarian rule,” ICG senior Africa adviser Andebrhan Giorgis said in a report titled “Averting New War.”
“But a minor border incident or miscalculation could produce a disastrous return to conflict,” the report added. “The troops face each other often at less than a football pitch’s distance.”
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon also warned in April that the withdrawal of most of the world body’s 1,700 peacekeepers on the border, following a fuel cutoff by Asmara, risked new hostilities on the 1,000-km (620 mile) frontier.
Asmara says a November 2007 “virtual demarcation” of the border by a now-defunct independent boundary commission has ended the issue, and Ethiopia Woyanne must pull its troops back from areas designated to Eritrea.
Ethiopia Woyanne says Eritrea is illegally massing troops on the border in a supposedly demilitarised zone, and it wants to discuss the border demarcation further.
“The departure of the Boundary Commission and the U.N. peacekeepers has made this conflict much more dangerous, removing the means both for dialogue between the parties and for stopping small problems from escalating,” ICG’s Giorgis said.
Some regional diplomats, however, believe that both sides may be restrained by the prospect of world condemnation, their already stretched economies, and the past cost to both nations in terms of human lives and finances.
ICG called on Ethiopia Woyanne to withdraw soldiers from territory awarded to Eritrea by the boundary commission, on Eritrea to leave the Temporary Security Zone, and on the international community to provide “carrots and sticks” for that.
Both Ethiopian Prime Minister Woyanne dictator Meles Zenawi and Eritrean President Isaias Afwerki use the border as an excuse to enhance their power and stifle democracy, the report said.
“The stalemate on the border feeds and, in turn, is fed by growing authoritarianism in both states. The ruling regimes rely on military power and restrictions on civil liberties to retain their dominant positions.”
ICG said border tensions were “as high as they have ever been” since the war, with “constant shooting incidents and other tense episodes.”
Writing by Andrew Cawthorne; Editing by Matthew Tostevin
[email protected]
The few newspapers that are struggling to survive in Ethiopia’s capital Addis Ababa under constant harassement from security forces of the Meles dictatorship have found a way to thrive in the past few weeks: Put Berhanu Nega’s photo on their front page.
Last week’s editions of Fitih, Awramba and Enbilta newspapers were sold out the same day they were printed. Each of them had published photos of Dr Berhanu and reports about the newly launched organization, Ginbot 7 for Movement for Justice, Freedom and Democracy.
According to ER sources, the newspapers will double their printed copies this week and all of them will have extensive coverage of Dr Berhanu’s ongoing European tour.
The newspapers’ circulation is limited to Addis Ababa. They are not allowed to distribute any copy outside of the Addis Ababa area. On top of that, every week, the reporters and editors of these few newspapers, who are carefull not to criticize the Meles dictatorship, are harassed, detained, and verbally abused by Woyanne security forces. Through all this they have found a way to survive, even thrive — that is until Woyanne decides to shut them all down again.
