‘Women empowerment one of the most profitable social investments imaginable’
ADDIS ABABA – Today the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) and the Kingdom of the Netherlands launch a € 2.7 million programme that aims to reduce violence against women.
The three-year programme, which will be managed by UNFPA, will further strengthen an enabling environment that reduces violence against women in Ethiopia.
UNFPA and the Netherlands, through their Agreement, will support the activities of civil society organisations that implement community-based intervention and violence prevention programmes. The agreement will also strengthen capacity in the areas of care and social support to victims of violence. Adolescent girls and women will benefit from better clinical help and legal assistance, for instance, and from counselling and rehabilitation services. The ultimate goal is to stop violence against women.
Empowering women is central to the Netherlands’ development co-operation policies.
Mr. Alphons Hennekens, Netherlands Ambassador to Ethiopia, said that ending violence against women is not only a human rights and a social justice issue: “Strong women and girls also help economic development and reduce poverty.” He called the improvement of the situation of women and girls “one of the most profitable social investments imaginable.”
Gender Based Violence is also at the heart of UNFPA’s mandate, as it reflects gender inequalities and is very closely related to reproductive health issues and HIV/AIDS. “Whether it is domestic violence, rape, sexual abuse, sexual exploitation, child prostitution, trafficking, forced labour, or harmful traditional practices like early marriage and female genital mutilation, violence prevents a girl or a woman from exercising her human rights, violates her dignity, and jeopardizes her health, well-being, and future,” noted Dr. Monique Rakotomalala, UNFPA’s Representative in Ethiopia. “Today’s agreement offers an opportunity to take a firm stand to stop gender-based violence and ensure that reproductive rights and care are the centre piece of our work.”
The Agreement and its objectives complement the Government of Ethiopia’s policies on gender equality. Gender equality is one of the eight pillars of the government’s poverty reduction plan, which aims to “unleash the potential of women.” The Donor community is currently supporting the Ethiopian Ministry of Women’s Affairs through a Gender Pool Fund, and the technical working group on Gender Equality is providing technical and financial support to promote the advancement of Ethiopian women.
About the Royal Netherlands Embassy
The Netherlands has a longstanding development partnership with Ethiopia. The Netherlands’ bilateral development cooperation programme with Ethiopia focuses on three sectors: education; health; and rural economic development. Gender is a cross-cutting issue that is reflected in all three sectors. Furthermore, governance is an important area of Dutch development policy.
A new policy area for the Netherlands Government is private sector development. The Embassy is actively promoting the development of the horticulture/floriculture sector in Ethiopia. With obvious success: over forty Dutch entrepreneurs have already started operations throughout Ethiopia.
About UNFPA Ethiopia
UNFPA, the United Nations Population Fund, is an international development agency that promotes the right of every woman, man and child to enjoy a life of health and equal opportunity. UNFPA supports countries in using population data for policies and programmes to reduce poverty and to ensure that every pregnancy is wanted, every birth is safe, every young person is free of HIV/AIDS, and every girl and woman is treated with dignity and respect.
UNFPA in Ethiopia currently supports Gender as the third sub-programme of its sixth country programme. The gender programme includes capacity building and community-based interventions through the federal Ministry of Women’s Affairs; the Ministries of Health, Education, and Youth Services; and various Bureaus of Women’s Affairs all over the country. UNFPA Ethiopia consistently appeals to local and national leaders to vigorously enact and enforce laws and regulations that address discrimination and violence against women and girls, and to advance gender equality and human rights, including the right to sexual and reproductive health. UNFPA Ethiopia also supports innovative programmes in the areas of Early Marriage and advocacy on Gender Based Violence. The organisation is a lead partner in fostering coordination within the UN and with the national donor network in Gender programming.
Present in Ethiopia since 1973, the Fund ensures that population continues to be a key focus in the UN development assistance to the Government of Ethiopia.
For more information, please contact:
Yelfigne Abegaz, Gender & CSOs Senior Advisor, Netherlands Embassy; Tel 011 3 71 11 00 ext.218; email: [email protected]
Helen Amdemikael, Assistant Representative, UNFPA; Tel. 0115444468;
e-mail: [email protected]
UNITED NATIONS – The U.N. Security Council considered on Monday a plan to disband its peacekeeping mission to the volatile border between Eritrea and Ethiopia after Eritrea forced most of its troops to go home.
The 1,700-strong force could be replaced by a small military observer mission on the Ethiopian side of the border, under one proposal before the council in a draft resolution submitted by Belgium.
The council took no immediate decision and instructed experts to assess the options, diplomats said.
The United Nations withdrew its peacekeeping force, known as UNMEE, from the border in February after Eritrea cut off fuel supplies. The force had been in place since 2000 after a two-year war between the Horn of Africa neighbours that killed some 70,000 people.
Asmara is angry that the United Nations has been unable to enforce a ruling by an independent boundary commission awarding the bulk of disputed border territory to Eritrea.
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon warned in April that the withdrawal of UNMEE could spark renewed conflict on the 1,000-km (620-mile) frontier.
Brussels-based think-tank International Crisis Group said last week the armies of the feuding neighbours were “less than a football pitch” apart, risking a catastrophic new war.
The Belgian draft would end UNMEE’s mandate, which comes up for a regular renewal on July 31.
Variant proposals would then either set up a mission “to observe and report developments in the border area which could undermine the peace process” or leave it to Ban to come up with ideas for a follow-on to UNMEE.
In a letter to the Security Council, Ethiopian Prime Minister dictator Meles Zenawi said Addis Ababa was open to a U.N. presence on its territory provided it did not mean continuation of UNMEE “under a new arrangement.”
But Eritrean President Isaias Afwerki said the only answer was for Ethiopia to withdraw from “sovereign Eritrean territory” and that the United Nations could not legitimize Ethiopian “occupation” by its presence.
Copies of both letters were obtained by Reuters.
Asmara says a November 2007 “virtual demarcation” of the border by the now-defunct boundary commission ended the issue. Ethiopia says Eritrea is illegally massing troops on the border in a supposedly demilitarized zone and it wants to discuss the border demarcation further.
The Eritrea-Ethiopia dispute is part of a set of regional tensions that extends into Somalia, where Ethiopian troops are supporting an interim government, and into Djibouti, whose forces clashed with Eritrean troops earlier this month.
ADDIS ABABA – UNICEF Deputy Executive Director Hilde F.Johnson today appealed for a more robust and rapid response to the urgent needs of severely malnourished children in drought-affected areas of Ethiopia.
“It is our assessment that the situation in the hardest hit areas is extremely serious,” said Johnson. “Children are now at risk of dying in numbers in several areas if help is not provided urgently. The government and partners are doing their utmost to help, but needs are not being met,at present, with adequate speed. More resources need to be provided.”
Johnson spoke at the conclusion of a four day mission to Ethiopia which included visits to emergency hot-spots in drought-affected parts of the south.
“We talked to children, mothers and fathers, grandmothers and grandfathers and all actors in the field, the health officials of the zones, the health extension workers, the professionals deployed and key partners among the NGOs,” said Johnson. “This picture was confirmed by all of them, and a clear message was conveyed: There is no food. The assistance needs to be taken to scale, and it has to happen urgently.”
UNICEF’s Deputy Executive Director outlined the most critical and urgent steps for responding to the emergency starting with scaling up life-saving therapeutic feeding in all affected areas, with parallel scaling up of supplementary feeding.
“Supplementary feeding is a fundamental part of the response related to the survival of children,” said Johnson. “It is urgent that supplementary feeding in large quantities is provided in these areas, both to avoid children from falling into acute malnutrition, and to prevent those having undergone treatment from falling back into severe malnutrition.
The World Food Programme has started to receive resources, but as yet, has not got adequate support from donors to cater for these needs. It is critical that these needs are also met for the survival of children.”
Johnson also urged careful monitoring and addressing of health hazards that threaten child survival including Acute Watery Diarrhoea (AWD), pneumonia,measles and malaria. This will require emergency provisions of safe drinking water, as well as supporting sanitation and hygiene education,especially in areas of increased risk for disease transmission such as Therapeutic feeding-centres and stabilization-centres.
To cater for the needs as outlined in the requirement document of 12 June,UNICEF will need around 28 million USD.
Johnson noted reports of additional emergency hotspots in areas of Oromia,Somali and Southern Nations Nationalities and Peoples’ Region, as well as potential challenges in Amhara and southern Tigray.
With the harvest not due until late September, the emergency situation may worsen over the next three months. While steps are being taken by government to provide food supplies, present funding levels will only cater for half the food aid needs required for June and July.
“Our main concern is that lack of an adequate response in the short term can further exacerbate the situation for children,” said Johnson, “as they are also dependent on the availability of adequate food in their households.”
Should the situation worsen, we all need to be prepared. We need mitigating measures. “UNICEF is therefore committed to strengthen the monitoring and surveillance system and –capacity,” said Johnson. “This includes training of local government staff to address these dynamic and evolving emergency challenges. This is absolutely essential in view of the speed with which we have seen these life threatening conditions for children develop. The strategic pre-positioning of essential supplies for children, such as therapeutic food, essential medicines, water purification and sanitation materials is critical for our capacity to respond. This is high priority for us.”
These measures will enable us to respond adequately should the situation worsen the next critical months. At the moment, UNICEF does not have sufficient supplies available. We will ask donors for additional support to be able to put in place these critical mitigating measures. They amount to around USD 20 million.
Johnson reiterated UNICEF’s agreement with the Ethiopian government and partners on the present assessment of the food and nutrition situation in the country. In view of the rapidly evolving situation, she called for an urgent nationwide assessment of the nutrition situation covering all affected regions including pastoralist areas and in particular Somali region. At present it is agreed that 4.6 million people are in need of food aid, of which 75,000 children are directly affected by severe acute malnutrition.
ENDS
For further information please contact, Dr. Kerida McDonald, Chief, Communication Cluster, UNICEF Ethiopia, Tel: + 251 115 184018, email: [email protected], Indrias Getachew, Communication Officer, UNICEF Ethiopia, Tel: +251 115184026 email: [email protected]
ADDIS ABABA (IPS) – When it was announced last month that the ruling party of Prime Minister Meles Zenawi had swept local polls in this vast Horn of Africa nation, few expressed surprise.
Zenawi’s Ethiopian Peoples Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) coalition was declared by the country’s national electoral board to have won 559 districts in the kebele and woreda divisions of local government and all but one of 39 parliament seats contested in the by-election. Out of a total of 26 million registered voters, the electoral board claimed that 24.5 million, or 93 percent, voted.
April’s ballot was the first chance for the EPRDF to flex the muscles of its electoral machinery since general elections in May 2005. Though early returns that year suggested an electoral triumph for the country’s two main opposition parties, the Coalition for Unity and Democracy (CUD) and the United Ethiopian Democratic Forces (UEDF). Prime Minister Zenawi declared a state of emergency before final results were announced. In the unrest that followed, hundreds of people were arrested and at least 200 killed by Ethiopian security forces. Official results — not released until September — gave 59 percent of the total vote to the EPRDF.
Cries of fraud stained the reputation of one of Washington’s closest African allies. to whom, according to U.S. defense department figures, the Bush administration sold $6 million worth of weapons to in 2006, more armaments than went to any other African country. The weapons are used in part to aid Ethiopia in its war against Islamic militants based in neighboring Somalia, which Ethiopia invaded in late 2006 and where it remains involved in active combat to this day.
Some observers contend that this year’s ballot was even more compromised than the 2005 vote. With an estimated 3.6 million posts up for election, Ethiopia’s opposition parties were only able to register some 16,000 candidates due to obstacles placed in their path by the country’s electoral council. In response, the UEDF, now the largest opposition party in Ethiopia’s parliament, and the Oromo Federalist Democratic Movement (OFDM) — a political party claiming to represent the interests of the Oromo ethnic group (Ethiopia’s largest) — both boycotted the final round of voting.
Though international observers were not permitted, an electoral law passed in June allowed domestic organizations to formally monitor the ballot. However, local observers such as the Ethiopian Human Rights Council never received responses from the electoral board to their requests to monitor the elections.
One official at a foreign diplomatic mission in the capital, who surveyed polling places on the days of the vote, told IPS that “what we saw in Addis Ababa did not correspond” to 93 percent participation total announced by the electoral council.
“These elections weren’t even good enough to be rigged,” asserts Bulcha Demeksa, a former United Nations and World Bank official who currently leads the OFDM and serves in Ethiopia’s parliament. “A genuine dictatorship has been evolving.”
The situation of the Oromo people — who form the majority in Ethiopia’s largest and most populous state, Oromia — is but one of the thorny poltico-ethnic quandaries confronting Ethiopia’s ruling party today.
Running the gamut from the democratic advocacy of the OFDM to the violent militarism of the Oromo Liberation Front guerilla group, the struggle of the Oromo — the Oromo were conquered and consumed into the Amhara-Ethiopian empire emanating from the nation’s north near the end of the nineteenth century — has found echoes in other regional struggles in the country.
In the southeastern Ogaden region, which abuts volatile Somalia, the Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF) has been fighting to make the region an independent state since 1984. In a report earlier this month, New York-based Human Rights Watch has accused the Ethiopian government of having “deliberately and repeatedly attacked civilian populations in an effort to root out the insurgency.” The attacks were by way of reprisal following an ONLF attack on a Chinese-run oil installation in April 2007 that killed at least 70 Chinese and Ethiopian civilians.
Amidst such internal dissent, several areas of the country currently are on the brink of famine, with the Word Food Program currently estimating that, of Ethiopia’s 80 million citizens, 3.4 million will need emergency food relief from July to September, a number that comes in addition to the 8 million currently receiving assistance. (see Q&A: Ethiopia’s Urban Poor Cannot Afford To Eat)
Given such a volatile political landscape, some observers have looked upon the EPRDF’s crushing victory in the polls in an extremely circumspect manner.
“The complete lack of any semblance of organized opposition in most of the country reflects how difficult it is in Ethiopia for dissenting voices to emerge with out facing a huge level of harassment,” says Chris Albin-Lackey, senior researcher with the Africa Division of Human Rights Watch.
Albin-Lackey says that he regards the April ballot as “a stark illustration of just how far Ethiopia’s political space has been closed off since the limited opening that preceded that 2005 polls.”
The EPRDF has governed Ethiopia since 1991, when in its initial incarnation as a rebel army, it succeeded in ousting the violent Marxist military junta known as the Derg that had ruled the country since 1974.
In a statement put out before the April ballot, the EPRDF wrote that the vote “underscores the fact that the people and government of Ethiopia are making relentless effort toward the development and democratization of the nation.”
Another source of concern to observers is the Ethiopian government’s “Charities and Societies Proclamation,” a copy of which has been obtained by IPS.
The proposed law seeks to strip domestic civil society organization of access to foreign funding by defining a “foreign” organization operating in the country as any body that receive more than 10 percent of its funding from abroad or has any members who are foreign nationals.
Such “foreign” bodies are also thus barred from addressing such issues as human rights and governance in their work. Any foreign human rights organization seeking to conduct research in Ethiopia would have to obtain the written permission of the Ethiopian government. A Charities and Societies Agency composed entirely of government officials and appointees would be charged with overseeing domestic organizations, maintaining the power to curtail the activities of or disband such organizations at will should they be deemed to be “contrary to the public or national interest.”
Heavy fines and prison terms are mandated for those who contravene the new law, which bears more than a passing similarity to a draconian law overseeing civil society organizations passed by the government of Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe in 2004.
Ejegayehu Dibaba leads her sister Tirunesh (the eventual winner) and another Ethiopian runner, Ayalew Wude, in a 10,000-meter race in Addis Ababa during May’s African Athletics Championships
[Photo: Anita Powell / AP]
It is half an hour before dawn in the Ethiopian highlands, and most of the town of Bekoji still slumbers in the shadows of a 14,000-ft.-high (4,300 m high) volcano. On the streets, though, a silent army is on the move. More than a hundred boys and girls — many in bare feet, some no taller than the goats feeding by the roadside — gravitate toward a vast, grassy plateau on Bekoji’s outskirts. There, a man with a stopwatch, local running coach Santayehu Eshetu, is waiting. So intense is the hunger here for running — and its rewards — that Eshetu’s workouts, initially meant for 25 athletes, now draw 150 or more. Focused and serious, the runners listen to his words of guidance before taking off across the plateau, their feet slapping the earth in thunderous unison. “I have no doubt,” says Eshetu, “that one of these kids will be world champion.”
Anywhere else, that comment might be an idle boast. In Bekoji, it is a virtual guarantee. By an improbable quirk of history, this small community of farmers and herders along the Great Rift Valley (pop. 33,000) has become the world’s leading producer of distance runners. Many of the fastest male and female middle-distance runners on the planet hail from this patch of red earth 170 miles (280 km) south of the capital, Addis Ababa; the athletes attended the same primary school, trained with the same childhood coach and in two cases grew up in the same thatched-roof hut. Led by two sets of siblings — the Bekele brothers and the Dibaba sisters — Bekoji’s runners are poised to rack up medals at this summer’s Beijing Olympics. So many, in fact, that their medal count alone may well surpass that of many industrialized nations. It’s enough to make the hand-painted sign that greets visitors on the dirt road into Bekoji seem endearingly modest: WELCOME TO THE VILLAGE OF ATHLETES.
Born to Race
Bekoji ranks as one of sport’s great anomalies. Here, after all, is a rural African town where time almost stands still, where horse-drawn carts outnumber motor vehicles and neighbors greet each other by asking after their herds or crops. And yet its most famous products are Tirunesh Dibaba, a 23-year-old blur who smashed the women’s 5,000-meter world record in June by five seconds, and Kenenisa Bekele, 26, who has run the fastest times in human history at 5,000 and 10,000 meters. And they are just the beginning. Kenenisa’s 21-year-old brother, Tariku, is the current 3,000-meter world indoor champion, while Dibaba’s sisters, Ejegayehu and Ginzebe, are also world-class runners. Several other Bekoji natives are close on their heels, while hundreds of others — that silent army on the plateau — are striving to join them. “The tidal wave of runners from Bekoji is unstoppable,” says Karl Keirstead, a Canadian investment banker whose foundation, A Running Start, has helped build classrooms in Bekoji. “The physical conditions are just perfect for producing runners.”
It’s tempting, when breathing the thin air of Bekoji, to focus only on the confluence of geography and genetics. The town sits on the flank of a volcano nearly 10,000 ft. (3,000 m) above sea level, making daily life itself a kind of high-altitude training. Children in this region often start running at an early age, covering great distances to fetch water and firewood or to reach the nearest school. “Our natural talent begins at the age of 2,” says two-time Olympic gold medalist Haile Gebrselassie, 35, who grew up in a village about 30 miles (50 km) north of Bekoji. Gebrselassie, who set a new marathon world record last year, remembers running over six miles (10 km) to and from school every day carrying his books, leaving him with extraordinary stamina — and a distinctive crook in his left arm. Add to this early training the physique shared by many members of the Oromo ethnic group that predominates in the region — a short torso on disproportionately long legs — and you have the perfectly engineered distance runner.
No formula, however, can conjure up the desire that burns inside Bekoji’s young runners. Take the case of Million Abate, an 18-year-old who caught Eshetu’s attention last year when he sprinted to the finish of a 12-mile (19 km) training run with his bare feet bleeding profusely. The coach took off his own Nikes and handed them to the young runner. Today, as he serves customers injera, the spongy Ethiopian flat bread, at a local truckers’ motel, Abate is still wearing the coach’s shoes. They are his only pair, though he confesses a preference for running in bare feet. “Shoes affect my speed,” he says. And speed may be his only salvation. Forced to quit school in fifth grade after his father died, Abate worked as a shoe-shine boy before getting the motel job, which pays $9 a month. All along, he has never stopped running, chasing the dream of prosperity his mother imprinted on him shortly after his father’s death, when she changed his name from Damelach to Million.
A Place Called Hope
By Ethiopian standards, Bekoji is not a desperately poor town. The famine and malnutrition that stalk other parts of the country have bypassed this region of potato and barley farms. Still, families in Bekoji’s outlying villages often live hand to mouth, and distance running — like football elsewhere in Africa or baseball in the Dominican Republic — offers the younger generation one of the few ways out. Bekoji’s trailblazer was Tirunesh Dibaba’s aunt, Derartu Tulu, who left home to avoid an early arranged marriage and ended up a national hero, winning the 10,000-meter Olympic gold medals in 1992 and 2000. As a reward, the government gave her a lovely house behind a stand of eucalyptus trees on the runners’ plateau. Dibaba herself has used some of her millions of dollars in winnings to build her widowed father one of the only two-story houses in Bekoji (the only other is the Bekeles’). Though locals gawk admiringly, the mansion is often empty. Dibaba’s father prefers to stay in his old village tukul, or conical hut, where he can cook over an open fire and keep an eye on his herd of goats.
Motivated by such signs of success, thousands of kids from the villages surrounding Bekoji have moved into town in the past several years. Many of them rent dingy rooms for a few dollars a month and fill their bellies with what they call “counterfeit pasta” — rolled-up wheat paste eaten with a pinch of salt. Some, like Million Abate, work long hours at regular jobs. Others crowd the classrooms at Bekoji Elementary School, where both Dibaba and Bekele attended and where Eshetu worked until recently as a physical-education instructor. Enrollment at the school has tripled over the past 15 years, and many of the runners are too exhausted to concentrate. “It’s difficult to teach kids under these conditions,” says principal Toshaoma Ida’oo Gaaguroo. “But in terms of running,” he adds, with a rueful smile, “we could beat any school in the world.”
Nearly every aspiring runner in Bekoji hopes to train with Eshetu, a former footballer who, despite his affable demeanor, has earned a reputation for punishing workouts: endless double-hill climbs, zigzag sprints through dense forest, even trudges through mountain streams. “These kids are willing to do anything to succeed,” says Eshetu, who toned down his training regimens after one of his runners began urinating blood. Two years ago, the local government tapped Eshetu to lead a new initiative called the Bekoji Project. His job is to identify and train the town’s top 25 teenage prospects, though he still mentors a group of 30 younger runners and informally coaches 100 others, including Million Abate. During a workout one afternoon at Bekoji’s “stadium,” a modest oval track whose grass-covered bleachers are manicured by a few stray goats, Eshetu looks out over the crush of athletes. “Even like this,” he says, “I still have to turn away more than a hundred runners every year.”
Run for Your Life
It is make-or-break time for million Abate. Though he is now the third-fastest 1,500-meter runner in town, Abate knows, at age 18, that he needs to win a big race soon to get noticed by the powers that be in Addis Ababa. The brutal calculation of success and failure in Bekoji leaves very little room for error: he either makes it into Ethiopia’s élite, where he can finally live up to the promise of his name, or he returns to a life of subsistence farming. To free up more time to train, Abate has started working for no salary at all, just food and shelter. “I have so much stress,” Abate says, his eyes tearing up. “Coach tells me not to beat myself up so much. But I want to lift myself up in life, and I get very angry when I’m overtaken by a single step.” Pushed by anxiety and desire, Abate gets up extra early these days so that he can be the first to arrive on the plateau, before any hint of light has touched the morning sky.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This is a news from the Ministry of Information. It is a joke by Bereket Simon on the people of Ethiopia. Sialagitibin naw (ሲያላግጥብን ነው).
Torn up Ethiopian flag at Bole International Airport, June 2008
(ENA) — Preparation has been finalized to celebrate the first ever ‘Ethiopian Flag Day’ at national level on July 5, 2008.
At a relevant meeting held here on Wednesday it was disclosed that some 600,000 flags would be dispatched as of 19 June 2008. Additional some 400,000 flags would also be distributed in the metropolis and in the surrounding area of the city.
Compact Discs (CDs) that contain the national anthem of Ethiopia is under distribution among regional states as of June 18, 2008.
Information Minister, Berhan Hailu on the occasion said the message to be delivered on the day aims at reinvigorating the feeling of nationalism.
The National Millennium Celebration Secretariat, Deputy Director Gifti Abassiya on her part said the national flag, which is a symbol of the nations, nationalities, and peoples of Ethiopia, shall be promoted in a coordinated manner.
Director of the Addis Ababa City Millennium Secretariat, Kiros Hailesilssie said the secretariat is closely working with stakeholders to celebrate the day colorfully.
A representative from Hayat S. C, a real estate business company, said the company is also carrying out the distribution of the national flags and CDs.
The company has already allocated 5 million Birr for the same cause.
