Saturday, Dec. 22, 2007
Kinijit Youth League officials will be interviewed by Ethiopian Review.
Time: 2:00 PM
Click here to listen live: Ethiopian Review Radio Network
Addis Dimts Radio will interview Addis Ababa Mayor-Elect Dr Berhanu Nega.
Time: 3:00 PM
Click here to listen live: Addis Dimts Radio
ADDIS ABABA (AFP) — The World Bank has approved a 41-million dollar loan to finance electricity connection between neighbouring Ethiopia and Sudan, a statement said Friday.
The transmission line from the Ethiopian towns of Bahir-Dar and Metema to the Sudanese frontier to connect the countries’ grids will be funded by the bank’s International Development Association.
Only six percent of Ethiopia’s 77 million people have access to power, while just 22 percent of Sudanese have electricity.
Press Release No:2008/169/AFR
Contacts
In Washington: Timothy Carrrington (202) 473 8133
[email protected]
In Addis Ababa: Gelila Woodeneh (251-1) 517 60 00
[email protected]
WASHINGTON, December 20, 2007 – The World Bank’s Board of Executive Directors today approved a US$215 million International Development Association (IDA) grant to the Government of Ethiopia to continue protecting and promoting the delivery of basic services by sub-national governments while deepening transparency and local accountability in service delivery. The current financing supplements the US$215 million already committed over the past 18 months of implementation of the Ethiopia Protection of Basic Services (PBS) Program, bringing the total IDA financing of the PBS project to US$430 million.
The project has the following components:
Component 1 – Basic-Services Program, comprises two sub-components:
Subcomponent 1(a)—Promoting the Delivery of Basic Services by Sub-national governments—will continue to support the delivery of basic services (in health, education, agriculture and natural resources, including water) provided by regional and local governments.
Subcomponent 1(b)—Pilot Local Investment Grant (LIG)—will support the scaling-up of the Program’s impact on local service delivery. This new subcomponent will support the introduction, on a pilot basis, of a Federal Specific Purpose Grant (SPG) to regions to be used exclusively for capital investment implemented by local governments in support of the delivery of basic services.
Component 2—Promoting the Health Millennium Development Goals—will continue the thrust of the PBS Project towards accelerating and sustaining malaria control, reducing infant mortality through vaccines, improving the delivery of primary health services, strengthening of family planning, as well as capacity building and strengthening the health system.
Component 3—Strengthening Governance Systems on Financial Transparency and Accountability—will continue to support activities at the Region/City Administrations, local government, and community levels to enhance transparency around public budget procedures and foster broad engagement of citizen representative groups and citizens more broadly on public budget processes and public service delivery. This component will also continue to support various institutional capacity building activities, support to improving the public financial management system, monitoring and evaluation activities, and an assessment of the technical quality of infrastructure for the new Pilot LIG Subcomponent.
Component 4—Social Accountability—supports capacity building for, and the piloting of, selected approaches to strengthen voice and client power of citizens in the context of decentralized service delivery, and to also build the capacity of citizens to engage in public budgeting processes. This component is financed by a Multi-Donor Trust Fund administered by the World Bank and provides direct financing to civil society organizations using a non-government Management entity.
The Additional Financing of US$215 million would address the financing gap largely associated with the completion of core activities under the existing Component 1 – Promoting the Delivery of Basic Services by Sub-national governments, and Component 2 – Promoting the Health Millennium Development Goal (MDG), of the Project.
In approving the additional financing, the World Bank’s Executive Board recognized and appreciated the impressive impact the PBS is having on the expansion of basic services in Ethiopia, the strong commitment that the Government has demonstrated in expanding pro-poor public services, and this being a good example of result-focused donor harmonization in an area that is so central to achievement of the MDGs.
“The PBS is pushing the frontier in terms of improving service delivery on a large-scale and making it more accountable to the people,” said Kenichi Ohashi, the World Bank’s Country Director for Ethiopia and Sudan. “The challenges are significant but these are the building blocks for true local empowerment. The international community looks forward to a sustained national effort to reach the MDGs and to do it in a way which taps into the potential of local communities in making decisions that affect the lives of themselves and their children.”
In earmarking local government grants for essential services in health, education, agriculture and water, the Protection of Basic Services Program requires strict reporting on how funds are allocated and spent. The plan applies four tests: fairness, to ensure that services are disbursed without partisan or political bias; sound fiduciary management, to guarantee that resources support the intended goals; “additionality,” to ensure that the Ethiopian government’s ongoing funding of basic services isn’t reduced; and accountability, so that citizens are fully informed and allowed to participate in decisions affecting their access to critical services. Disbursements under the PBS program can be halted if there are significant shortcomings in meeting the four tests.
The PBS project is supported by a broad coalition of development partners including the African Development Bank (AfDB), Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), Britain’s Department for International Development (DFID), the European Commission (EC), Irish Aid, Germany’s KfW, the Netherlands, and the World Bank. The development partners have contributed over US$800 million thus far via the original PBS, with additional financing of approximately US$375 million expected of which the World Bank is providing US$215 million. The Government and the international community have agreed that these additional funds will be utilized for the next year, during which time preparations will be launched to develop a successor to the PBS in support of decentralized service delivery for the medium-term.
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For more information on the World Bank’s work in sub-Saharan Africa, visit www.worldbank.org/africa
For more information on the International Development Association, visit www.worldbank.org/ida
For more information on the World Bank’s work in Ethiopia, please visit www.worldbank.org/et
For more information, please visit the Projects website
Woyanne-backed Eritrean opposition urges the overthrow of President Isayas Afeworki for being ‘pro-Ethiopia’
(Reuters) Addis Ababa – Eritrean opposition groups should help each other bring down the pro-Ethiopian government of President Isaias Afwerki, the Woyanne-owned Walta News Agency quoted one opposition leader as saying on Friday.
“Eritrean opposition parties should unite in their struggle to overthrow the government in Asmara which is pushing the people to servitude and economic crisis”, the head of the Eritrean Peoples Democratic Front (EPDF), Tewolde Gebre-Selassie, was quoted as saying.
Several opposition groups met in the historic northern city of Axum in Ethiopia, which has bitter ties with neighbour Eritrea. The pair fought a war in 1998 to 2000.
Eritrean opposition leaders from the United States, Germany, Sweden and Sudan were at the unprecedented three-day meeting, the news agency said.
The EPDF head said Afwerki’s government was leading its people “to war and a dreadful socio-economic and political crisis” and had lost support at home and abroad while turning Eritrea into a “virtual prison”.
The executive committee of the Coalition for Unity and Democracy Party (Kinijit) has opened a new office in Addis Ababa. The address of the new office has not been disclosed yet for security purposes, but the Kinijit Central Council will meet there soon, according to the officials. Read more in Amharic from zikkir News Service here.
By Elizabeth Blunt
BBC News, Mekelle, Ethiopia
The mountains of eastern Tigray in Ethiopia are bare and brown just three months after the end of the rains.
The people in the region are skilled farmers and hard workers but even they struggle to support their families from their tiny patches of worn-out land.
The answer used to lie across the border in Eritrea – more developed and industrialised and with two good ports, Ethiopia’s outlets to the sea.
The older farmers remember the days when they used to work on their farms until the harvest was in and then go as seasonal migrant labour to Eritrea.
It was an easy journey to make. The people on the other side of the border were like themselves, Christian highlanders, speaking a similar language.
The Eritrean capital, Asmara, was far easier to get to and more familiar than the distant Ethiopia capital, Addis Ababa.
Families intermarried.
Even today, many Tigrayans have friends and family in Eritrea, relatives they no longer see, cannot phone and can write to only courtesy of the Red Cross.
Barrier of steel
In a continent of notoriously porous borders, an impenetrable barrier has come down between Ethiopia and Eritrea and nowhere is this felt more acutely than in Tigray.
Its history, its economy – everything in Tigray is intertwined with and affected by what lies on the other side of the border.
The last war with Eritrea hit the region hard.
Not only was the war fought on the edge of its territory but Tigrayans suffered heavy casualties.
Its regional militia was involved as a well as the national army and the authorities here reckon that a third of those killed and wounded in the fighting came from their region.
Economically the war was a disaster.
The overthrow of Ethiopia’s Marxist military government had brought peace to Tigray in the early 1990s after a long guerrilla war.
New businesses opened and new hotels were built, only to close their doors from lack of business as soon as the war broke out.
Trade barrier
Worse still, even after the war was over the border stayed closed.
The region’s Vice-President, Abadi Zemo, says this makes promoting economic development very difficult.
“Tigray is located up in the north. We have an advantage – we are located much closer to the sea than other towns.
“But having this situation between us and Eritrea, it has put us in a very odd situation,” he says.
“An investor, when he comes to Tigray, he sees there is no war and there is no peace – that investor prefers to invest in the south.
“Had it been normal, Tigray might have been the best region in Ethiopia for investment.”
“It’s hard”, he says, “to persuade investors to come in, when the border is still closed and there is always, hanging over Tigray, the threat of another war.”
Despite this, the regional capital, Mekelle, is a busy little town and its own businessmen have had the confidence to come together and begin building a massive new shopping and office complex.
Old fighter
From inside Mekelle it is almost possible to forget the military situation along the border.
A substantial part of Ethiopia’s very large standing army is stationed in Tigray but those camps are well away from the town.
The United Nations has a peacekeeping force here too – but that is up on the border.
In Mekelle itself there is just a small liaison office, a few white-painted UN vehicles in the streets, occasionally a white-painted helicopter circling overhead.
The fact that the UN peacekeepers are still in place – at least until their mandate is next reviewed at the end of January – makes Tigrayans feel a little safer.
But still they worry about the future.
Abadi Zemo was a fighter himself once, before the government in Addis Ababa was overthrown and he became Tigray’s vice-president.
He knows the range of an AK-47 down to the nearest metre.
And he knows that on some parts of the border the two armies are so close that one slipped safety-catch, one stray bullet, one single soldier, could spark a new conflict.
“Imagine – 500m,” he says.
“Just, you know a Kalashnikov, and a soldier, a simple soldier. The range of a Kalashnikov? That would be 900m, perhaps 1,000m.”
The vice-president laughs at having given himself away as an old fighter, but he knows that one slipped safety catch, one stray bullet, and that simple soldier could start a new conflict.