By Allan Odhiambo and Zeddy Sambu
Business Daily Africa
As the race for contract stakes in the planned seven billion dollar new railway lines to link Kenya with key regional capitals begins in earnest, groups of international investors are now angling to be incorporated in the initial design study.
Though no concrete deals have been reached so far, sources in Government said a team of Chinese investors have already expressed interest in the design study of the planned new line between the Port of Mombasa and Nairobi while another group of investors from Russia are eyeing to carry out the task on the section between Nairobi and the Addis Ababa.
“The offers are coming through, the interest is great but no agreement has been reached with any group so far. Some thing will be on the table soon,” a senior official at the Transport ministry told Business Daily.
According to plans, Kenya envisaged to have a detailed design study for the phase one Mombasa to Malaba railway section by July 2009 to pave way for a decision on funding and operational structure.
The project implementation is scheduled to kick off by end of 2009 as part of a wider East Africa infrastructure development venture that targets to build 15 new railway lines connecting at least seven countries.
EDITOR’S NOTE: The following report is by Woyanne regime mouthpiece Walta Info Center (WIC). It talks about meat export while people in the country eat food in shifts and children are quitting school because they are too weak to learn. Ethiopia is currently being governed by some of the dumbest people on earth. Professor Kanazawa of London School of Economics must have based his study on officials of the Woyanne regime when he stated in his paper that Ethiopia is a country with the lowest IQ in the world. Only the dumbest of the dumb would export food when his own people starve.
Efforts underway to raise annual meat export to 30,000 tons
Addis Ababa, September 18 (WIC) – The Ethiopian Meat and Dairy Technology Institute said it has been undertaking capacity building activities that help achieve the plan set by the government to raise the annual meat export of the country to 30,000 tons from 6,000.
Institute Director General, Dr Ameha Sebsibe, made the remark at a training program on Ethiopian beef fabrication organized here by the Ethiopian Sanitary and Phytosanitary Standards and Livestock and Meat Marketing Program (SPS-LMM), in collaboration with The Ethiopian Meat and Dairy Technology Institute.
Dr Ameha said a capacity building is necessary to raise Ethiopian beef fabrication up to the international standard in order to attain the government meat export target.
Ethiopia is exporting about 6,000 tons of meat at present and most of the meat being exported comes from goat and sheep, Dr Ameha said, adding that the meat being exported from livestock does not satisfy the international standard.
Accordingly, the Institute has been providing support to investors engaged in the sector to boost meat export through raising productivity and beef fabrication standards, he said, adding that the Institute has been providing training that focuses on beef fabrication to experts drawn from 10 abattoirs.
The training is being given by a professor who has come from Texas A&M University, USA, and it will help bring the Ethiopian beef fabrication up to the international standard, thereby attracting new clients and raising foreign exchange earnings, according to Dr Ameha.
Ethiopian Sanitary and Phytosanitary Standards and Livestock and Meat Marketing Program (SPS-LMM) Deputy Chief of Party, Belachew Hurisa, on his part said that SPS-LMM has been exerting efforts to create a conducive situation to make Ethiopian animal and animal products competent in the international market.
Accordingly, SPS-LMM has been engaged in activities to enable the beef fabrication of export abattoirs meet the demand of the market.
Training of trainers is therefore being given for 21 experts drawn from 10 abattoirs. The training is aimed at enhancing the standard and amount of the nation’s meat export, he noted.
Ager [left], 15 years old, inside her hut with her mother, Alem Tesfu and her father Mashresha Bericun in Kosoamba, Ethiopia [Photo: JOSE CENDON] Until two years ago, before the rains failed and the price of maize tripled, Alem Tesfu dreamt that her daughter Ager would one day finish her education at the village school and start work as a nurse.
By Nick Meo, telegraph.co.uk
KOSO AMBA, ETHIOPIA – “We used to pray to God that Ager would study hard and make something of herself so she could serve her community,” Mrs Tesfu said. “Now our animals are all dead and we eat only one meal a day. We just pray that we will not starve.”
Ager now spends her days foraging for edible weeds, while her schoolbooks hang in a plastic bag in the family’s thatched hut, a reminder of her ambitions.
This year, slums and villages across Africa have similar stories to tell of dreams ruined by hunger. With global food and fuel prices surging, children have been taken out of school and put to work by desperate parents. The future of one of the continent’s great development success stories – education – is in doubt.
Nowhere have the effects been crueller than in Ethiopia, coming at the same time as the return of the droughts that caused the notorious famine of 1984.
With healthy economic growth, more than nine out of 10 children of primary school age in education, and massive improvement in infrastructure, until two years ago Ethiopia had been an example for the rest of Africa. Lauded by Britain, the country at last had a future that looked bright.
Now, though, price rises of 250-300 per cent have threatened to wreck many of its hard-won achievements.
The cost that hunger has already exacted in Mrs Tesfu’s district of Kosoamba in the Ethiopian highlands was spelt out bleakly by the local school director, Chane Hailu. An idealistic teacher, he gave up city life to teach here, hoping to bring the benefits of education to one of Ethiopia’s most backward corners. Now he finds once-full classrooms are half-empty.
“We are trying to educate a new generation of Ethiopians, to drag these communities out of their poverty and to teach farmers how to make a decent living,” he said.
“If the children are too weak or too poor to come to school, we are losing all that. If that happens this generation will not be the one that changes Ethiopia for the better.”
So far mass starvation has been held at bay in Ethiopia’s highlands, although the government admits that 4.6 million are at risk of famine countrywide. Aid agencies believe the number is closer to 10 million, and fear the famine could soon become much worse. That fear eats away at the residents of Kosoamba, where they dread what could happen if, next February, the rains fail for the third year.
On a day of bright sunshine and scudding clouds last week, the grasslands around the village looked remarkably like the North Yorkshire moors, with dry stone walls, skylarks and bleating lambs.
But until recent years local villages, with round thatched huts and ragged men clad in patched clothes, were places of medieval poverty. Farmers toiled with crude wooden ploughs, watching the heavens and praying for rain.
New clinics and schools that have arrived in the past 15 years have transformed life, cutting mortality rates and educating the children of illiterate farmers for the first time.
Hunger threatens to undo all that, with youngsters now out foraging and working in the fields. In the past few months several dozen have died of dysentery.
The price rises, on top of drought, are having a dire effect on education across Ethiopia and forcing cruel choices on families, according to Matt Hobson, a food expert from Save the Children UK who is based in Addis Ababa.
“These rises are a massive hit for families and something has to give,” he said “It is usually schooling or health care.”
Officials in the village estimated that about 100 of the district’s 700 children show signs of serious malnourishment, a prelude, if the famine worsens, of death.
One 11-year-old, Tesmegen Worku, had pale blotches on his face, a sign of malnutrition which the villagers call “itch”.
The boy used to go to school, but now he herds skinny cows and sheep for one of the wealthier villagers in return for a daily bowl of maize porridge. He said that he felt hungry nearly all the time, and disliked the long, boring hours with the animals.
The job is dangerous because of hyenas, which have killed many animals that are too weak to escape.
The biggest fear of the child herdsmen is that one day they will themselves be eaten if they are too weak to fight off the predators. Local elders, hunched into a circle and draped in blankets, endlessly discuss the vagaries of
Ethiopia’s food market with the expertise and anxiety of Wall Street traders.
Cruelly for them, although food prices have rocketed, nobody wants to buy their scrawny livestock, most of which is too weak to survive the long journey to a city market anyway.
The village’s altitude at nearly 10,000ft is so high that the only crop they can grow is barley, which is dependent on winter rains called the belg which have failed for two years running.
Ironically, the summer rains were good this year, so the village is green and pleasant, but it is too late in the season for barley to ripen.
Next year they will be in real trouble. Nearly all the village’s seed has been eaten, and many rely on government handouts and help from a Save the Children development project.
One of the better-off villagers, Besfat Bisat, headman of the hamlet of Ataguay, had to take four of his teenage sons out of school and send them to a nearby town to work as day labourers on a new road.
With a shudder, he remembers 1984. For the first few months of the famine he
carried his neighbours’ bodies to the little church graveyard near the village, then as his own strength waned he buried them where they fell. Finally, when the survivors had no energy left, the dead were simply left.
“In 1984 those who had cash could buy food, but now it is simply too expensive,” he said.
“What is keeping us alive now is that our government is trying to help us, but we worry about what will happen if the support comes too late.
“If the spring rains come the next harvest will be in August, but only God knows if we can wait that long. If there is no rain next spring, our fates will be clear. We will die.”
