In a bid to accelerate the pace of the construction of Ethiopia’s strategic dam, the country has contracted the services of two Chinese companies.
The Ethiopian Electric Power (EEP) on signed on Tuesday 19 February a contract worth $40m with China Gezhouba Group Co., Ltd (CGGC). CGCG will henceforth handle the pre-commissioning activities at the dam, that is expected to be operational by 2020.
The EEP also signed a contract worth $113m with Voith Hydro Shanghai, that includes the electrical, mechanical, and various civil/structural works required to complete the construction of the generating station and spillways of GERD.
The 6,000-megawatt Grand Renaissance Dam is the centrepiece of Ethiopia’s bid to become Africa’s biggest power exporter.
Last year, Ethiopia’s prime minister Abiy Ahmed cancelled the contract of a state-run military conglomerate, Metals and Engineering Corporation (METEC), to build the dam’s turbines.
Abiy said at the time that not a single turbine was operational more than seven years after the government awarded the contract to METEC.
The dam has also been a source of friction between Egypt and Ethiopia, as Egypt fears the project will reduce waters that run to its fields and reservoirs from the Nile river in Ethiopia’s highlands and via Sudan.
The country is determined to build GERD because fighting poverty is a matter of survival to its people while respecting the principles of posing no-significant harm and equitable use of transboundary resources.
Studies conducted for half a century have found out that the dam has many blessings to offer to both Sudan and Egypt – be it in reducing sedimentation at Roseries Dam and protecting frequent flooding in Sudan, increasing the water levels at Aswan High Dam, not to mention its impacts in ensuring regulated flow of water in the Nile course.
A Tripartite Infrastructure Fund that to deal with issues relating to the GERD was established in May last year, in addition to a resolution to regularise the summit of the leaders, to be held every six months alternately in the capitals of the three countries.
During an official visit to Ethiopia, Anton Caragea, President of the European Council on Tourism and Trade, signed the official decision naming Addis Ababa as World Capital of Culture and Tourism.
The Government of Ethiopia and the Government of Addis Ababa are currently implementing many strategic measures to further develop the country’s tourism sector, including investment in infrastructure and capacity building on destination management and product development, through the recently established Tourism Transformation Council.
These measures reflect that tourism is firmly established among the development drivers of the country. European Council on Tourism and Trade President Dr Anton Caragea commended Ethiopia for the political support awarded to the tourism sector and in particular for integrating tourism as part of its development policy.
In 2015, after the decision of the European Council on Tourism and Trade to select Ethiopia as the World Best Tourist Destination, the country registered an influx of over 1 million tourists and earned more than 2 billion dollars in the 2015/2016 tourism year, numbers never achieved before in Ethiopia’s tourism history.
The decision to inscribe Addis Ababa as a World Capital of Culture and Tourism will undoubtedly give a new impetus to tourism in the country.
The LOW building of the European Parliament in Strasbourg at sunset
The European Parliament is planning a bigger footprint around the world.
Senior members of the assembly agreed at a closed-door meeting this week to approve plans to send permanent staff to Indonesia, Ethiopia and New York.
The Parliament staffers will work at the EU delegation in Jakarta, the headquarters of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (also in Jakarta), the headquarters of the African Union, in Addis Ababa, as well as the EU delegation to the United Nations in New York.
The Parliament also discussed sending staff to Brazil and India, and recently appointed an official to head the Parliament’s office in London ahead of its scheduled departure from the EU on March 29.
The move “would entail limited additional costs,” the note said, and the “number of permanent staff would vary from 2 to 4.”
The decision to send staff beyond EU borders is part of a plan by Klaus Welle, the assembly’s secretary-general, to “strengthen Parliament’s activity and diplomatic presence in the world”.
The European Union is already represented in some 140 delegations and offices around the world, thanks to the European External Action Service.
Staffers from the Parliament have “broad knowledge of parliamentary procedures and parliamentary diplomacy,” the note said, and could “complement the activities of the Commission and the EEAS in engaging the parliamentary dimension of regional bodies.”
“The composition of the EEAS reflects staff expertise exclusively coming from the Council of the European Union, the European Commission and Member States’ diplomatic services,” according to the note.
The Parliament has prioritized Indonesia, Ethiopia and New York because they are the seats of “multilateral parliamentary assemblies and international organisations.”
But “enlarging the initiative to other continental democracies, such as for example Brazil and India, could be considered at a later stage.”
Ethiopia and Djibouti signed an agreement on Friday for the installation of 765 kilometres gas pipelines between the two countries. When completed in 2020, the pipeline will enable Ethiopia to sell its gas resource from Calub and Hilala fields in the Ogaden area of Somali Region via Djibouti Port.
Calub and Hilala fields have deposits of 4.7 trillion cubic feet of gas and 13.6 million barrels of associated liquids, both discovered in the 1970s but not yet exploited.
The agreement between Djibouti and Ethiopia comes more than a year after POLY-GCL signed a memorandum of understanding with Djibouti to invest $4 billion to build the natural gas pipeline, a liquefaction plant and an export terminal to be located in Damerjog, near the country’s border with Somalia.
Ethiopia and Djibouti are already connected via railway, electricity and water supply.
Ethiopia expects over one billion dollars annual income by selling gas to the global market.
Africa’s eastern seaboard could soon become a major global producer of liquefied natural gas, with other planned projects based on big gas finds made in Tanzania and Mozambique.
Ethiopia, Africa’s biggest coffee producer, is introducing production and marketing reforms that could triple its output in five years.
The country is replacing old trees and cutting existing ones to allow new stems to sprout as ageing trees become less productive.
That could help boost output to between 1.2 million tons and 1.8 million tons by 2024, up from an estimated 600,000 tons in the recent harvest, Bloomberg quoted the Ethiopian Coffee and Tea Authority as saying.
Old trees account for about 60 percent of the 1 million hectares (2.5 million acres) of trees in production, while another 1.5 million hectares aren’t yet yielding beans, according to the authority.
New trees in the country, where smallholders account for almost all output, take about three to four years to start producing.
The government, non-governmental organizations and research centers are helping to implement the changes, Adugna Debela, director general of the authority, said Thursday in an interview in the Rwandan capital, Kigali.
Marketing reforms are helping producers skip some stages of the supply chain, Adugna said. That will help increase income for farmers, who currently receive about 60 percent of the price of coffee, he said.
“Under the new reforms, farmers can directly export,” he said. “We are creating awareness and this will be materialized this production year.”
Ethiopia exports the bulk of its beans to Europe and the U.S., and is trying to tap new markets in Asia, especially China, South Korea and Japan, Bote said.
China has the potential to take half of Ethiopia’s shipments, he said.
The United States launched yesterday a new five-year 40 million US dollars Health Financing Improvement Program to invest in expanding Ethiopia’s capacity to provide quality affordable healthcare to citizens across the country.
Under the new program, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) will work with the Ministry of Health to strengthen policy and financing reforms that will enable public and private entities to better provide primary health services while reducing out-of-pocket expenses for Ethiopians.
Over the next five years, the new program will focus on mobilizing increased domestic resources and streamlining medical insurance schemes to expand coverage to millions of people.
The project will also work with public and private healthcare providers to better utilize resources and revenues to finance their services.
USAID’s Health Financing Improvement Program builds upon the successes of earlier investments like USAID’s community-based health insurance initiative, which currently provides medical coverage to nearly 20 million Ethiopians nationwide.
USAID Mission Director Leslie Reed remarked, “We look forward to continuing our joint work to tackle the challenges facing health financing as part of overall efforts to build a truly sustainable and resilient health system in Ethiopia.
Together, we can show other developing countries around the world that with the right political will and commitment, it is possible to lay the promising foundation to a self-reliant healthcare system, capable of providing high-quality health services to all citizens in every corner of the country.”
U.S. development programs like the Health Financing Improvement program invest in the capacity of Ethiopian institutions and the Ethiopian people to address their own needs and become stronger partners.
The United States is the largest bilateral donor to Ethiopia’s health sector, with approximately 150 million US dollars per year in funding for HIV/AIDS; malaria; maternal, neonatal and child health; nutrition; tuberculosis; and water, sanitation and hygiene.
Overall, the United States has provided over $4 billion in development and humanitarian assistance to Ethiopia over the past five years.
Ethiopia and Luxembourg have agreed to strengthen cooperation on both bilateral and multilateral venues.
This agreement was made during a meeting between Minister of Foreign Affairs, Dr Workneh Gebeyehu and the Foreign Minister of Luxembourg, Jean Assselborn, yesterday.
Both parties highlighted the importance of enhancing bilateral relations and other multilateral issues including migration and refugee management.
“In such score, Minister Workneh took note of Ethiopia’s refugee law, which he described as one of the most progressive refugee policies in Africa and beyond. Dr Workneh also acknowledged Luxemburg’s support for the EU-Africa Strategic Partnership,
Minister Assselborn expressed his country’s keenness to further boost relations with Ethiopia.
On his four-day visit to Ethiopia, UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi praised the country’s generosity towards hosting refugees, as well as the government’s openness to new and innovative approaches to improve the lives of the more than 900,000 refugees and the communities hosting them.
The High Commissioner spent two days in Melkadida, a region bordering Somalia, which hosts over 200,000 refugees.
He also visited markets supported by microfinance and other economic empowerment programmes, where refugees and the local community buy and sell their crops. The programme has been so successful that some of the crops are being exported to other regions in the country. Refugees told the High Commissioner that they are saving some of their income to improve the markets themselves.
“The host community are welcoming us, and we are welcoming them.”
“What has developed here is a unique approach to self-reliance of refugees where the government of Ethiopia has been extremely open to new approaches,” said Grandi. “The host communities and refugees have also been remarkably open to working together in harmony. This is something we don’t normally see.”
At a meeting with community leaders in Dollo Ado, the High Commissioner and IKEA Foundation CEO Per Heggenes heard about how the investment has had a positive impact on the entire community. They also announced that the Foundation has decided to extend their investment in the project for at least three more years to ensure the community can sustain it independently.
Heggenes, who noted that the area was in a dire situation when the project began, calls the progress he has witnessed “a dream come true.” He said its legacy is as much about helping foster harmony between the refugees and the local Ethiopians, as it is about growing the economy.
“What always happens when large numbers of refugees descend on a small community is it creates conflicts, because everyone wants to have the firewood, everyone wants to have the grazing land for their goats,” said Heggenes. “We approached this in a way to say we’re going to help the refugees and the host community come together, farm the land together, share the crops and live as sisters and brothers.”
At the Melkadida Camp, the High Commissioner visited another project that the IKEA Foundation invested in – a secondary school, where refugee and host community students have access to quality teachers, well-equipped classrooms and a supportive learning environment.
For those that graduate, there is an opportunity to attend a new teacher’s college in Melkadida, also thanks to IKEA Foundation funding, with the goal of giving young people the opportunity to become professionally qualified teachers and to help shape the next generation of students in the region.
One of those students, 19-year-old Fartun who is in her last year of secondary school and hopes to attend university to study medicine, told the High Commissioner and Heggeness that she hopes the rest of Ethiopia can learn from how education can be a crucial tool to bring peace and harmony between communities.
“I have refugee friends and friends from the host community,“ she says. “ We study together and it makes no difference. The host community are welcoming us, and we are welcoming them.”
“It is important that we share this solidarity.”
“I have been in the most remote villages of this continent where sharing the little food, water and shelter that people have with foreigners that are in distress because they had to flee, is not like in other richer parts of the world. It’s not the subject of political negotiations but is a natural instinct rooted in the absolute values of a tradition of a culture and of a society,” Grandi said in an interview.
“This solidarity is there. People have it naturally. But we should not take it for granted. It is important that we share this solidarity.”
Throughout his visit, the High Commissioner spoke about the importance of the Global Compact on Refugees, adopted by the UN General Assembly last December, which calls for more inclusion of refugees in communities where they reside and more global support for countries like Ethiopia, who continue to welcome and host them.
“This the first year we’re going to implement the Global Compact on Refugees,“ Grandi said. “But I tell people we’re already implementing it here in Melkadida, with multiple partners and development partners from programmes in irrigation, vocation, educational training.”
While in Addis, the High Commissioner also met with President Sahle-Work Zewde, as well as Ato Kebede, the Director General of the government’s refugee agency ARRA, where he praised Ethiopia’s new refugee law as forward-looking and representing the principles of the Global Compact on Refugees.
Addressing the media following his meeting with the President, Grandi said “the proclamation is one of the best refugee laws, not only in Africa, but in the world,” and pledged to mobilize more resources for development, “not just for refugees, but also for their hosts.”
The road connecting Ethiopia and Kenya has raised trade by 400 percent between the countries, according to the African Development Bank (AfDB).
In an exclusive interview with ENA, AfDB President Akinwumi A. Adesina said the bank is financing transport and energy infrastructures and building new agro-industrial parks to promote Ethiopia’s economy.
AfDB is delighted to have funded the road that links Ethiopia all the way to Mombasa, Kenya, he added.
“That road alone has allowed trade between Ethiopia and Kenya to rise by 400 percent, and has also provided Ethiopia with access to the port,” Adesina pointed out.
According to him, the bank is also financing Ethiopia’s hydropower generation, power transmission lines, and infrastructure linking Hawassa Industrial Park to Djibouti as well as the new agro-industrial parks to promote value addition.
The government of Ethiopia has been doing very well in investing in hydroelectric power, the president said, describing the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam as “a major accomplishment.”
Adesina expressed his amazement by saying, “I have never seen any other African country invest more in infrastructure than this country.”
“This is the country that has experienced economic growth rate over 10 percent for over a decade and even last year (it) had 7.7 percent GDP growth rate which is amusing against the context of the global growth rate of about 3 percent. This is a phenomenal performance that you have in Ethiopia,” the president stated.
“I will tell you one thing that never makes me nervous about Ethiopia. If you ever watch Olympics and you see people that run long distances without getting tired, they are Ethiopians; right? So I think Ethiopians always know how to face challenges, and I am sure that is one you will cope with as well.”
Obviously, given the history of Ethiopia, where the public sector does a lot of things, the president stated that “with the bold move of opening up the economy for the private sector, the economy will even grow faster with liberalization.”
Describing the private sector as a key potential to economic growth, Adesina noted that it is critical to unlocking the potential through creating a good environment as well as right business and investment regulatory bodies.
Furthermore, he pointed out that AfDB will invest in transforming Ethiopia’s rural economy into zones of economic prosperity.
“All in all, we are great partners with Ethiopia, but most importantly Ethiopians by themselves are doing great all by themselves. We can only help to support what they are doing,” President Adesina concluded.
This biweekly bulletin is prepared by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ethiopia in view of informing the public and the diplomatic community on investment, trade, technology transfer and tourism activities undertaken by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs as well as the opportunities in those sectors.
This edition includes articles (on pages 4-5) about Ethiopia’s presence at the annual tourism expo of Luxembourg, known as LUXEXPO, and the colourful promotion of tourism in Ethiopia at the Brussels holiday fair “Salon des Vacances” from 7-10 February 2019.
