Flooding in Ethiopia’s western Gambella region has killed three people, displaced thousands and destroyed crops, an official said on Monday.
Thanks to global prices hikes, life in Addis Ababa just got harder for the cappuccino crowd, writes Lemlem Tilahun.
The green highlands of West Badawacho in south-west Ethiopia are not a place where you would expect to find hunger. The land is fertile and lush.
A single mother — desperate to get her only child some more food –offers to give him away to an aid worker. That is how bad the situation is.
The UN urgently needs -million to avert a major food crisis in Ethiopia, where millions are struggling to cope with drought, it said on Monday.
Hussein Ibrahim walked solemnly past tidy rows of bright green cabbages, vines bursting with tomatoes and trees weighed down with plump avocados.
Ethiopia’s Ogadeni rebels accused the regime in Addis Ababa on Friday of deliberately blocking international aid to their war-wracked region.
The army is accused of terrorising people in the Ogaden region and the government won’t let outsiders go in to investigate
A deadly cocktail of calamities — including war, drought and rising prices — is engulfing the Horn of Africa, the UN Children’s Fund has warned.
Could a country that has produced fewer than 100 PhDs in the past 50 years turn into a research powerhouse in a decade?
Over a quarter of Ethiopia’s Aids patients on drugs are not taking their medicine because of logistical problems but also due to religious beliefs.
Omer Redi takes a peek behind the ceremonial scene in rural Ethiopia and watches how one young couple seals the deal.
Drought-ravaged Ethiopia should improve its ”backward” farming systems to curb acute food shortages, a top World Bank official said on Wednesday.
Twenty-nine people, mostly children, were killed and 35 wounded in weekend flash floods in the eastern Ethiopian city of Jijiga, officials said. ”We have recovered 29 bodies so far from early Friday’s floods in Cheraketo [district]. A majority of those were children,” regional president Abdullahi Hassan said.
Ethiopia’s Supreme Court sentenced former dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam to death in his absence on Monday, along with 17 senior officials of his regime, overturning a previous life term on appeal. The court followed the request of the prosecution to toughen the sentence imposed in January 2007 on Mengistu.
More than 20 people were killed in three days of clashes over land in western Ethiopia last week. ”A long-standing dispute over land along the border between Oromia and Benishangule states in western Ethiopia erupted into violence claiming the lives of more than 20 people from both sides last week,” said police spokesperson Demsash Hailue.
The African Union on Friday urged Sudan and former rebels in the south of the country to exercise restraint and seek a political settlement after clashes left at least 22 soldiers dead in a flashpoint region. "The Commission of the African Union is greatly concerned over the renewed hostilities between the parties," the AU said in a statement.
This year’s poor rains have nearly killed Bizunesh. The rangy three-year-old weighs less than 4kg. Her long limbs, weak and folded like a praying mantis, cannot carry even her slight weight. She cannot speak. She doesn’t want to eat. Health officials say she is permanently stunted.
A severe drought in Ethiopia threatens up to six million children, the United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef) warned on Tuesday. "Up to six million children under five years of age are living in impoverished, drought-prone districts and require continuation of urgent preventative health and nutrition interventions," Unicef said in a statement.
A lack of funds has forced the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) to cut by more than half the number of districts in drought-hit Ethiopia it serves, the food agency said on Monday and appealed for ,4-million in aid. WFP said shortages would prevent it from providing food supplements to malnourished mothers and children.
Ethiopia criticised Amnesty International on Thursday and said the group’s accusations that Ethiopian soldiers killed 21 people at a Mogadishu mosque were ”lies” and ”propaganda”. Amnesty said on Wednesday the soldiers, who are stationed in Somalia to bolster the interim government, had also captured dozens of children.
The second and final day of voting in Ethiopia’s local and parliamentary polls was held Sunday amid tight security, days after deadly blasts in the capital, Addis Ababa. Three people were killed and 18 wounded when simultaneous bomb blasts went off at two petrol stations on April 14, a day after the first day of voting.
Ethiopians voted on Sunday in a first round of general elections that the opposition coalition boycotted to protest alleged intimidation of its candidates, and that an international rights group said would be unfair. Governing coalition candidates are running virtually unchallenged after the main opposition coalition pulled out.
Troubled by a difficult case, doctor Asfaw Atnafu decides to seek advice. He walks into a consulting room at Black Lion Hospital in Ethiopia’s capital Addis Ababa and greets a doctor at the Care Hospital in the southern Indian city of Hyderabad. Linked by a high-speed internet connection, the doctors study X-rays and laboratory results.
Africa must make higher health spending a priority if it is to stop rich nations poaching medical staff and cut deaths from the continent’s five biggest killers, an African health campaign group said. Tuberculosis, HIV/Aids, malaria, child and maternal mortality kill about eight million Africans every year, more than the combined populations of Sierra Leone and Botswana.
African ministers on Wednesday agreed to tackle rising food prices that have threatened the continent’s fledgling stability and economic growth. Although the hike ”presents opportunities for increased food production in some of our countries”, the phenomenon is not sustainable and has to be tackled, they said.
The military operation to oust the rebel leader of the Comoros island of Anjouan was hailed on Friday as a success by the African Union, in dire need of a boost to its conflict-resolution record. The first ever AU-backed plan to remove a renegade leader came after failed negotiations.
The road from Harar runs for more than 960km east towards the border with Somalia, penetrating deep into the desiccated badlands of the Ogaden desert, the dusty heart of Ethiopia’s war-torn Somali regional state. This is the land that the self-styled separatists of the Ogaden National Liberation Front claim as their own.
More than one million people in eastern Ethiopia’s drought-hit Somali region face critical water shortages, the United Nations said on Wednesday. ”A joint multi-sectoral Drought Emergency Response Plan … has been released by the regional government. The plan indicates that more than one million people are currently facing critical water shortage,” the UN said.
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/ 3 February 2008
The United States of Africa is one of few concrete plans on which African leaders agreed as they struggled with issues of peacekeeping and political disputes at this week’s continental summit. The problem is, so many countries want to be Washington, DC, and presidential candidates are already rumoured.
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/ 2 February 2008
African Union leaders condemned the latest unrest in Chad and Kenya on Saturday at the close of a summit overshadowed by new crises on the continent and which saw little headway achieved on older ones. The pan-African body’s summit wrapped up even as military sources said that rebels had seized control of the Chadian capital.
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/ 1 February 2008
Gabon Foreign Minister Jean Ping was elected on Friday as the African Union’s top diplomat, replacing Mali’s Alpha Oumar Konare as the head of the AU Commission. ”I can’t say too much at the moment, but of course I am very happy,” Ping told a crowd of diplomats, journalists and well-wishers after winning the vote at an AU summit in Ethiopia.