US Donates $17.8m worth of wheat

Aug 31 , 2019


The United States Department of Agriculture announced that it is donating 17.8 million dollars worth of wheat to Techno Serve Ethiopia, a non profit organisation, on August 29, 2019. Technoserve will use funds generated from the sale of this wheat to support Ethiopia’s coffee sector by increasing productivity and expanding the coffee trade. TechnoServe is an international non-profit based in Washington, DC that promotes business solutions to poverty in the developing world by linking people to information, capital and markets. Since 2009, TechnoServe has been working to address lack of coordination, information and access to markets, with a focus on supporting smallholder coffee farmers. Coffee is the most important foreign currency earner for Ethiopia. The United States was the fourth-largest buyer of Ethiopian coffee, accounting for nearly 11pc of total Ethiopian coffee exports by volume valued at 142.1 million dollars in 2017/18. Ethiopia has more than 400 coffee exporters, 395 coffee farmers who directly export coffee and over 30 import-export companies who export coffee and use the foreign currency to import other materials like vehicles and construction inputs.


Radar

CHERRY PICKING

Women around the Koshe area hunt through piles of trash to find scraps of metal to sell. With close to three million people unemployed in the country and a headline inflation of 33pc, unskilled labour is in little demand. Ethiopia has an adult literacy rate of 51pc, with fewer numbers going past high school. Less than three percent of 12th-grade students made it to universities this year while the rest were at the mercy of remedial exams...


Radar

JUNGLE CREW

An old wooden car that was part of a commercial campaign by a furniture company around the Beherawi Theatre area. Ethiopia's forest coverage to national land size has been registered at 15pc to the latest data by the World Bank. The current Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed launched an initiative labelled 'Green Legacy' to plant five billion trees in 2020 claiming an 83pc success...


Radar

OVER CAPACITY

A young boy attempts to pull a piece of cloth from an overloaded pickup truck around the Ayer Tena area. Observing an unsupervised child on the streets of the capital has become a common sight, with sporadic conflict across the country creating nearly four million internally displaced people. Despite the last census having been conducted 16 years ago, the population of the country is estimated at 120 million...