Effectiveness of an improved road safety policy in Ethiopia: an interrupted time series study

Research article: Teferi Abegaz, Yemane Berhane, Alemayehu Worku and Abebe Assrat

Abstract (provisional)

Background

In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in implementing road safety policy by different low income countries. However; the evidence is scarce on its success in the reduction of crashes, injuries and deaths. This study was conducted to assess whether road crashes, injuries and fatalities was reduced following the road safety regulation introduced as of September 2007 by Oromia Regional State Transport Bureau.

Methods

Routine road traffic accident data for the year 2002-2011were collected from sixteen traffic police offices. Data on average daily vehicle flow was obtained from the Ethiopian Road Authority. Interrupted time series design using segmented linear regression model was applied to estimate the effect of an improved road safety policy.

Results

A total of 4,053 crashes occurred on Addis Ababa - Adama/ Hawassa main road. Of these crashes, almost half 46.4% (1,880) were property damage, 29.4% (1,193) were fatal and 24.2% (980) injury crashes, resulting 1,392 fatalities and 1,749 injuries. There were statistically significant reductions in non-injury crashes and deaths. Non-injury crash was reduced by 19% and fatality by 12.4% in the first year of implementing the revised transport safety regulation.

Conclusion

Although revised road safety policy helped in reducing motor vehicle crashes and associated fatalities, the overall incidence rate is still very high. Further action is required to avoid unnecessary loss of lives.

The complete article is available as a provisional PDF. The fully formatted PDF and HTML versions are in production.

The remarkable story of Ethiopian tour guide Firew Ayele

Stephen Scourfield Ethiopian tour guide Firew Ayele

When Ethiopian Firew Ayele was nine years old, he was captured by soldiers from neighbouring Somalia, and spent more than 10 years as a prisoner.

Today, he is 43 years old and one of the most respected tourist guides in Ethiopia. The company he owns and runs with wife Senait employs up to 50 people and he leads groups from all over the world, explaining Ethiopia's extraordinary history and introducing them to its vibrant culture.

He's a geographer, a historian, and a great and knowledgeable story teller.
A measure of his professionalism is that he looks after, researches for and guides perhaps 90 per cent of the film crews which visit Ethiopia, including the BBC, Al Jazeera and documentary makers.

And another is that he is here, today, with me alongside Tony Evans, leading a Travel Directors group on their African Dawn tour, which starts in Uganda and Rwanda but spends the majority of its time in Ethiopia. Firew and Tony have known each other about 10 years.

But if it might look that tourism has been the making of him, when he tells his story, his childhood as a prisoner of Somalis has played no small part in it.

"It was July 1977 - school holidays." Firew begins his story, in his own words. "I was only nine years old and living with my uncle. My mother and father had divorced when I was five and he became responsible for keeping me and to get me to school.

"There had been a rumour that the Somali Liberation Front was planning to overtake the Ethiopian government - there was a lot of war before in many times between these two countries and this was a good time to invade as the government of Emperor Haile Selassie had gone and they were trying to make the country socialist.

"It was transitional, there was a student movement and conflict with Eritrea, which wanted independence. The Somali army rushed into Ethiopia and captured about 600km.
"I was in Gode, near the Somali border."

His uncle was a high-ranking official and they were living in a small palace compound, with military guards.
At 4am, Firew heard gunfire. "We were hearing a lot of noise of bullets. We were told to sleep in the ground house but there were a lot of bullets and it was very frightening.

"Then some people came and told us to run out of the palace. When we came out there were a lot of bullets making noise overhead. Wee-oo. Weee-ooo. Kalishnikovs." AK-47 assault rifles from the Soviet Union. And artillery dropping shells, too. "We started running - it was a few kilometres towards the military campus.
"There is a big, flat land between the town and military camp. Artillery was landing . . . whoosh . . . arms and legs were coming down."

Everyone was running straight to the garrison but Firew, persuading two other boys, cut out to the left, and eventually they hid for six hours behind a termite mound. "This was good defence."
As they set off again, through a forest, there was suddenly shooting over the three little boys. They lay down. "So many bullets the leaves were falling on us."

Firew was hit by a bullet, and shows me the scar by his right eyebrow.
Then soldiers told them to stand up - what he describes as "filthy and hard-looking persons".
But it was the bravery of one of these soldiers that saved them. He told his compatriots: "If you kill them I will kill you - they are kids, not soldiers." He gave the boys water, dry biscuit and dates.They were walked to a place where many prisoners were sitting. Firew says an officer turned up in a four-wheel-drive and announced: "We are soldiers from the Somali government. The plan of the Somali government is to take out land from Kenya, Djibouti and Ethiopia. You are captured because we have found you on our land."
Others might have seen it as terrorists taking prisoners and hostages.

And then these 150 people, including pregnant women, babies and little children, started walking, with 20 soldiers behind, 20 in front, passing their own broken homes, and across the bridge leading in to town that was so covered in the bodies of the defending soldiers who had died there that they had to walk over them - "taking care not to stand on the stomach or intestines," Firew says.

In the afternoon, Ethiopian jets came over and fired on them, killing both soldiers and Ethiopians, and the general in charge was hit in the heart. As he was dying and asking for help, Firew says, his own soldiers were checking his pockets for cigarettes. "This shocked us - if they would treat their own general like this, how would they treat us?"
In the evening they were loaded into military trucks and taken to a forest camp, where they were held for three days, the women victims of and at risk of rape until a man defended his wife by hitting back, taking a gun and killing seven soldiers. "They were then beating us all - 300 soldiers on what were now 60 of us."
But then another commander came and told the soldiers not to touch the women. A second act of humanity in the face of war.
Firew recalls they were forced to walk 60km across the desert to Barad in Somalia until another senior soldier questioned what was going on - "this is not what the Prophet Mohammed teaches". They were then loaded onto trucks, on top of artillery.

But they were again attacked by Ethiopian planes, which bombed them, setting off ordnance which exploded and burnt for an hour.

One truck was left, and the 60 people were piled on top and taken to Mogadishu, passing through towns where people threw stones at them.

Suddenly they were with more than 8000 other captured people. "We spent three months in the central jail there. It was full of people. Your space was the size of your shoulders. You couldn't walk more than 3m. There was limited toilet. It was very hot. Sometimes there was water only once a day. There was sickness and people started dying. For three months, I just sat all day."

During that time the Somalis had been sorting civilians from military. The former were taken to a prison camp on the coast and set to work cutting rock.

"The first six months were really a terrible time because I didn't understand what is going on and I didn't know anybody there.
"Many people lost their minds.

"It was very hot and sanitation was a big problem. When we weren't working we were locked in 24 hours a day in one room. Once a week we were taken to 'shower' in the ocean - but salt water. There was malaria and lice. All the kids under five years old died in less than one year - four or five a day."
And after that year, Firew was driven 14 hours in a truck in the rain to labour on a prison farm. "At first we were kept in a big open compound." It took six months to clear the forest enough to build their own housing before continuing to clear for farmland.

"We worked very hard but now we were not locked in a house. There were 10 soldiers to 100 prisoners as we planted orange, mango, corn and rice. I stood in water up to my chest for 13 or 14 hours a day to keep birds off the rice. There were a lot of mosquitoes."

But there was also a great mix of educated Ethiopians at the camp - teachers who had been highly educated in the UK and US, agriculturalists, doctors and nurses.

Dr Tibebu Haile Selassie was highly skilled, treated Somali officers and their families, won their trust and won permission to start teaching. The highly qualified prisoners developed a curriculum, and opened a school, sometimes writing on cement bags cut to make sheets.

"But most of the teachers were high level," says Firew, who sees now the great opportunity that had been presented to him - tutors the like of this would not normally be teaching a 10-year-old boy. They taught at universities; they had doctorates. "I finished
my high school there in prison,"
as people around him died of cholera, malaria, bilharzia and suicide.

"I learnt a lot in prison. I had a lot of time with extraordinary people - teachers, agronomists. From this it is very easy to plan your life. What is good for me is that I am not afraid of any problem. I always say there's nothing worse comes than what happened in prison.

"I am not afraid of anything because I faced this in my childhood."
When, after more than 10 years of imprisonment, the Ethiopian and Somali governments agreed to a prisoner-of-war exchange, he returned home, 20 years old with a high level of education which was accepted by the authorities in Ethiopia, and he was given a place at university in Addis Abba, where he studied geography. He then worked for the Ministry of Agriculture for eight years in the Ethiopian town of Bahir Dar.

"Travelling in the northern part of Ethiopia gave me a clue about tourism."
He was also asked to show some visitors around this part of Ethiopia - north from the city of Addis Ababa, which is such a hub of Africa, to Lalibela, with its 13th century churches hewn into rock, the town of Bahir Dar and the valley of the Blue Nile, and the old city of Axum.
He enjoyed it and earned good money. "So I resigned, studied tourism, worked for three years as a guide for an Italian-owned tour company, spent three years as a freelance guide and 10 years ago started my own company."

With Senait on top of finances and the office ("she also knows how to cool me," he says), Firew has time to do the fieldwork, and personally guides most of his tours. Daughter Eva, who is nine, even brings her skills to the business. Firew says that she will carefully check gear and provisions lists for camping trips and make sure everything is there.

In guiding this section of Travel Directors' Africa Dawn tour, alongside tour leader Tony, he tells the stories of what might be called the world's original country - from the remains of humans' oldest primate relatives to its old Christian beliefs and still vibrant celebrations, from its world heritage sites to its lively, dusty markets, its remote villages and, in very clever, simple narratives, through the stories of it all.
He's terrific, and now one of my handful of "best guides in the world".

And the fact that Tony trusts him carries a lot of weight, too. Apart from his work for Travel Directors, Firew leads groups mostly from the UK, US, Germany, Russia and Israel.
And, in fact, he has quite a reputation with the Israelis, from the time he was leading a group of generals and pilots who had their own ideas about where they should go and what they should do.
"I know this place best," he told them. "I am the only general here. I am trying to be a good general - try to be good soldiers."

They dropped into line, let Firew lead, had a wonderful trip and have not only returned since, but helped to spread Firew's fame.

He flicks down the emails in his iPad to show me one from the leading Israeli general on that trek. It reads: "You are the emperor of Ethiopia's tourism" and praises both the beauty of Ethiopia and Firew for his "efficiency and beloved character".

Effort and honesty have made a successful business in Across Abyssinia.
Firew says: "After I started business, I am getting a lot of money but money is more precious if you are using it for the right purpose. I don't feel good if I am keeping a lot of money in my hand or my account.
"Me and my wife started supporting poor people around us and this makes me very happy.

"I am supporting 35 kids to study in school. Every month I give them money for their food, their school and their clothing.

"One woman had a kidney problem and she doesn't have 10 per cent of what she needs for medication and I have more than that in my hand - I paid for her. She is well and I am happy.
"It's better to use money you have for possible good things. If you keep money, it rusts like metal.
"It's not money that makes you rich - it's how you think."

I have just spent more than two weeks with Firew and I have admired his professionalism and kindness, his humour and his strength. I'd be privileged to call him a friend. He is an inspiration, and he has shared the intimate story of his life.

• fact file *

·Firew Ayele's company, Across Abyssinia, has packages and group tours but also caters for individuals, couples and small groups. They can follow Across Abyssinia's itineraries, or amend them. But in looking at the website, consider the Northern Historic Route (14 days on road, or eight days flying). Visit adventureabyssinia.com, email info@adventureabyssinia.com or phone +251 911440145.

·Days in Ethiopia are part of Travel Directors' African Dawn tour - a 28-day journey through Uganda, Rwanda and Ethiopia from January 4-31, 2015. It's a mix of diverse experiences and sights, from Lake Victoria and the source of the Nile in Uganda, to the rare mountain gorillas of Rwanda and on to Ethiopia - the cradle of civilisation. It is $18,880 per person, twin share, and single supplement is $3250 per person. The cost includes economy-class international airfares, all internal flights in Africa, accommodation, meals, Travel Directors tour leader and local guides, entrance fees, the US$750 permit to visit mountain gorillas in Rwanda, visas. 9242 4200 and traveldirectors.com.au.

·Qatar Airways flies daily direct between Perth and Doha and connect to Africa, among its 130 global destinations. qatarairways.com/au and 1300 340 600.

Network Disconnection is caused by power cuts: EthioTelecom

Network Disconnection is caused by power cuts: EthioTelecom Recently there has been a severe case of network disconnection throughout the country.

Responding as to the reason behind the network problem, EthioTelecom’s public relation office head Ato Abduraheim Ahmed said that the power cut is behind the recent incessant network disconnection.

He also said that EthioTelecom is discussing the matter with the Ethiopian Electric power corporation and efforts are underway to install a system that can give a sustain power supply to the network equipments in cases of a power cut.

Ato Abduraheim also said that the network expansion doesn’t cause the network disconnection. The network expansion which is being carried out in three phases has got the first two phases completed. When the network expansion is completed in the coming june, the 3G internet connection service will become operational.

Source: Diretube

Ethiopia to send Troops to South Sudan within weeks

Ethiopia to send Troops to South Sudan within weeks

Ethiopia, Kenya and Rwanda will send 2,500 troops to South Sudan to prevent renewed fighting between government and rebel forces, an Ethiopian official said.

Soldiers from Ethiopia, which shares a border with South Sudan, may arrive in the war-torn nation “within weeks” and be the first to deploy as part of the United Nations-approved force, Getachew Reda, an adviser to Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn, said by phone today from the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa.

“Deterrence by its nature involves taking action when there are spoilers,” Getachew said. “They will have to deal with anything and anyone that stands in the way of the discharge of their responsibility.”

Conflict erupted in the world’s newest nation on Dec. 15 with President Salva Kiir accusing his former deputy Riek Machar of plotting a coup, a charge Machar denies. Thousands of people have been killed in the fighting and more than a million have been forced to flee their homes, according to the UN. Both government and rebel forces have reported clashes even after Kiir and Machar signed an accord on May 9 committing the two sides to cease hostilities.

By William Davison
More Here: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-05-28/ethiopia-kenya-rwanda-sending-2-500-troops-to-south-sudan.html

After 50 years, Dr Hamlin is still fighting to end fistula in Ethiopia

50 years, Dr Hamlin is still fighting to end fistula in Ethiopia

On International End Fistula Day, an Australian gynaecolgist shares her experiences of a lifetime working to improve the lives of women with a degrading and preventable condition Obstetric fistula is a degrading condition in which women who suffer traumatising labours are left incontinent and often ostracised by their community.

Since 1959, Dr Catherine Hamlin has worked to restore the lives of women with fistula in Ethiopia by performing surgeries, training doctors and nurses and fundraising to build hospitals.

On International End Fistula Day, she shares her experiences below. We [Hamlin and her late husband Reginald] came to Ethiopia from Australia in response to an advertisement to work as obstetrician/ gynaecologists at a hospital in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

We were touched and appalled by the sadness of our first fistula patient: a beautiful young woman in urine-soaked ragged clothes, sitting alone in our outpatients department away from the other waiting patients. We knew she was more in need than any of the others.

She had been through a long labour of five days with only the village women to help. And so we saw the first of many fistula sufferers. Five per cent of all women who give birth have an obstructed labour and cannot deliver their child without help, but a caesarean section or some other skilled delivery is not available for women in rural Ethiopia.

The fistula patients are the survivors of an obstructed labour, many don't survive. The maternal death rate in Ethiopia is one of the highest in Africa. Fistula patients are ashamed of their injuries and are often ostracised by their village communities, living alone and hiding from others, so the world is not aware of them.

When the word spread about our surgery, women started arriving at the hospital from all over the country hoping for the operation. To cater for the demand we began fundraising and opened the Addis Ababa Fistula Hospital in 1974.

Over the next thirty years we opened five regional hospitals across the country. Since then, we have treated about 40,000 women for this preventable injury. We now work in close collaboration with the Ethiopian ministry of health and have increasing support from them.

Much has improved since we started our work. The ministry of health has given health services to the rural population by building health centres throughout the countryside. The government also started a medical faculty at Addis university in 1966, which meant we could train our doctors there instead of sending them to train at a US-established medical training centre at Beirut University.

Now we have doctors from our own universities, but unfortunately few are willing to work in the rural areas – many have left Ethiopia hoping to live a better life abroad. This is a great tragedy and loss. Our country hospitals have almost no doctors in them.

Going forward our greatest need is to have a well-trained midwife in every village in Ethiopia. We set up a midwifery training college in 2007. We take 12th grade students from countryside schools to train on a four- year degree course. These girls go back to their homes to work in antenatal clinics attached to the many health centres.

We are hoping to spread our midwives throughout the country, but they need doctors in the referral hospitals to do the caesarean sections. We can't do it all alone. We need to continue to work in closer collaboration with the ministry of health and key partner organisations to eradicate obstetric fistula from Ethiopia. Then women won't have to suffer this devastating ordeal.

Source The guardian