January 25, 2025
The United Nations Development Program (UNDP) has pledged to assist Ethiopia in mobilizing USD two billion in green financing by 2030. This ambitious effort will focus on leveraging innovative mechanisms such as green bonds, carbon credits, debt swaps, and payments for ecosystem services.
Ethiopia’s commitment to addressing persistent challenges in green finance and renewable energy was highlighted at UNDP’s Annual Development Conference, held last week.
UNDP-Ethiopia Resident Representative, Samuel Doe, emphasized the urgency of tackling climate change: “As we stand at a critical juncture in history, we are acutely aware of the unprecedented global challenges posed by climate change. These challenges demand urgent action, driven by global solidarity and a shared vision for a sustainable future.”
Ethiopia, ranked 155 out of 187 countries on the 2022 Global Climate Vulnerability Index, has been disproportionately impacted by global warming. With a rapidly growing population, deforestation, and soil degradation intensifying environmental and economic pressures, the country has implemented bold strategies, including the Climate Resilient Green Economy (CRGE) initiative, its Long-Term Low Emission and Climate Resilient Development Strategy (2020–2050), and the Green Legacy Initiative (GLI).
The conference showcased Ethiopia’s achievements, such as securing USD 400 million in grants from multilateral and bilateral funds over the past decade and leveraging its significant renewable energy potential. However, challenges remain, including limited access to climate finance.
The recent breakthrough at COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan, where developed nations committed to tripling climate finance to $300 billion annually by 2035, offers promising opportunities for Ethiopia. Additionally, new agreements on carbon markets under the Paris Agreement provide mechanisms for generating and trading carbon credits, further enhancing resource mobilization efforts.
Between 2011 and 2021, East African countries, including Ethiopia, secured nearly USD 44 billion in climate finance. However, Africa as a whole receives only 11 percent of the funding needed to meet its Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), highlighting the urgency for innovative financing solutions.
UNDP’s latest working paper, Financing Ethiopia’s Green Transition, underscores the country’s progress in expanding renewable energy and exploring innovative climate finance sources. However, it notes a significant gap between Ethiopia’s ambitions and the funding required to implement its goals.
Ali Zafar, economic advisor and team lead for UNDP-Ethiopia’s Policy Development and Research Hub, stated: “Our analytical study documents Ethiopia’s journey toward expanding renewable energy and mobilizing new and innovative sources of climate finance to improve the country’s energy production and boost access for communities. This report identifies promising financing options for both climate change mitigation and adaptation.”
(Reporter)
Disinformation fuels ethnic tension in Ethiopia
Supporters of Ethiopia’s warring factions are exploiting increasingly advanced technology and poor media literacy to spread disinformation that provokes anger between ethnic groups, risking fresh violence, experts warn.
Ethiopia, Africa’s second most-populous nation with 120 million people, has deep political divisions and a complex patchwork of ethnicities that have fuelled decades of internal conflict.
That makes fertile ground for false claims to spread among Ethiopia’s 36 million online users, with AFP Fact Check debunking numerous doctored videos in recent months.
They have ranged from misleadingly edited speeches by Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed to a false announcement that a rebel leader had died.
A lack of media literacy is “aggravating pre-existing conflicts” and “giving rise to new socio-political challenges,” said journalism lecturer Workineh Diribsa of Jimma University.
Media literacy is the ability to understand and analyse news stories, videos or other content such as memes to independently determine whether they could be fake or misleading.
The brutal two-year war in the northern Tigray region ended in November 2022, but there are multiple ongoing conflicts, including against rebels in the Amhara and Oromia regions.
AFP Fact Check investigations have found that all sides spread disinformation to stir tensions and malign opponents.
Previously, text and photo captions were altered. Now, freely available AI editing tools make it easy to manipulate audio and video.
A 2020 video of Abiy addressing the murder of Ethiopian pop star Hachalu Hundessa was doctored to give the impression he was discussing a gruesome beheading in Oromia in November 2024.
Another depicted the fake death announcement of a rebel commander in the Amhara region.
Government supporters circulated a video in July 2024 which used a voice seemingly created with AI to falsely claim that Human Rights Watch had urged the international community to classify the Oromo Liberation Army as a terrorist organisation.
“One can see manipulated speeches of public figures, taking old videos out of context to replace or cut out words to use them for the wrong purposes,” said Norwegian journalism lecturer Terje Skjerdal, who has extensively researched Ethiopia’s media landscape.
“The warring parties in Ethiopia are fighting to control information on social media with increasingly sophisticated disinformation tactics and poor media literacy has made the situation worse,” he added.
Low levels of basic literacy and numeracy among young people fuel the problem, according to a 2024 report by the UN Capital Development Fund.
But the biggest issue is a “lack of engagement” from local media, both state-owned and independent, said civil society leader Befekadu Hailu.
The emergence of disinformation tools also coincided with Abiy’s polarising rise to power and the Tigray conflict.
“Following the political transition in Ethiopia in 2018, the public is highly divided across contending political objectives, which created a fertile ground for conflict actors to use disinformation as tactics to control narratives,” said Befekadu.
He added disinformation creators had a financial incentive to maximise their reach with inflammatory content.
Skjerdal said improving media literacy was key to fighting the normalisation of false and violent content.
“In addition, fact-checking initiatives, as we have seen from independent organisations like AFP, are urgently needed in local languages,” he added.
AFP currently works in 26 languages with Facebook’s fact-checking scheme.
Meta’s recent decision to scrap fact-checking on Facebook and Instagram in the United States has sparked fears the tech giant could drop its third-party programmes across the world.
(Macau Business.com)
Ethiopian Airlines Receives IATA Re-certification
Ethiopian Airlines is proud to announce the successful recertification of its IATA Center of Excellence for Independent Validators in Pharmaceutical Logistics (CEIV Pharma) accreditation as an airline and ground handling agent.
The milestone underscores the airline’s unwavering commitment in providing world-class air cargo services tailored to meet the stringent requirements of the healthcare and pharmaceutical manufacturers and shippers.
Ethiopian Airlines Group CEO, Mesfin Tasew, commented on the recertification, stating, “This achievement underscores our unwavering commitment to excellence in healthcare logistics. With a global network spanning key healthcare logistics hubs, Ethiopian Airlines positions itself as a trusted partner in Pharma and life science logistics. We are dedicated to supporting the healthcare industry by providing reliable and efficient air cargo services that meet the highest international standards. Our goal is to make Addis Ababa the premier Pharma corridor in the global south, leveraging its strategic geographical location to address the logistical challenges of healthcare air transportation.”
The IATA CEIV Pharma certification is a globally recognized standard ensuring the safe and efficient handling of pharmaceutical products. Ethiopian Airlines, the first in Africa to achieve this accreditation in 2022, continues to uphold high standards of operational excellence.
With this recertification, the airline reaffirmed its commitment to modernizing cold chain infrastructure, specialized training, and innovative technologies to meet pharmaceutical logistics needs. This certification provides a globally acknowledged stamp of quality, reassuring customers, partners, and regulators of consistent and reliable operations, aligning with international standards and simplifying compliance.
(This Day)
Ethiopia has highest rate of scientific paper retraction
Researchers in Ethiopia have a higher percentage of their scientific papers retracted than researchers in any other country, according to a new analysis published in the online repository Zenodo.
The analysis, posted Jan. 12, examines the rates at which papers were retracted from the scientific literature from 2022 to 2024.
Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, China, and Egypt follow Ethiopia as the countries with the highest rate of retractions, according to the study, which was conducted by Achal Agrawal, a data scientist based in Chhattisgarh, India. Agrawal founded India Research Watchdog, a site that keeps tabs on scientific research conducted in India.
“Some countries might figure high on this list as they may have an active community of science sleuths working to weed out the bad papers,” Agrawal writes in the study. France, for example, is one of the world’s leaders in research integrity, he notes, and the work of sleuths resulted in a lot of retractions in 2024.
While some studies could have been retracted because of honest errors, the study suggests that “a good proportion” of retractions are due to some sort of misconduct. The analysis acknowledges that researchers in countries with high retraction rates can come under enhanced scrutiny, which itself may lead to even more retractions.
The other countries making up the top 10 are predominantly in the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent. That may be because those countries have milder penalties for research misconduct than Western nations do.
Countries that had high retraction rates in the analysis period typically saw a sharp rise in their total publication output in the 5 years through 2023, the study found. Such a rise in output by a country without concurrent development in its research infrastructure is usually a sign of a large number of bogus studies that eventually lead to more retractions, the paper suggests.
“This calls into question the current incentive system which promotes quantity over quality,” the paper says.
(C&en)