Ethiopia

ADF STAFF After years of dormancy, the Eastern Africa Standby Force (EASF) is ready to deploy its collective military, police and civilian specialists when called upon, the force’s leadership announced recently. Speaking during the annual…

ADF STAFF Ethiopian businessman Tola Tesfaye was returning to Addis Ababa when armed men stopped his vehicle and kidnapped him for a ransom of 1.3 million birr ($23,000). Tesfaye’s experience is becoming routine across central Ethiopia’s…

ADF STAFF Three military-led countries — Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger — dealt a blow to the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) when they announced that they will leave the regional bloc. It was one of several blows that…

ADF STAFF Somaliland is an autonomous breakaway state in northern Somalia that has persistently pursued independence for 33 years. It has state institutions, a military, and functioning political and economic systems. The United Kingdom…

ADF STAFF For some African nations, 2024 appears to be a year of economic reckoning as debts to China and other lenders come due. “People went and got low-interest loans by the bucketload,” Nonkululeko Nyembezi chair of South Africa’s…

ADF STAFF Drug confiscations at Ethiopia’s Addis Ababa Bole International Airport have more than doubled over the past year, an indication of Ethiopia’s growing role as a hub of drugs moving from South America to Europe and southern Asia.…

ADF STAFF What began as Ethiopia’s aspiration to regain access to the Red Sea turned into a threat of force against its coastal neighbors in late 2023 and is now fueling fears of war. Last year, critics in the Horn of Africa region…

ADF STAFF Weighed down by the costs of war, the COVID-19 pandemic and billions of dollars in Chinese loans, Ethiopia defaulted on a loan payment recently, joining Ghana and Zambia on the list of African countries unable to pay their debts.…

ADF STAFF Fourteen-year-old Abel and some friends were playing in the remote north Ethiopian town of Adi Hageray, in the Tigray region, when one of them found a new toy. “We were throwing it at each other,” he told the International…

ADF STAFF Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi’s three-country tour of Africa in mid-July marked the first time the controversial country’s president has visited the continent in more than 11 years. Raisi’s government has made a point of…