By our staff reporter
The Addis Ababa based, emerging, home grown and ambitious technology company, Ashewa Technology Solution, announces a short term share sales window aimed at boosting its new business venture, which is said to bring in a massive revenue in the coming few years.
Daniel Bekele, CEO of Ashewa, recently disclosed that the company has targeted to boost its subscribed capital by ten folds from the current 200 million birr.
As per the plan, the short share sales window will go on for three months at a minimum share offer of 200 units at 2,500 birr each per share value.
The technology company has also offered an alternative which is the grouping of five individuals to come as a group to buy the minimum share.
Recently, the company that is well known for its ecommerce platform introduced new digital solutions that it called ‘smart solutions’.
Ashewa Smart ERP is one of the new businesses that it set to innovate and accelerate human resource and other accounting based administrations to ease companies’ businesses. The Smart Website Builder is also another notable initiative created by the company that allows interested buyers to get their own website within few hours. Such customer based software development is the other business that is offered for the market by the firm to which Daniel claimed it attracts huge demand on the market.
Currently, the company is also working with international development organizations to support small and medium businesses to promote their activity through modern digital based marketing.
Ashewa Technology issues lucrative short term share sales
AFRAA to join Focus Africa Initiative to enhance aviation’s economic contribution to the continent
By our staff reporter
The International Air Transport Association (IATA) and the African Airlines Association (AFRAA) announced that AFRAA is joining the Focus Africa initiative.
Focus Africa aims to maximize the contribution of aviation to development across the African Continent by better serving passengers and shippers. Under Focus Africa, private and public stakeholders are committed to delivering measurable improvements in six critical areas – safety, infrastructure, connectivity, finance & distribution, sustainability, and skills development.
“AFRAA strengthens the Focus Africa coalition as we work to increase aviation’s role in Africa’s development. This has enormous promise. The continent is home to the world’s most rapidly growing population but accounts for just 2% of air passenger and cargo transport activity. The road to realizing aviation’s potential will be long. But with the strong partnerships committed to Focus Africa, we can, and we will realize the needed change,” said Kamil Al Awadhi, IATA’s Regional Vice President for Africa and the Middle East.
“AFRAA and IATA share a common vision – the development of a safe, secure and sustainable aviation industry in Africa that facilitates business, trade, and tourism and contributes positively to Africa’s economic growth and development. AFRAA fully supports and encourages collaboration in tackling the challenges and threats to the sustainability of Africa’s air transport sector. By joining IATA and the other Focus Africa partners we can help propel this initiative which will deliver widespread social and economic benefits,” said Abderahmane Berthé, AFRAA Secretary General.
IATA and AFRAA are also enhancing their collaboration by renewing a joint work program which includes promoting regional air connectivity by working together with governments to support the implementation of the Single African Air Transport Market (SAATM). This work aims to (1) see the 23 countries committed to SAATM ratify the accord and (2) encourage more countries to join the SAATM.
The other area is liberating airline funds blocked by governments from repatriation by advising governments on best practices to clear backlogs. Since 2018, a significant amount of blocked funds have been repatriated from Angola, Ethiopia, Ghana, Nigeria, and Zimbabwe through working with the respective governments. Currently $1.5 billion in airline funds remain blocked across the continent.
Moreover it will work towards improving operational safety through a data-driven, collaborative program to reduce safety incidents and accidents. This includes improving data sharing, prioritizing the accurate communication of aeronautical information, timely accident and incident reporting, and promoting IATA safety auditing programs including the IATA Operational Safety Audit (IOSA) and IATA Standard Safety Assessment (ISSA). With all IATA members on the IOSA registry and all AFRAA members on the IOSA or ISSA registry, this effort will focus on encouraging governments to adopt the use of IOSA in their safety oversight programs.
COP28 UAE Presidency announces priorities to drive water up the climate agenda
By our staff reporter
The COP28 UAE Presidency has launched its Water Agenda during World Water Week in Stockholm, which took place from August 20 to 24.
COP28 announced its top priority areas, which include conserving and restoring freshwater ecosystems, enhancing urban water resilience, and bolstering water-resilient food systems.
Furthermore, the COP28 Presidency announced a partnership with the Netherlands and Tajikistan to serve as COP28 Water Champions.
This partnership aims to build upon outcomes and momentum from the UN 2023 Water Conference held in March, which was co-hosted by the Netherlands and Tajikistan, and resulted in the Water Action Agenda.
COP28 aims to give unprecedented attention to water risks and opportunities across the agenda, from agriculture to disaster prevention.
This partnership unites the COP28 Presidency, Tajikistan, and the Netherlands to deliver water policy, technology, and financing results at COP28.
Support from the Netherlands and Tajikistan is essential to ensuring progress and commitments from the UN Water Conference are driven forward.
Razan Al Mubarak, UN Climate Change High-Level Champion for COP28, spoke on the launch of the Water Agenda and partnership, saying, “Climate change profoundly affects water through flooding, droughts, and sea level rises, impacting homes, ecosystems, and livelihoods. Yet water is not only essential for human survival, health, and food systems, but it’s also fundamental to nature’s balance and the flourishing of biodiversity. With the COP28 Water Agenda, in collaboration with the Netherlands and Tajikistan, we seek to bridge the insights from the UN Water Conference with the climate community, amplifying our adaptation and mitigation efforts.”
Tajik Minister of Economic Development and Trade, Zavqi Zavqizoda, welcomed the partnership and expressed his commitment to co-lead COP28’s Water Agenda.
“I am pleased that Tajikistan and the Netherlands have recently been invited by the UAE to co-lead the Water Agenda at COP28. We are honored to have this great role and express our strong commitments to work hard to bring water on the top of the climate agenda, since water plays a critical role both in terms of climate adaptation and mitigation and thus greatly contributes to achieving climate resilience,” he said.
René van Hell, Ambassador for Sustainable Development, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Kingdom of the Netherlands, also stated, “We need collective action on water and climate now. As co-host of the UN 2023 Water Conference, we firmly believe that the Water Action Agenda commitments, the pathways of change of the Global Commission on the Economics of Water, and other initiatives are the backbone for the realization of our goals. Our cooperation will support that, from New York to Dubai, and from Dubai to the world. Tangible outcomes on water and climate at COP28 are essential. There’s no time to waste. We have to act, all together, from public to private sector leaders. And we will.”
This collaboration will help put nature, people, lives and livelihoods at the heart of climate action.
Stuart Orr, Freshwater Practice Leader, WWF International, said, “We welcome the partnership with the COP28 Presidency to restore 30% of degraded freshwater ecosystems by 2030, leveraging the Freshwater Challenge. Rivers and wetlands are among our greatest allies in adapting to the climate crisis and need urgent attention and investment that benefits not only nature but also people across the world.”
The UAE and Brazil will also co-host the first UNFCCC high-level dialogue on building water resilience in food systems at COP28, bringing together ministers, the private sector, international organizations, and civil society to assess water and food resilience within National Determined Contributions (NDCs) and National Action Plans (NAPs).
It will take place on Food, Agriculture and Water Day during COP28’s two-week thematic program.
The first day of its kind, it will focus on innovation investment, regenerative agriculture, and national transformation pathways, underpinned by financing mechanisms. Water programming will look at freshwater restoration and conservation, infrastructure for urban water resilience, and integrated governance and management of water-food systems.
Billions of people worldwide are now facing severe droughts, floods, and water contamination due to climate change, further undermining food security, community cohesion, and economic development. These climate impacts worsen existing challenges around clean drinking water access and sanitation.
The History of Cheap Labour
Alazar Kebede
The Industrial Revolution began in Britain at the end of the 18th century, and for much of the 19th century it was the dominant industrial power in the world. By the 1880s, however, it was bypassed by the United States and then by Germany at the turn of the century. In both cases, the newcomers benefited greatly from absorbing and deploying British technology such as the steam engine and the Bessemer process for steel making.
The newcomers initially grew by leapfrogging technologies and ramping up production capacities on an unprecedented scale. Consider what happened to the railways. In 1830, the United States had barely 40 miles of railroads but the network had jumped to 28,920 miles by 1860 and further to a staggering 163,562 miles by 1890. This was more than the rest of the world put together, according to the United States Census Bureau. Technological invention was very important for turning Britain, Germany and the United States into industrial powers, but the key factor that allowed mass production was the deployment of cheap labor.
Desmond King, Professor at Nuffield College in UK stated that the share of the population that was urbanized in England and Wales jumped from 20% in 1800 to 62% in 1890 as people from the countryside migrated into the industrial cities. The United States saw wave upon wave of migrants who pushed up its population from a mere ten million in 1820 to 152 million in 1950, according to data compiled by the OECD. In the popular imagination, these migrants headed west to settle in remote farms or participate in the Gold Rush. In reality, the migrants were usually absorbed by the booming industrial sector. At the turn of the century, around 80% of New York’s population of five million was either foreign-born or children of migrants.
Desmond King further noted that many of them were squeezed into the slums of the Lower East Side, with as many as 25 people sharing a single windowless room and sleeping in shifts. Most indicators suggest that living conditions were significantly worse than in the slums of present-day Mumbai. Even as the West was industrializing, the experience was very different for China and India. These two giants had been home to large artisan-based manufacturing sectors in the pre-modern age and had been exporting manufactured products like textiles and porcelain for millennia. However, both of them found it difficult to adapt to the changing world.
Sanjeev Sanyal, Global Strategist at Deutsche Bank in Singapore explained that as the Mughal Empire in India crumbled in the early 18th century, it appeared for a while that the Marathas would replace it. When the Maratha bid for power stumbled, India dissolved into chaos, with many indigenous and foreign groups vying for power. According to Sanjeev Sanyal, the uncertain political conditions severely affected the investment climate and caused many parts of India to de-industrialize. The re-establishment of order under British colonial rule, however, did not help.
The Industrial Revolution had taken off, and cheap goods produced by British factories flooded India beginning in the early 19th century, further damaging the old artisan-based sector. Note that this happened even though Indian labor was much cheaper than that in England. Even in 1820, Indian per capita incomes were less than a third of British levels, but the largely illiterate workforce was not capable of absorbing new technology.
David Rueda, Professor at Oxford University stated that the buildingof new infrastructure like the railways also did not help. In fact, it worsened matters by allowing imported goods to penetrate further inland. Therefore, the de-industrialization of India is a good illustration that neither cheap labor nor improved infrastructure is useful unless the overall investment eco-system is in place. It is important to remember that the productive deployment of cheap labor depends on many factors, ranging from property rights and general governance to the prevalence of basic literacy.
According to David Rueda, Japan was the first Asian country to experience industrialization and, beginning in the 1890s, output rose very rapidly. Despite the devastation of World War II, Japan had built up a competitive industrial sector by the 1950s. Yet again, the deployment of cheap labor was a key component of this success. As recently as 1980, when Japan was already considered a developed country, the unit labor cost in nominal United States dollar terms was barely half of today’s levels. The sharp increase in Japan of the costof labor input in the last three decades has been due mainly to the exchange rate.
Jason Moore, Professor of Economics at University of Leeds stated that the currency appreciated from 250-240 yen per United States dollar in 1985 to just over 120 per dollar by the end of 1987 and then further to 84 per dollar in 1995. The yen would drift weaker to the 100-150 per dollar range for the next decade and a half before appreciating back to the current range of 80-85 per dollar.
This currency movement undid the 0.5% per year decline in unit labor cost in local currency terms that Japanese manufacturing has sustained over the last three decades. According to Jason Moore, this goes to illustrate how the exchange rate is an important factor that needs to be considered when dealing with the international competitiveness of labor. It is possible, of course, to compete on design and quality, but a strong currency does make matters difficult.
As Sanjeev Sanyal explained, the exchange rate was an important factor in the re-emergence of both China and India on the world stage. There is a great deal of academic debate about the exact impact of this move, but it would be hard to deny that Chinese wages, already low by international standards, became even more competitive.
