Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed inaugurated Sheger Bakery, which is dubbed as the largest bakery and flour factory in Africa with a potential of baking 1.8 million loaves of bread every day in three shifts.
“The Sheger Bakery which took 10 months from conception to finalization is symbolic of our path to prosperity. Producing 80,000 pieces of bread per hour, availing it at affordable prices will contribute to food security in Addis Ababa and the surrounding cities,” PM Abiy said.
It is stated that including those working in the factory some 3,400 people in Addis Ababa will get job at the factory and in distribution lines of the bread.
The Sheger bakery is built by MIDROC Ethiopia, which is owned by the Ethio Saudi billionaire Sheikh Mohammed Hussien Al Amoudi. Built with 900 million birr, the state-of-the-art bakery has a capacity to make 1.8 million loaves of bread a day and 80,000 an hour.
The bakery, which uses automated machinery, will source flour from a plant that was built next to the bakery. Resting on 4.1 hectares, the bakery and the flour processing plant is located in Akaki Qality Sub City. MIDROC imported the machinery for the bread and flour from Italy, while the transformers were shipped in from China.
The bakery has four silos each with a storage capacity of 30,000 quintals of wheat, 12 ovens, 13 mixers, and two cooling towers capable of cooling 140,000 loaves of bread a minute. It has 357 permanent employees and 23 food vans each capable of carrying 24,000 loaves of bread at once.
The flour factory can produce 2,224 quintals of flour a day, from which the bakery uses 1,200 quintals, and the excess 1,024 quintals of flour will go to the market, according to Abinet Gebremeskel, CEO of the project management office and general manager of MIDROC Construction Ethiopia.
The flour factory will source its wheat supply from Horizon Plantation’s farm and other cooperative unions, as well as through import.
The project was initiated by the Deputy Mayor Takele Uma.
The Addis Abeba City Administration and Sheger Bakery and Flour Factory, an industrial-scale bakery agreed to sale the products at reasonable prices.
The company has procured 150,000 quintals of wheat from Ukraine that will be used for three months of production. The first of six batches of the supply has reached the factory.
The plant consumes five megawatts of power during peak hours, according to electrical engineers of the Factory. It has three stand-alone generators that produce 3.2MW in total.

The demand for raw materials used to manufacture rechargeable batteries will grow rapidly as the importance of oil as a source of energy recedes, as highlighted recently by the collapse of prices due to oversupply and weak demand resulting from COVID-19, according to a new UNCTAD report.
The report, Commodities at a glance: Special issue on strategic battery raw materials, documents the growing importance of electric mobility and the main materials used to make rechargeable car batteries.
Ongoing efforts to lower greenhouse gas emissions are expected to spur further investment in green energy production, which has been steady over the years, standing at around $600 billion per year on average.
“Alternative sources of energy such as electric batteries will become even more important as investors grow more wary of the future of the oil industry,” UNCTAD’s director of international trade, Pamela Coke-Hamilton, said while launching the report.
Electric car sales have boomed in recent years, rising 65% in 2018 from the previous year to 5.1 million vehicles, and are expected to reach 23 million in 2030, according to the International Energy Agency.
Rechargeable batteries will play a significant role in the global transition to a low-carbon energy system and help mitigate greenhouse gas emissions if the raw materials used in their manufacture are sourced and produced in a sustainable manner, the report says.
The worldwide market for cathode for lithium ion battery, the most common rechargeable car battery, was estimated at $7 billion in 2018 and is expected to reach $58.8 billion by 2024, according to the report.
“The rise in demand for the strategic raw materials used to manufacture electric car batteries will open more trade opportunities for the countries that supply these materials. It’s important for these countries to develop their capacity to move up the value chain,” Coke-Hamilton said.

The Ebola outbreak in the northeast of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) was declared over on Thursday June 25, almost two years since the first case was confirmed. The DRC Ministry of Health made the announcement after no new cases were reported 42 days since the last patient tested negative for the virus.
The outbreak started in August 2018. There were 3470 cases, 2287 lives lost and 1171 survivors, making it the second-deadliest after the one in West Africa that lasted from 2014 to 2016.
In a context of insecurity, the efforts to halt the 10th Ebola outbreak in the DRC were particularly challenging. Emergency teams from World Health Organization (WHO), partner organizations, the DRC Ministry of Health and communities made huge efforts to end the outbreak.
“During the almost two years we fought the Ebola virus, WHO and partners helped strengthen the capacity of local health authorities to manage outbreaks,” said Dr Matshidiso Moeti, WHO Regional Director for Africa.
“The DRC is now better, smarter and faster at responding to Ebola and this is an enduring legacy which is supporting the response to COVID-19 and other outbreaks.”
The gains made during this response are already being applied to other public health emergencies in the DRC. Many of the key approaches in tackling Ebola such as contact tracing, infection prevention and control and isolating patients and suspected cases are at the core of COVID-19 response in the country, where more than 6000 cases have been confirmed so far.
WHO is supporting countries in Africa as the COVID-19 pandemic accelerates in the region. As well as providing equipment and expertise to support the response, WHO is also helping countries to minimize disruption to essential health services and to restore a full range of services as lockdowns are eased to protect people from preventable diseases like malaria.

One stop shop for info on Africa

An afro friendly education and entertainment social media hiring network has been launched by an Ethiopian diaspora.
The website called Alphabetic Africa Timeline take an overview of the African continent with the complete and comprehensive guide to the African countries, people and politics.
“It helps to promote the African continent to the world based on geographical and historical events with press articles and information connected to the African nation states in timeline” said Moges Mulgeta Founder and Executive Digital Content Editor of the platform.
“It is a media primarily working on to promote and empower the African continent as a whole,” he said.
The platform provide historic and geographic information through project undertaking such as intricacies in African politics, diplomacy, and economic development and the form of government of individual states; nature of the executive branch, legislative branch, and the judiciary branch systems, the achievements such as civil liberties, and failures such as internal conflict, and public disorder, dominate the version.
africacomplete.com develops its contents in regards to individual African country, and the surrounding of nearly 14 islands, islets and city states usually known as the “Dependencies” as integral and territorial parts of Africa.
According to the author it can provide press edutainment and produce equipped competent digital media press which can contribute for the African social, economic, and political development by adding access to information with full professional, and ethical through active participation of the Diaspora Africans, the civic groups and the development forces is essential.
The platform has e-Map poster entitled, A to Z of AFRICA General Information of African Nation states a four-colors digitally separated e-map layout.
Archival sources from various media outlets shed light on Inter-African geographic and historic information.
Concerning the national economy it provides in-depth analysis on the arable and cultivated land, the state of agriculture and farming, the utilization of forests and green areas, the extent of environment and urban development, the mineral resources, topographic and demographic terms, public holidays, local measuring system, the various types of national currencies employed, the character of import-export trade routes, and the healthy side of national economies and the commercial access to the sea and the share in the global maritime and transit activities can also be found on the platform.