The Coordinated Land Information System Project Coordination Office opened a tender two weeks ago to put up streets address poles in Mekele, Adama, Bahir Dar, Harar, Adama and Hawassa. The poles will ha ve signs attached to them with street names and addresses. The Office will incorporate; naming and numbering of streets and properties.
The street addresses are similar to ones in Addis Ababa. They are intended to facilitate registration of immovable properties, fire emergencies, postal services, elections, censuses, ambulances and other services.
The address system will be based on the cadastral map. It will use an aerial survey photographing roads, boundaries and houses in the respective cities. The fixing pole has two parts; one is the physical erection of poles with all information and the other is the navigation work, which will post the address information online. The total project, which will cover all of the districts in the six cities should be finished in a year.
Yared Teshome, who is in charge of gathering information at the project office told Capital that poles will keep people from getting lost.
“Knowing the exact location of where you want to go is an essential part of our day to day life. We selected these cities because they are capitals and they have better roads and infrastructure to install street address poles, eventually we will do the same in 18 other locations.”
According to Yared, they plan to raise awareness about the poles before they finish the project.
“Addis Ababa installed many street addresses but the problem is, many do not use them because they don’t know about them or how to use the address information. We want regions to focus on raising awareness when the poles are put up.”
The work will involve 46,841 new house numbers and 4,500 poles, according to Assake Kawefa, operations head at the Integrated Land Information Centre.
A study indicated that lack of appropriate mapping in Ethiopia has slowed down the growth of e-commerce.
In 2012 the Addis Ababa City Administration changed all the house numbers and road signs and gave new numerical names to unnamed roads as part of a 400 million birr contract with the Metal and Engineering Corporation, which installed poles.