In the Ethiopian year 2007 a law was passed to make it easier to import food and traditional clothing around the border regions. It allowed people living in those areas to import the items tax free and without foreign currency. The rational is that infrastructure issues make it more difficult to obtain these items from the capital city. This type of trading should involve small transactions among people living along the border. However, at the moment, single transactions of over 200,000 cartons are coming across the border. The imports are massive and the products are coming all the way to the center of the country and competing with local manufacturers who pay the requried taxes.
This is seriously affecting and discouraging local manufacturers as they pay tax unlike the people who import these products under this directive. This gives them an unfair advantage and is not what the sprit of the law intended.
Article 6.2 of the directive clearly indicates that people who misuse this rule to import products to the center of the country will be prosecuted. This is not only driving local manufacturers out of business but also discouraging all their efforts toward import substitution, which would save foreign currency for the country.
Among the categories that are tremendously affected by this directive is the pasta manufacturing industry. Ethiopia’s policy clearly supports the agro-processing industry. However, this directive is going to be a major bottleneck in the development of the sector unless something is done immediately to curb this problem.

Seventy seven percent of SA organizations have experienced economic crime;fraud committed by consumers ranks as the second most reported crime in SA;CEO and board increasingly being held accountable for economic crime;Only 37 percent of respondents have conducted an anti-bribery/anti-corruption risk assessment;19 percent of organizations have spent between twice and ten times as much on investigations as the original amount lost to economic crime.
South African organizations continue to report the highest instances of economic crime in the world with economic crime reaching its highest level over the past decade, according to PwC’s biennial Global Economic Crime Survey released this week.
South African organizations that have experienced economic crime are now at a staggering 77 percent, followed in second place by Kenya (75 percent), and thirdly France (71 percent). With half of the top ten countries who reported economic crime coming from Africa, the situation at home is more than dire.
The Global Economic Crime and Fraud Survey examines over 7200 respondents from 123 countries, of which 282 were from South Africa.
Economic crime in South Africa is now at the highest level over the past decade. It is also alarming to note that 6 percent of executives in South Africa (Africa 5 percent and Global 7 percent) simply did not know whether their respective organizations were being affected by economic crime or not.

The U.S. President’s Malaria Initiative (PMI), led by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), marked the end of a nine-year program with the Ministry of Health to improve the ability of Ethiopian health centers to detect, diagnose, and treat malaria.
Under PMI’s Malaria Laboratory Diagnosis and Monitoring Project, experts trained more than 3,500 laboratory professionals to conduct more accurate microscopy diagnoses, and an additional 2,400 healthcare workers received training to treat malaria patients more effectively. As a result, more than 1,000 health facilities in areas most prone to the disease have improved their quality of service.
Malaria is a leading health threat in Ethiopia, where more than two-thirds of the population lives in high-risk areas and more than 1.5 million cases are reported annually.

More than 2.5 billion people around the world – many of them in Africa – lack formal identification that enables them to access to financial and government services, according to the United Nations and the ID2020 project . What’s more, less than 10 percent of adults in low and middle-income countries are on file in public credit registries.
The result is that millions of people in East Africa are paying punitive interest rates for credit or are frozen out of access to financial services. Microfinance institutions (MFIs) in the region charge their borrowers notoriously high interest rates, often up to 30 percent per year . This is partly because these lenders face a higher risk of loan defaults than mainstream banks due to a lack of borrower data to support lending decisions.
MFIs in frontier markets have traditionally needed to make lending decisions without access to the sort of customer data and documentation commercial banks take for granted: credit scores, identification documents such as passports or government ID cards, bank statements, lending history and collateral.
Fintech providers, financial inclusion companies and digital finance applications are filling this information gap with alternative credit data. Credit scoring applications like Tala in East Africa , for example, collect masses of data about phone owners and use these data points to produce accurate credit scores.
This alternative credit data could help the credit officers at microfinance banks (MFBs) and MFIs who make lending decisions to make more accurate predictions about loan performance. This could, in turn, help improve collection rates and profitability for institutions and make credit more affordable for lower-risk customers.