Orange Withdraws from Ethio Telecom Sale Process

Orange Group opted to withdraw from a process to acquire a 45 per cent stake in Ethiopia’s state-owned operator Ethio Telecom, blaming existing market conditions which it claims do not match its strategy.

In a statement to Mobile World Live, the France-based operator group explained it would not move forward with a plan to attempt to acquire a 45 per cent stake in the Ethiopian business, ending interest which first began in 2021.

“After analysis, the group believes the conditions do not allow for the rapid deployment of our strategy and the completion of a project that would create value for the company,” it stated.

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Grand Challenges and Opportunities; Blue Ribbon Panel Report of ETHIOPIA2050

Grand Challenges and Opportunities which is a Blue Ribbon Panel Report of the ETHIOPIA2050 is officially published and submitted to Government of Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia. This report is prepared by a Blue Ribbon Panel (BRP) consisting of an independent group of Ethiopian and Ethiopian-origin experts with diverse professional backgrounds. They bring deep expertise across fields as varied as economics, public health, statistics, education, population dynamics, technology, and urban planning. Together, they have formulated a transformative vision to proactively aid Ethiopia on its journey to a better future.

To proactively address what were identified as “Ten Grand Challenges and Opportunities” associated with this expected generational and historical demographic shift, an Initiative was launched to carefully examine, both the opportunities of demographic dividend and the associated risks. The approach in this Initiative was guided by the consideration of population as a central issue for both the challenges and opportunities side, because it is people who are the ultimate beneficiaries of development.

The BRP rests upon a collective vision that is part of the broader ETHIOPIA 2050 Initiative and focuses on the actions that policymakers can take, with broad support of the public. Their insights were generated after extensive and careful vetting of the transformative new ideas presented at an international conference held on December 19th and 20th, 2019 in Addis Ababa which included 450 Ethiopian/Ethiopian origin participants from 10 countries.

The report presents a series of bold, feasible, and actionable ideas with an execution plan - that will have multi-generational impacts. The report lays out a straightforward and powerful rationale for actions in the areas like, Rapid Urbanization, Water-Food-Health-Energy Nexus, Economic Growth, Institutional and Civic Development and Gender Equality just to list some. The full report is available here.

First FORTRAN Program Runs in 1954

The first successful FORTRAN program runs September 20, 1954, 66 years ago. FORTRAN, which is an acronym for "FORmula TRANslator," was invented at IBM by a group led by John Backus. FORTRAN's purpose was to simplify the programming process by allowing the programmer ("coder") to use simple algebra-like expressions when writing software. It also took over the task of keeping track of where instructions were kept in memory--a very laborious and error-prone procedure when undertaken by humans. FORTRAN is rarely in use today and used some times in scientific and engineering applications, making it one of the oldest programming languages still in use.

ECA's New Logo

The Ethiopian Communication Authority has introduced the new logo. According to the information from ECA's tweeter page, @eca_ethiopia, the authority has started the New Ethiopian Year with a New Logo  introduced.

First Search Engine: September 2, 1993

The world’s first primitive web search engine is started. on September 2, 1993. Known as W3Catalog or the CUI WWW Catalog, it was started by Oscar Nierstrasz at the Centre Universitaire d’Informatique (CUI) of the University of Geneva. This search site lasted for about 3 years before more modernized search engines began appearing. 

One Voice for Our Dam

Ethiopians celebrate the progress made on the Nile dam, in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia,Sunday Aug. 2, 2020. Ethiopians in the capital celebrated the progress in the construction of the country’s dam on the Nile River. In joyful demonstrations urged by posts on social media and apparently endorsed by the government, tens of thousands of residents flooded the streets of the capital Addis Ababa on Sunday afternoon, waving Ethiopia’s flag and holding up posters.

Twelve EOI for the Two Telecommunications Licenses in Ethiopia

A press revised by Ministry of Finance and Ethiopian Communications Authority (ECA) indicated that a total of 12 submissions, of which 9 are telecom operators and 2 are non-telecom operators and 1 incomplete are received before the closing date of June 22nd, 2020. According to the press release, the consortium of Vodafone, Vodacom, and Safaricom,  Etisalat,  Axian, MTN, Orange, Saudi Telecom Company, Telkom SA, Liquid Telecom, Snail Mobile, and the two non-telecom operators, Kandu Global Telecommunications and Electromecha International Projects.

The Ministry of Finance and ECA  thanked all those potential bidders who have responded to the request and expressed their interest.
For further reading please visit the official site here.