Day: November 24, 2021

Posted on

Thunes Partners with Ethiopia’s Ethio telecom to Power Cross-Border Transfers for its Mobile Money users

SINGAPORE and ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia, Nov. 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/ — Thunes, a leading global payments platform, today announced a partnership with Ethio telecom, Ethiopia’s largest telecom operator with more than 59 million subscribers. With access to Thunes network, telebirr will become the first telecom operator-led money transfer service in Ethiopia to deliver a fast, transparent and cost-effective money transfer experience to its customer base of over 11 million mobile money users.

This partnership enables users of Ethio telecom’s mobile money platform, telebirr, to receive real-time cross-border payments from anywhere in the world via Thunes’ global partner network, which enables payments to 116 countries in over 70 currencies. This move will significantly expand and enhance international payments in Ethiopia.

“In Africa, mobile operators play a crucial role in driving innovation and adoption of financial services. So we are extremely delighted to collaborate with Ethio telecom on this initiative and enable real-time payments into the telebirr mobile money accounts. Ethiopian people rightfully expect payments to be fast, inclusive, and affordable, and through the power of our technology we hope to address the needs of consumers and businesses in this dynamic market,” said Sandra Yao, Senior Vice President, Africa, Thunes.

To date, over 11 million people in Ethiopia are using telebirr since its inauguration launch on 11 May 2021. The mobile money platform allows users to send and receive money, deposit or take out cash at appointed agents, receive cash from abroad, transfer from bank to wallet and wallet to bank, pay for goods, airtime top up, buy package and pay bills to merchants. Over the last two decades, remittances to Ethiopia have increased substantially, jumping to $5.6 billion at the end of 2018/2019 from $233 million.

”Today, our customers’ mobile phones are not just used to make phone calls and access the Internet. With telebirr, they’re also used to send, receive, and store money, alongside payments for goods, utilities, airtime and other empowering services. telebirr has been in the mobile money business to serve as an engine for financial inclusion and ensure availability, accessibility, affordability, and convenience of financial services to all Ethiopians. To date, we have transacted over 2.2 billion birr using our telebirr since its launch back in May 2021.

Moreover, our engagement with Thunes will enable our customers to easily receive any amount of International Remittance through telebirr. We believe this service will save time and cost for our customers. Ethio telecom, as one of the largest telecom operators in Africa with more than 59 million subscribers, will continue leveraging mobile money and other digital solutions to unlock opportunities to realize our country’s vision for a digital economy,” said Frehiwot Tamru, CEO of Ethio telecom.

Media Contact
Irina Chuchkina
press@thunes.com

Posted on

Foreigners Urged to Leave Ethiopia as Security Worsens

The U.S., France and Germany have joined other countries in urging their citizens to leave Ethiopia as fighting between federal forces and rebel groups moves closer to the capital, Addis Ababa. The U.N. has also announced evacuation flights for family members of its staff in the country. The presidents of neighboring Kenya and South Africa have joined calls for an urgent cease-fire.
As the security situation worsens in Ethiopia, there are increasing concerns about what happens next.
William Davison is the International Crisis Group’s Senior Analyst for Ethiopia.
“There is a real prospect of the war coming to Addis Ababa and that could have even more terrible consequences we have seen so far we could see, very serious urban warfare. We could see Amhara-Oromo clashes if the OLA is involved lots of popular resistance obviously to the Tigray forces, the potential breakdown in government authority if there is an effort to regime change. We could see the violence against Tigrayans civilians increase and the repression rapidly. So definitely a need for a cease-fire,” he said.
CNN reports the U.S. military has prepared special forces to assist its embassy workers and citizens if the security situation deteriorates in the Horn of African nation.
Briefing reporters in Washington Tuesday, U.S. Special Envoy for the Horn of Africa Jeffrey Feltman said there was progress in getting all parties to agree to a cease-fire.
Feltman expressed fears the military confrontation threatens Ethiopia’s stability and unity.
The Kenyan and South African presidents Tuesday also called for a cease-fire.
In November of last year, armed conflict broke out in the Tigray region between Ethiopian government forces and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front. Since then, the conflict has spread to other parts of the country.
Tigray forces and the Oromo Liberation Army threaten to drive Ethiopia’s Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed out of power by storming Addis Ababa.
On Tuesday, Abiy said he would be at the front line to guide troops against the advancing rebel groups.
Tobias Wellner is a sub-Saharan Africa senior intelligence analyst with Dragonfly Intelligence, a group that works on global security and political risks. He said Abiy’s plan to lead the military on the battlefront is to keep the troops’ morale high.
“It’s really to rally support as the government is struggling to defend against the advancing rebel forces. I personally think it’s very unlikely that Abiy is actually going to fight himself; it’s more of a propaganda act and it also means it’s a sign that Abiy will fight rather than step down from his position,” said Wellner.
On Wednesday, Ethiopia government spokesman Legesse Tulu said the prime minister had arrived at the battlefront without giving details.
Tulu also said Abiy’s deputy, Demeke Mekonnen Hassen, is handling government activities while he is away.
Wellner said a victory for either the rebel groups or the government will create more rebellion in the country.
He said there will be no winner in this war.
“The connections between the TDF and OLA and other rebel groups that have joined the fray, it’s a very cautious and not so strong alliance. Right now they are under the umbrella of opposing Abiy Ahmed but if they need to rule Ethiopia is a whole ‘nother question, then the Ethno-politics will come out and make that alliance very shaky. Last scenario stalemate there is going to be some sort of cease-fire that will often be broken,” said Wellner.
The Tigray leadership is calling on lifting the humanitarian blockade so that more than 400,000 people can receive much-needed humanitarian assistance. The government wants Tigray forces and other rebel groups to leave areas of the country they have captured.

Source: Voice of America

Posted on

Somalia Declares Humanitarian Emergency as Drought Worsens

Somalia has declared a state of humanitarian emergency as drought ravages 80 percent of the country, leaving more than two million people short of food and water.
Somali Prime Minister Mohamed Hussein Roble, who declared the emergency, appealed for an urgent response.
He said, “I am calling upon all Somalis, including the business community, religious leaders, members of the diaspora community and international partners, to take part in aiding those affected by the famine.”
The situation is very dire and there is a need for an immediate response, the prime minister added.
Badia Moalim Osman is among thousands of Somali pastoralists who lost their livestock in the escalating drought.
She was displaced to Dhobley town in the Lower Jubba region, one of most affected areas.
She said they lost herds of cattle to the drought and were only left with two cows that also succumbed to the famine.
U.N. agencies in the country say their efforts to reach those affected are limited by a lack of funding and access due to conflict in some areas.
Cindy Isaac is the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs deputy head in Mogadishu.
“The humanitarian partners and authorities in Somalia are really trying to scale up the responses mainly through water tracking, repairing boreholes and delivering food and health assistance to address the extraordinary critical water and food needs however the efforts have been significantly hampered due to the ongoing inadequate funding and access constraints in the areas affected by the conflict,” she said.
The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization warns food insecurity is projected to worsen significantly through May 2022, with many households experiencing widening food consumption gaps and erosion of their coping capacity if expected rains fail again.

Source: Voice of America

Posted on

Libya Election Head Rules Out Gadhafi as Presidential Candidate

Libya’s election commission said on Wednesday that Saif al-Islam Gadhafi, the son of the former ruler and a major candidate in December’s planned presidential election, was ineligible to run, compounding the turmoil surrounding the vote.
Gadhafi was one of 25 candidates that it disqualified in an initial decision pending an appeals process that will ultimately be decided by the judiciary. Some 98 Libyans registered as candidates.
Disputes over the election rules, including the legal basis of the vote and who should be eligible to stand, threaten to derail an internationally backed peace process aimed at ending a decade of factional chaos.
The military prosecutor in Tripoli had urged the commission to rule out Gadhafi after his conviction in absentia on war crimes charges in 2015 for his part in fighting the revolution that toppled his father Muammar Gadhafi in 2011. He has denied wrongdoing.
Some of the other candidates initially approved by the commission had also been accused of possible violations by political rivals.
Interim prime minister Abdulhamid al-Dbeibah vowed not to run for president as a condition of taking on his present role, and did not stand down from it three months before the vote as is required by a contested election law.
Another prominent candidate, eastern commander Khalifa Haftar, is said to have U.S. nationality, which could also rule him out. Many people in western Libya also accuse him of war crimes committed during his 2019-20 assault on Tripoli.
Haftar denies warcrimes and says he is not a U.S. citizen. Dbeibah has described as “flawed” the election rules issued in September by the parliament speaker Aguila Saleh, who is also a candidate.
U.N. Libya envoy Jan Kubis, who is stepping down from his post, told the U.N. Security Council on Wednesday that Libya’s judiciary would make the final decision on the rules and on whether candidates were eligible.

Source: Voice of America

Posted on

Humanitarian, Human Rights Organizations Press for Aid Access in Ethiopia

With a yearlong conflict taking an increasing toll in northern Ethiopia, the U.N. World Food Program, Human Rights Watch and other organizations are intensifying their appeals for combatants to halt abuses and permit the delivery of emergency aid to millions of at-risk civilians.
Meanwhile, people displaced by fighting in the eastern Amhara region say that beyond the immediate violence of war, they also are battling hunger and unmet critical medical needs.
Residents interviewed by VOA’s Horn of Africa Service at a refugee camp in the Amhara regional capital of Bahir Dar spoke this week of frequent deaths and funerals for individuals who died in recent weeks from hunger or a lack of medicine.
The Amhara region lies just south of the Tigray region, where Ethiopian federal forces and their allies began fighting in November 2020 to put down a rebellion by the once politically dominant Tigray People’s Liberation Front and its fighters. The conflict has killed tens of thousands of people and has spread to neighboring regions, including Amhara and Afar.
Zelalem Lijalem, commissioner of coordination for the Amhara regional disaster prevention and food security program, said roughly a third of the region’s more than 21 million residents need emergency humanitarian assistance. Zelalem said at a Monday press conference in Bahir Dar that the needy included 2.1 million internally displaced people and another 5 million in areas still controlled by the TPLF.
Fighting has “closed the main corridors into Tigray and Amhara [regions], substantially cutting access,” WFP spokesperson Tomson Phiri said at a news briefing Tuesday in Geneva. Despite that, he said, the organization has delivered food and nutritional aid to 2.6 million people in Tigray, 220,000 in Amhara and another 124,000 in Afar.
Responding Wednesday to written questions from VOA, another WFP spokesperson, Kyle Wilkinson, said about 1.7 million people have been displaced in the Amhara region, according to government estimates, and 3.7 million people in the region “are in urgent need of food assistance.”
Phiri said his agency has begun a two-week “major food assistance operation to serve more than 450,000 people” in the northern Ethiopian towns of Kombolcha and Dessie.
“For WFP to scale up the delivery of food assistance to save 3.7 million lives in northern Ethiopia, all parties must cooperate to facilitate movement of supplies across battle lines and allow access to affected populations, wherever and whenever needed,” Phiri said.
He also said the agency faces a $546 million shortfall for its efforts throughout Ethiopia “to save and change the lives of 12 million people over the next six months.”
Evidence of looting
The availability of relief supplies has been hampered by looting and destruction. Phiri said the WFP last week was able to access humanitarian warehouses in Kombolcha, in the Amhara region, only to find “damaged equipment, vandalized storage units and substantial amounts of food looted from the facilities. The loss of this food means fewer people in need can be reached by WFP and its partners.”
He did not indicate when the vandalism took place or who might be responsible.
The U.S. Agency for International Development’s mission chief in Ethiopia, Sean Jones, said in a late-August interview with Ethiopian state TV that TPLF fighters were culpable for looting and destroying humanitarian goods in at least some Amhara locations.
TPLF spokesperson Getachew Reda denied his organization was culpable, saying in a Sept. 1 tweet that “while we cannot vouch for every unacceptable behavior of off-grid fighters in such matters, we have evidence that such looting is mainly orchestrated by local individuals & groups.” He called for an independent investigation.
Fighting, TPLF attacks and a federal government blockade on Tigray imposed in June have deterred aid. But, as The Associated Press reported, a joint investigation by the U.N. Human Rights Council and the government-appointed Ethiopian Human Rights Commission “could not confirm deliberate or willful denial of humanitarian assistance to the civilian population in Tigray or the use of starvation as a weapon of war.”
‘Investigative mechanism’ sought
On Tuesday, Human Rights Watch cited the joint investigation, saying in a statement that the UNHRC should “urgently establish an independent international investigative mechanism” to document abuses, “to ensure accountability and to prevent impunity.”
Human Rights Watch said its own research “found serious violations and abuses of international human rights and humanitarian law” on a range of fronts, including “obstruction of humanitarian assistance, leaving millions at risk of famine and disease.”
In mid-November, Martin Griffiths, the U.N. humanitarian chief, announced $40 million in new humanitarian aid for Ethiopia. The funding aims to provide aid and civilian protection in a country beset by conflict and drought.

Source: Voice of America