Different World
The rest of my week in Addis (when I wasn’t being ill!) was taken up with a workshop for EFFORT, this is an organisation which represents the main big businesses in Tigray. They are setting up a management training institute with assistance from the OU Business School. Before I came out to Ethiopia I’d already been in contact with Professor Graeme Salaman (from OUBS) and he invited me along to the workshop to help out with advising EFFORT on what IT support and systems they will need for the institute. The workshop seemed to go very well, I spent most of my time helping out the head of their IT support.
We were staying at the Addis Hilton, one of the best hotels in the country, although the workshop was in Debre Zeit (about hours drive south of Addis) at the Ethiopian Management Institute training centre. The Hilton was great, although very expensive and way out of reach for all but the Ethiopian elite! My room cost 2 months of my current salary per night. We also went out to a very good restaurant, where the bill for 3 of us to have dinner and a bottle of wine was around 1000 birr (around 70 GBP). The restaurant was full of who I can assume must be staff from various embassies and NGOs, all of which makes you start to wonder where all the money put into development actually ends up – especially seeing all the brand new land cruisers being driven around…
The beginning of this week hasn’t really been off to a great start, firstly, I’m still feeling pretty run down and tired, secondly our water has been off for last couple of days and thirdly my external hard drive seems to have failed. I can still read it (just incredibly slowly) when in Ubuntu, but can’t read it at all in XP. I’ve attempted to run disk repair tools on it, but no luck so far. There is a huge amount of data on the drive (too much to be able to back up onto DVD or even onto my desktop PCs drive) and although I have backups of the critical data, I’d still like to be able to recover the rest of it (programs, ebooks, mp3s etc). My plan is just to get another external hard drive and copy the data off – I’m hoping to get one sent over soon.
Computer hardware is more expensive here than in the UK, due to high import taxes. In applying a 100% import duty, not only does Ethiopia receive the equipment (often paid for by development organisations), but the government receives a matching amount of money to spend as it likes. If I was being very cynical I’d suggest this may be why there is so much new computer equipment sat around unused or at least under-used.
