Africa

Kaizen and revolutionary principle: A marriage of opposing world views?

The government in Ethiopia is keenly introducing a concept that has little to no resemblance with its revolutionary principles

By Taye Negussie (PhD), Tsedale Lemma and Emnet Assefa

Since Oct. 2009, shortly after the introduction of a nationwide Business Process Re-engineering (BPR), an idea introduced to bring radical changes among state institutions but, in the process, virtually stalled them for months and now widely deemed to be a failure, the Ethiopian government started advocating the idea of kaizen–a Japanese management philosophy–among private and state owned companies; the idea was first brought to the attention of Ethiopia’s late PM Meles Zenawi in 2008.

Africa

Ethiopia to commence one window electric billing system for multiple services

Emnet Assefa

Addis Ababa- Ministry of communications and Information Technology announced here today it will commence a one-window electronic billing system as of Feb. 2013. The service called ‘Lehulu’ (loosely translated ‘for all’) will enable customers to make their electric, water and landline telephone bill payments at a single paying centre.  

Africa

Addis hosting African Leadership for Child Survival conference

Africa has shown an impressive decline in child mortality rates, but still loses a million children a year

Emnet Assefa

African Leadership for Child Survival, an initiative to reduce child mortality rate in the continent, has opened its continental conference in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, this morning at the African Union Commission (AUC). The conference that will last for the next three days is being attended by health ministers of African countries, international organizations as well as non- governmental organizations.