Providing Beauty to Urbanites

Walking on the streets of Addis Ababa, it would not take long to notice mini flower marketplaces. These marketplaces are now increasing in number in almost all districts of the capital as the tradition of using indoor and outdoor flowers to decorate residences has grown. At the various corners of the capital, it has become big business to grow and sell indoor plants. As a result of the community’s expanding change in attitude towards aesthetics, members of the society have started to purchase and use them at a premium price to adorn their homes. In this article, EBR’s Tirualem Asmare looks into the flourishing flower business that is bringing beauty and livelihoods to homes in the capital.

The purpose of the holidays is to honor the things that bind people together in life. The holidays are also a time for giving beyond offering appreciation and expressing gratitude to loved ones– often in the way of gifts. This year, the culture of gift-giving faces a formidable foe in the form of unabated inflation, writes EBR’s Trualem Asmare.

The pet trade has evolved in recent years from individual vendors hawking puppies on the roadside to full-fledged pet stores and social media sites offering high-end breeds to increasingly eager customers. An evolving attitude to dog ownership means that demand continues to grow, with some breeds selling for as much as ETB 250,000. The booming trade is only one side of the story for the dogs of Addis Ababa, as untold numbers of the canines still live on the streets, posing serious public health concerns, writes EBR’s Tirualem Asmare.

After the Ethiopian new year holiday season and two months of winter vacation, students return to school. It is definitely tough to take-on day-long classes after a vacation packed with fun. The holiday season right before classes begins offers some solace to students, but the greatest burden of lifting children’s spirits for the new academic year falls on their guardians, both physically or morally. The procurement of new school supplies, uniforms, backpacks, lunch boxes, and other materials is expected of parents and guardians at the beginning of each year. Every year though, the procurement of these school supplies has proved to be nothing but a signal of a bad start. This year is no different—skyrocketing prices of school supplies have hit parents hard, writes EBR’s Bamlak Fekadu.

TikTok allows individuals to record and share videos of themselves or others engaged in activities to their followers and the large number of users on the platform. It assumes a video-sharing community that is real, raw, and without boundary. One of the most significant marks of TikTok is that it has provided ‘creative freedom’ to normal people which was once limited to only celebrities. Launched in 2016 by the Chinese technology company ByteDance, the social media platform is now attracting more and more Ethiopians to its pool. While some Ethiopians are turning the platform to their advantage by making it a source of their livelihoods, others are wasting their precious time on it. In this article, EBR’s Trualem Asmare looks into the overall impact of the TikTok phenomenon on Ethiopian society.

As Ethiopia is being rocked by high inflation, the economic nightmare has affected people’s lives in many ways. As such, unaffordable goods and services in the capital are causing a change in lifestyles. A couple years back, buying food from street stands that serve food was frowned upon and was more frequented by daily laborers who work at construction sites or others working on streets—from shoe shiners to fruit vendors. The continuing rise in food prices, however, is driving even those with relatively better earnings to consider street food as an affordable alternative, writes EBR’s Trualem Asmare.

Ethiopia is home to not just products that are typical to its various communities, but also in the specific way in which those products are made. Injera is made on the ‘mitad’, loosely translated as pan or griddle. Most cultural attire is also made in unique methods and steps. The handmade and distinctive features have garnered iconic status among Ethiopians, and global markets are slowly giving an eye. But now, there seems to be slowly shifting trends in the way these very Ethiopian foods and clothes are made. While there are new developments in automating injera-making using a machine, the printing of the ‘tilet’ has been quite common for some time now. Further, some other Ethiopian entities such as the Geez alphabet are also taking shape into modern brands, writes EBR’s Trualem Asmare.

If anything, most people who have been closely watching Ethiopia’s import-dominated economy would agree on the flood of cars that have been passing through the nation’s dominantly-used Port of Djibouti. The import of automobiles has been continuously increasing throughout the last two decades despite the rise in the cost of living and other socio-political challenges. With the mass import of vehicles in the last several years, one also may notice how it has been following various trends of brands and models. In this article, EBR’s Trualem Asmare investigates what dictates the brands of cars seen on the streets of Addis Ababa.