Africa

Educated, unemployed and unemployable (may be)

50, 000 Ethiopian graduates have just joined the search for the job market. Majority of them will not be employed soon and a good number of them are may be unemployable at all

Hone Mandefro

  Tekeste Amaha is one of the 50, 000-odd undergraduates this year only from the 31 public universities spread nationwide. Tekeste was graduating from the main campus of the Addis Ababa University (AAU) and one of the hundreds of his batches who were frustrated to see a statement that says “If others don’t employ you, it’s alright you can do that for yourself!” written in bold in one of the brochures distributed during the graduation ceremony last July. That the fate of self-employment awaits him and thousands of other graduates by itself should not as a frustration, but that it came as a last minute surprise is; Tekeste believed once he was done studying he would get a good job and a better life. Alas. That seems unlikely to happen anytime soon.

Africa

Israel – The gradual nightmare for African asylum seekers

Israel is embroiled in tragic tales of black African asylum seekers. In this special report this magazine’s Middle East analyst Ran HaCohen (PhD), from Tel Aviv, Israel, looks deep into the tricky human, political and economical factors at play 

The prelude took place at the end of April: four Molotov cocktails, thrown at homes and a kindergarten of African asylum seekers in Tel Aviv. The damage was massive; luckily nobody was injured. Hell broke loose a few weeks later. A demonstration against the so-called “Sudanese” – most of them are in fact Eritreans – attracted a handful of politicians, both from Netanyahu’s far-right coalition and from the even-further-right opposition, who turned the event into an incitement contest. “The time for words is over,” threatened opposition Knesset Member Michael Ben-Ari (former member of the violent Jewish-racist “Kach” movement, outlawed in Israel and considered a terrorist organization in the United States).