Ethiopia: Our Impact

The four-year Ethiopia Network for HIV/AIDS Treatment, Care, and Support (ENHAT-CS) project held its end-of-project conference in December in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and announced its notable achievements in the two regions where it operated – Amhara and Tigray.

Updated January 30, 2015 A Phone Call for Health Alongside a road in a remote area of the Amhara Region, Solomon Dawit*, a truck driver from the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa, sits waiting for a ride to the nearest town. He has two big problems: his truck has broken down and he doesn’t know how long it would take to get the parts needed to fix it. Another problem?  He is running out of his lifesaving antiretroviral (ARV) medication. After one month of waiting, Dawit’s truck is fixed, and he heads back home to Addis Ababa.

For more than eight years, the Supply Chain Management System (SCMS) has been saving lives through stronger supply chains. Funded by the US President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), SCMS is supporting rapid scale-up of HIV/AIDS programs, creating a reliable global supply chain where none existed, leveraging economies of scale to reduce costs, and serving as an emergency provider of choice for AIDS programs. SCMS is managed by the non-profit Partnership for Supply Chain Management (PFSCM)—a partnership of John Snow, Inc. (JSI), and Management Sciences for Health (MSH).

Ethiopia has the seventh highest TB burden in the world. Out of every 100,000 Ethiopians, 572 are infected with TB. In Ethiopian prisons, this prevalence rate can be three to four times higher due to crowded quarters and insufficient TB control services.  In the three decades he has worked at Ambo Prison as clinic head, Birhanu Weyecha has seen hundreds of inmates become infected with TB and transmit the disease to other prisoners and staff.