Diaspora Ethiopia

From restaurants and music to advancements in medicine, business and the arts, the Ethiopian community – the largest African population in the country – has had a significant impact on the US. During this year's presidential elections, the community, which has traditionally aligned with the Democratic Party, appeared to shift to the right. “A majority of Ethiopian Americans associated with the Democratic Party for many years,” Mesfin Tegenu, chairman of the American Ethiopian Public Affairs Committee, told The National. “Although we haven’t conducted a formal survey, it looks like there has been a shift in party affiliation or support. We believe a significant number might have moved to the Republican Party.” Continue Reading...

For four years, Mahad Ali Hussein reported from the Somali region of Ethiopia, one of the most dangerous countries in the world for journalists.  After multiple arrests and beatings by police, he fled the country in 2023.  For the last year, he’s been podcasting from Minnesota, part of an ecosystem of Somali journalists who cover the Somali diaspora, telling stories that would be suppressed back home.  Continue Reading...

On Ethiopian integration, there's much to celebrate but also more work ahead | Adi Yonas : We understood our life in Ethiopia was difficult, and the promise of ... Approximately 19,900 Ethiopian - born people were registered at the Ministry of ... Continue Reading...

One day in 2020, Abeba Birhane found herself on Wikipedia, scouring a list of slurs. At the time, Birhane was pursuing a PhD in cognitive science at the University College Dublin and was trying to see how many of those slurs appeared in the image descriptions for a massive data set that’s often used to train AI systems.  She had already turned up plenty of matches on the obvious filth, but Birhane was running out of ideas for what to search next. “The reason I went to Wikipedia is because I couldn’t think of enough slur words,” she says.  Continue Reading...