Inviting more Indian head room

Gennet Zewide’s eyes light up when she remembers ‘Madam Krishna, Ramachandra Sir’—her teachers in school. She is the Ethiopian ambassador to India, after being its education minister for 13 years.

“How can I forget India’s contribution in my life? Whatever I am today is because of the Indian teachers,” she told Business Standard at the Ethiopian parliament.

Ethiopia is attracting investments and aid from various countries. On the way to the city from the airport, you get to see a warehouse made by Arabs, the African Union headquarters being constructed by China, signboards of German engineering and Japan’s Toyota dominates the car market.

But in the education sector, it’s only India that matters to Ethiopia. “We don’t take help of the Chinese or any other country to develop our education sector. We totally depend on India,” syas Zewide.

Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, ruling the country since 1991, told his Indian counterpart, Manmohan Singh, yesterday that he wanted his sugar technology experts to the World trade Organisation negotiations to be trained by India. “We are depending on you,” Zenawi told Singh on education.

According to foreign ministry sources, 40,000 people in Africa have so far studied in India. This list includes many important country leaders. Zenawi, too, was taught by Indian teachers in his younger days.

Taking the New Delhi show of this “soft power” ahead, the PM’s Africa package announced during the India-African Union Summit laid a lot of importance on education. The PM has announced establishment of an India-Africa Virtual University with 10,000 new scholarships, a total of 22,000 scholarships to Africa students, institutes for English language training, information technology, entrepreneurship development and vocational training, among other things.

The seed for Singh’s endeavour was actually laid many years ago during the rule of Haile Selassie, the last monarch. Selassie was overthrown in 1974. But before that he had realised the importance of Indian teachers and lured them to his country with fat pay packages and other facilities.

Today, Piassa, the main market area of Addis Ababa, boasts of an Indian School. “We have Turkish school and British schools here. But the Indian school, enjoys a different level of respect,” says Jyotsna Gupta, a migrant of Uttar Pradesh.

In his address to the Ethippian parliament today, Singh said education and capacity building are high priority areas for both countries. In July 2007, then external affairs minister Pranab Mukherjee had come down here to inaugurate the tele-education programme of Addis Ababa University, whose campus stands on the main road of the city. Mukherjee mentioned that at the time around 450 Indian teachers are teaching in Ethiopia.

For Manmohan Singh, who was a teacher before joining the bureaucracy and finally, politics, it is probably even more satisfying that his government has taken a big step in Ethiopia’s own ‘Sarv Shiksha Abhiyan’!