Dear Ed: Your colleague should get in touch with Nicola Bradbear at
IBRA. She will have a good handle on who is doing what in beekeeping
in Ethiopia. There is lots of potential for beekeeping, honey and wax
production in Ethiopia. There have been some development projects, but
the earlier ones were not very well conceived nor very useful and
generally unsuccessful. I don't know about more recent, in the last
5 years, projects. It is difficult to know what sort of help is needed
for your colleague, so I can not offer much advice. I know that Langstroth
hives have been used in the past, but mostly without much success.
That probably resulted from inadequate training and in-country infra-
structure (i.e. no trained apiculuralists). For small scale operations
Kenya Top-bar hives would probably work better.
 
Development projects in beekeeping in may underdeveloped countries have
failed because of lack of adequately trained national apiculturalists.
It's all very well to teach people to keep bees, but the knowledge of the
average beekeeper, even in N. America and Europe, is pretty shallow. The
presence of trained professionals is needed for extension work and for
knowing how, or who to contact elsewhere, to address the unforeseen or
unusual problems by way of techniques or research. Without that sort of
infrastructure to support beekeeping, sooner or later, it fails and leaves
disillusioned ex-beekeepers behind.
 
Cheers, Peter.