Discussions of female education in Sub-Saharan countries often focus on ways to improve conditions and to achieve gender parity. However, a few studies have also examined the conditions under which individual women choose to go to school. The discussion of dropping out among female students has been focused on prevention and allowing more females to attend school, whereas there has been little discussion about education after dropping out or about those who did not enter school at customary age. This study used the community of Maale in southwestern Ethiopia as an example to investigate the process of female schooling with regard to how individual women decided to enter or return to school. To this end, I interviewed three women who entered or returned to school despite older than the usual school age. I identified two factors that enabled these women to enter or return to school: (1) the presence of a formal educational system and a community consensus in support of allowing females to make their own decisions about their education, (2) the relationships between the student and the people to whom she was close. Sustainable female education requires respect for the diversity of the decision-making processes by which individuals make choices.

The decentralization and free provision of life-saving antiretroviral therapy (ART) to health centers in Ethiopia began in 2006. In the Tǝgray Region, the number of people who began ART increased almost tenfold between 2006 and 2010, yet treatment retention among these patients has been challenging. This qualitative analysis explores the experiences of patients who either continued or interrupted adherence to ART. Conducted at three health facilities in Mäqälä City from August to October 2009, the aim of this study was to document the facilitating factors and barriers to ART adherence from patients’ perspectives.

For both continued and interrupted adherence, the most common facilitating factors are a belief in the efficacy of the medication, trust in the health-care providers, low level of side effects, positive treatment results, and having an HIV-positive friend. Each restarter had distinctive reasons for interrupting the ART. Major contributing factors to ART interruption were the side effects and fear of stigma or discrimination.

In urban neighborhoods with a high volume of rural migration, where people lived far from their extended families, ART patients were more dependent on health workers for adherence support.

This report introduces the life and collection of Friedrich Julius Bieber. He visited Ethiopia several times, especially Kafa, at the beginning of the twentieth century and is recognized as the foremost authority on ethnological research focused on Kafa. Bieber left a great deal of property and written documents concerning both Ethiopia and his daily life. This collection included ethnological objects from Ethiopia, instruments used during his journeys to Ethiopia, photographs, books, and unpublished written documents, such as diaries, drafts, memoranda, letters, and postcards to his family and friends. Today, these items are housed in three places: the Ethnology Museum, the Austrian National Library and the District Museum of Hietzing in Vienna, Austria. They can help deepen our understanding of Kafa, both historically and in its current state, and of Ethiopia as a whole, providing insights that would be impossible to uncover by present-day fieldwork. However, we can gain significant knowledge from these items only if we construct a proper basis for the use of these valuable collections.