Ethiopia received 100,000 testing kits and 2 million gloves from the Chinese Tencent Foundation in support to the fight against the COVID 19 pandemic.
“The donation is important which helps us to grow our strategies we have in fighting the pandemic,” said Dr Lia Tadesse Minister of Health, adding that “expanding testing is one of our strategy in responding to the pandemic, we are working very hard to increase our daily testing capacity over the country.”
“We are working to increase our capacity in testing trying to get through donations and to buy from the market” said Dr Lia.
The equipment is transported by Ethiopian Airlines from China, Guangzhou to Addis Ababa on May 21, 2020.
After the outbreak of the virus in Ethiopia Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed called for global support to the whole Africa. Since then Ethiopia has been receiving donations from different institutions, from all over the world.
“We have been transporting different donations from all over the world but Chinese donation is much greater,” said Tewelde Gebremariam CEO of Ethiopian Airlines.
China and Ethiopia have maintained close partnership supporting each other and sharing experience since the Covid-19 outbreak.
“China is always ready to support Ethiopia’s effort in fighting the Covid 19 pandemic,” said Ambassador Tan Jian. “From the beginning Ethiopia and China has been working together, even when the whole world cut flights to China Ethiopian Airline sayed with us,” the ambassador said.
On April 16, Chinese task force with urgent medical supplies, including surgical masks, personal protective equipment, “non-invasive” ventilators and traditional Chinese medicine, arrived in Ethiopia.
Also following Prime Minister Abiy’s call to combat the spread of the virus and support the response in Africa, the Chinese billionaire and co-founder of Alibaba group Jack Ma has made three batches of donations to the continent. The three round donations mainly includes millions of masks, swabs and test kits, ventilators, sets of protective clothing, face shields, temperature guns, body temperature scanners, and pairs of gloves that were distributed to Africa Center for Disease Control and the 55 African countries through Ethiopian airlines.
The Tencent Charity Foundation was founded in June 2007 operating under Tencent Holdings Ltd. which is a Chinese multinational conglomerate holding company founded in 1998, whose subsidiaries specialise in various Internet-related services and products, entertainment, artificial intelligence and technology both in China and globally.