The groups of people in Omo valley, are facing the worst declining of the biodiversity and of indigenous practices, where the higher threat being man-made. Irrigation schemes for large-scale agriculture by the government like Kuraz Sugar Development Project (KSDP), with its planned 175,000 hectares of large-scale farmland and extensive implementation strategies is among the cause. United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID) reported that it will have a profound impact on some of Ethiopia’s most important protected areas, including the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Heritage Site, and the riparian forest along the Omo River. Besides, forced resettlement implementations are raised as the reason for human rights abuse in the area; most of the resettlement place doesn’t bear fertile agriculture and pastures as it is degraded and covered by invasive plant species. Hence ethnobotanical study and documentation of medicinal and wild edible plants used currently or in the recent past by the people of lower Omo valley, became our main objective, planned to collect ethnobotanical data of traditional knowledge of medicinal and wild edible plants, to conduct taxonomic identification and deposit samples of the claimed medicinal and wild edible plants in the National Herbarium of Addis Ababa University, to identify the threats and opportunities of indigenous knowledge and ecological conservation.

The Rift faces challenges like habitat destruction, wildlife poaching, and resource exploitation. Activities include conservation programs, anti-poaching patrols, and community education. Projects involve reforestation, sustainable tourism, and partnerships with local communities to promote biodiversity.

My research area of interest is renewable energy. Since energy is the engine of everything that does many works. For my research specifically on Organic Solar Cells’ power conversion performance using Plasmonic Nanoparticles at different layers of inverted Organic solar cells, I am studying the title “Unraveling Plasmon-Coupled Power Conversion Efficiency Enhancement in Wide-Band Gap Polymers-Based Organic Solar Cells: Both Experimental and Computational Approaches” at Addis Ababa University under the supervisors of Prof. Newayemedihin Aberra Tegegn and Dr. Nika Bekri Abdullah from Ethiopia. This study aims to solve the world’s energy problem and the Horn of Africa, which will contribute to the future of the rift specifically Ethiopia because Ethiopia is found in the Horn of Africa and is one of the parts of the rift.

I conducted my MA thesis on the coservational challenges of world heritage site of konso cultural landscape which is found in the great rift valley. I presented this on the 3rd GDR colloquium.

However for in the future i have a plan to do the same assessment on the Lower Omo Valley and Lower Awash Valley archaeological and paleontological world heritage sites.

I want to inquire conservational challenges of these to site.

Lower Valley of Awash paleo-anthropological site covers 150km2 where ‘Lucy’ or “ድንቅነሽ” Australopithecus Afarensis (3.2mya) and ‘Ardi’ (4.4mya) are found. It is inscribed by UNESCO in 1980.

Lower Valley of Omo paleontological site covers 165km2 where different human and animals fossil found. The site inscribed by UNESCO in 1980.

Based on the field trip experience, I observed the people were faced with a lot of climate uncertainties ” extreme weather events” leading to the occurrence of drought and flood interchangeable over years. The decline of natural resources within rift could be as a result of climate and environmental change which have been intensify by human activities. Other identify problems were as follows;

1. The Maasai pastoralist lived with their cattle’s within the rift which gave room for water contamination and other related sanitation issues resulting to water related illness among the populace which could affect their productivities (output).
2. The increasing population (human and animals) over the years could cause conflict between the farmers and pastoralist due to shrinking land for farming (rain fed agriculture) and grazing over the years.
3. There evidence of sheet and rill erosion process which could affect the fertility and condition of arable land for rain fed agriculture.
4. Depreciation of the ecological services within the Maasai conservation area of the rift was observe and needs urgent attention.
5. Drought and flood have affected the livelihood, health and well begin of the Massai people of the rift.
6. The people are living in hamlet and in dispersed form of settlement which could be difficult for the Narok government to provide preventive measures against diseases like malaria and water relate problems to the people.
7. There is need to understand the past climate before the development of the rift, present micro climate and predict what the future micro climate will be within the rift system. These will give more light on the implications

Research themes: Late Pleistocene and early Holocene hunter-gatherer societies in Africa. I am interested in the organization of hunter-gatherer lithic technology, especially stone procurement. My research explores how technological organization can be studied to understand the major evolutionary and demographic changes of the last hundred-thousand years in Africa.

My PhD research is about finding and dating cryptotephras in marine sediment cores around the Horn of Africa, over the last million years. The aims are : to provide a tephrostratigraphic framework, and to correlate these tephras with tuffs from the East African Rift (e.g. Silver Tuff from Konso, Ethiopia) using glass shard geochemistry. The outcomes are : the age of hominin fossils, palaeoclimatology of the area, and volcanic history of the East African Rift System.

Currently working as curator at the National Museum of Ethiopia in paleoanthropology, in Addis Ababa, and PhD student in PACEA lab in Bordeaux for African hominin fossils study, especially dental material.

I study fossil pollen and phytoliths as paleobotanical markers of past vegetation in order to reconstruct paleovegetations associated with Mio-Pliocene and Pleistocene hominins in Central and East Africa.

I am interested in the interactions between plants, vegetation and present-day climate in the tropics, and the influence of these three factors on botanical markers for tracing climatic and plant community changes in the past. Since 2018, I have been participating in the OGRE paleontological mission in the Shungura Formation, Omo Valley, Ethiopia.

Currently, I am a Ph.D. student at the University of Poitiers. My research interest focuses in exploring the relationships between morphology and dietary behavior of megaherbivores (proboscidean; elephants, and their relatives) revealed from hominid bearing sites of the Afar Rift Valley (e.g., Middle Awash and Hadar) and the Turkana Depression in Ethiopia (Shungura Formation) and Kenya. For the study, I will use multiproxy approaches such as dental wear analyses (dental microwear texture analysis and mesowear) as well as stable isotope study for a better understanding of their responses to various environmental contexts and changes.

This research will contribute to understand the impact of Late Miocene to Middle Pleistocene environments on the habitats of megafauna, which were shared with many other animals including hominins.