Original Story Published by: Staff Writer for Acumen Ideas
Photo Source: Girma Berta
(Above) Acumen Fellow Kibret Abebe (center) and his team of emergency care providers at their office in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
Sirens blaring. Lights flashing. Medics racing. For most people living in a city, ambulances are omnipresent, the sights and sounds always humming in the background. But in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital and home to nearly 4 million people, that wasn’t always the case. Until Kibret Abebe, that is.
Acumen Fellow Kibret Abebe is the Founder and CEO of Tebita, Ethiopia’s first private ambulance company. But 10 years ago, Kibret was a trained anesthetist working at the city’s largest public hospital. Nearly every day, car accident victims were rushed in.
“They’d be bleeding tremendously and not breathing,” said Kibret. “They’d be taken from the scene of the accident without any professional support.”
Car crashes are quite common in Addis — in 2016 alone, there were 463 fatal crashes, or about 13.8 deaths per 100,000 people.
Quite often, the few ambulances provided by the government can’t or don’t make it to the scene of a crash in time, leaving people to find their own way to the hospital.
“Only four percent of victims come to the hospital with ambulances,” said Kibret. “They arrive without any life-saving measures. People think, ‘If we just take this person to the hospital, they will do whatever they need to save his life.’ But often, the patient isn’t properly handled.”
Kibret witnessed too many lives lost because people didn’t have access to urgent care. He believed these deaths could’ve been prevented if only emergency services could reach accident victims and provide them with proper treatment on the spot.
