The research team, led by Firew Bekele Ejigu with colleagues Tariku Sime Gutu and Wudu Melese Tarekegne, surveyed 342 primary school teachers selected through stratified random sampling across the city, complementing the questionnaire data with in-depth interviews and school observations involving six purposively chosen participants. The study employed an embedded mixed-methods design, giving greater weight to the quantitative strand while using qualitative data to contextualize and enrich the statistical findings. Addis Ababa, home to roughly 5.46 million people and often described as a microcosm of Ethiopia, provided an ideal setting: the city’s population includes ethnic Amhara (47 percent), Oromo (19.5 percent), Gurage (16.3 percent), Tigray (6.2 percent) and numerous other groups, alongside Orthodox Christian, Muslim and other religious communities.

The theoretical backbone of the study draws on James A. Banks’s influential framework of multicultural education, which identifies five interlocking dimensions: content integration, the knowledge construction process, equity pedagogy, prejudice reduction, and an empowering school culture. Crucially, Banks’s model insists that multicultural education is not merely a matter of revising textbooks or adding festival days to the calendar. It demands a transformation in teachers’ beliefs, attitudes and everyday instructional practices, because even the most carefully designed curriculum is only as effective as the educator who enacts it in the classroom.

Measuring attitudes required a purpose-built instrument. The researchers constructed a 20-item Likert-type questionnaire ranging from strongly disagree to strongly agree, with negatively worded items reverse-coded during analysis. One sample item probed a common anxiety: whether addressing student diversity in class is dangerous for national unity. Before deployment, the scale was vetted by language instructors and diversity education researchers, then piloted with 15 teachers outside the main sample. The resulting Cronbach’s alpha of 0.754 indicated acceptable internal consistency, and skewness and kurtosis statistics confirmed the scores were approximately normally distributed, clearing the way for parametric testing.

The headline quantitative result was a grand mean score of 3.41 on the five-point scale, with a standard deviation of 1.33. That figure places teachers squarely in the moderate range: above the scale’s midpoint, signaling generally favorable orientations toward weaving diversity into curriculum experiences, but far from uniformly enthusiastic. The variability matters. Some teachers expressed genuine comfort with multicultural content, while others reported discomfort or uncertainty, and the interviews revealed why the average conceals a spectrum of understanding.

Those qualitative conversations were revealing. One teacher described a school where children speak Welayitegna, Afan Oromo, Amharic, Tigrigna and other languages, and where she regularly coordinates cultural shows and Nation and Nationalities Day events. Another participant, a school principal, painted a more cautious picture, noting that while some teachers hold positive attitudes, others avoid discussing diversity openly for fear of being perceived as politically motivated. Several teachers conflated multicultural education with inclusive education for students with disabilities, or equated it narrowly with religion-free schooling, suggesting that conceptual clarity remains a work in progress even among committed educators.

The inferential statistics told a story about what does and does not predict these attitudes. Gender made no significant difference, with male teachers averaging 3.39 and female teachers 3.47, a gap that failed to reach statistical significance. Academic qualification likewise showed no significant relationship, despite degree holders posting the highest raw mean of 3.73. More surprising was the weak, non-significant correlation between the number of languages teachers spoke and their multicultural attitudes, a finding the authors interpret through the lens of how languages are acquired: community-based, everyday multilingualism may matter more than a simple count of languages known.

What did matter was training and career stage. Teachers who had completed multicultural coursework or professional development scored significantly higher, at 3.54 versus 3.34 for those without such exposure, a difference the researchers report as statistically significant. One-way ANOVA results further showed that younger teachers, aged 22 to 35, and those with one to ten years of experience held significantly stronger multicultural attitudes than their older, more seasoned colleagues. The authors caution against attributing this generational pattern to training alone, since the data did not capture when or where teachers studied; generational socialization around diversity values, or younger teachers’ closer cultural proximity to their students, could also play roles. Still, the pattern echoes findings from Norway’s TALIS data, where professional development emerged as a significant predictor of multicultural teaching self-efficacy.

The study’s most sobering statistic may be that 50.6 percent of participating teachers had never received any training in multicultural education. That gap mirrors a continental pattern. Comparable studies in Nigeria, South Africa and Tanzania have documented a recurring attitude-practice divide, in which teachers express rhetorical commitment to cultural diversity but lack the preparation, resources and institutional support to translate that commitment into classroom practice. The Ethiopian findings thus reinforce a growing scholarly consensus that the weakest links across African education systems are content integration, equity pedagogy and empowering school culture, precisely the dimensions that require deliberate, structured intervention.

The implications reach well beyond Addis Ababa. The researchers recommend embedding multicultural education as a core component of teacher preparation, both through dedicated standalone courses and through infusion across subject-specific methods training, alongside continuous in-service workshops and experience-sharing programs. They also call for systematic textbook analysis against Ethiopia’s new Education Sector Development Roadmap and curriculum framework. Because children begin forming evaluative categories about social difference at remarkably early ages, and because teachers serve as the role models from whom young learners internalize attitudes toward out-groups, the stakes of this professional development extend far beyond individual classrooms. In a nation whose founding educational aspiration is unity within diversity, the study suggests that the surest investment is not in policy documents but in the minds of the teachers who open them every morning.

Subject of Research: Primary school teachers' attitudes toward multicultural curriculum integration in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

Article Title: Primary school teachers’ attitudes towards integrating multiculturalism into curriculum implementation in Addis Ababa city, Ethiopia

Article References: Ejigu, F. B., Gutu, T. S., & Tarekegne, W. M. (2026). Primary school teachers’ attitudes towards integrating multiculturalism into curriculum implementation in Addis Ababa city, Ethiopia. Discover Education, 5(1), Article 1073. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44217-026-02166-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44217-026-02166-6

Keywords: multicultural education, teacher attitudes, Ethiopia, Addis Ababa, primary education, curriculum implementation, professional development, teacher training, cultural diversity, inclusive education, James A. Banks, mixed methods

The research combined satellite-based land change analysis with extensive fieldwork in three peripheral kebeles, or administrative wards, of Burayu: Burayu Gafarsa, Malka Gafarsa and Gafarsa Guje. On the geospatial side, the authors processed multi-temporal Landsat imagery spanning the years 2000 to 2023, classifying each scene into land cover categories and then applying post-classification comparison, a technique in which independently classified maps are compared across dates to quantify how much land moved from one category to another. Post-classification methods are widely regarded as robust for detecting change because each date is classified separately, allowing analysts to trace the full matrix of conversions between classes rather than merely measuring aggregate shifts in reflectance. The approach was supported by ground-truthing validation, in which field observations were used to confirm that the satellite-derived categories accurately matched conditions on the ground.

The numbers that emerged are stark. Built-up land in the study area expanded by 50.99 hectares every year on average across the 23-year record, a net growth rate of 31.85 percent, as concrete, roofing sheet and graded roadbeds spread outward from the urban core. Cropland absorbed the brunt of this expansion, suffering a net loss of 59.312 hectares per year, equivalent to a 39.14 percent decline over the study period. In other words, for every hectare of new construction, more than a hectare of cultivated land was effectively sacrificed, a relationship that identifies agriculture as the primary spatial donor to the city’s horizontal growth. The authors describe the outcome as the conversion of vital agricultural spaces into fragmented urban zones, with the surrounding landscape broken into a patchwork of residual plots, access roads and half-built structures.

What makes this trajectory consequential is not simply the loss of hectares but the way that loss intersects with livelihoods. The study’s socioeconomic component was built on a defined institutional frame of 4,832 systematically displaced farming households across the three kebeles. From this frame the researchers drew a structured survey of 145 households, supplemented by 12 key informant interviews with local officials, elders and experts, and 6 focus group discussions with affected residents. This mixed-methods design allowed the team to pair the statistical weight of the survey with the explanatory depth of interviews, tracing not only how many households lost land but how they interpreted, negotiated and survived that loss.

The survey results document a livelihood system in free fall. A decisive majority of displaced households, 73.1 percent, reported a total collapse of their agrarian income following displacement, meaning the farming revenues that once anchored family economies simply ceased. Layered atop that loss is heightened tenure insecurity: even after giving up their fields, many families remained uncertain of their legal standing on the land they still occupy, exposed to further expropriation without the protection of formal, documented rights. In Ethiopia’s peri-urban zones, where customary tenure and state land ownership overlap in complicated ways, farmers often hold use rights rather than freehold titles, which weakens their bargaining position when developers and municipal authorities arrive with compensation offers or eviction notices.

Confronted with the collapse of farming income, affected families have assembled survival strategies that the study characterizes as precarious and non-formal. Households have turned to petty trade, daily labor, rental of spare rooms and reliance on informal social networks of kin, neighbors and former farming associations. These coping mechanisms buffer the immediate shock of displacement, but the authors find they fail to fully mitigate the socio-ecological vulnerability that displacement creates. Families that once produced their own food now buy it in volatile urban markets; skills honed over generations in agriculture have limited market value in construction and informal commerce; and the social fabric that once pooled risk at the community level has been thinned by dispersal and the pressures of urban poverty.

Behind the spatial data, the researchers identify a distinctive driver profile. Speculative land markets top the list: as Addis Ababa’s expansion raises land values along the corridor, investors and intermediaries buy and hold farmland in anticipation of appreciation, accelerating conversion regardless of planning designations. Weak institutional planning enforcement compounds the problem, with zoning rules and master plans routinely overridden, ignored or circumvented through informal transactions. Top-down infrastructure development, in which roads and utility corridors are extended into peri-urban areas by central decision-makers with limited local consultation, then anchors and legitimizes the sprawl, effectively redrawing the urban boundary ahead of any participatory planning process. Together these forces create a self-reinforcing cycle in which infrastructure attracts speculation, speculation pressures landholders, and weak governance ensures the conversions proceed without coordination or compensation adequate to rebuild displaced livelihoods.

The governance deficit the study documents extends beyond Ethiopia. Across Sub-Saharan Africa, rapid, uncoordinated horizontal sprawl repeatedly collides with the preservation of peri-urban agricultural systems, producing severe governance failures, landscape fragmentation and socioeconomic marginalization of indigenous farming communities. Peri-urban zones are among the most productive agricultural landscapes on the continent, benefiting from proximity to urban markets and often from richer soils favored by earlier settlement. Their conversion is therefore not a marginal loss but a structural one, undermining urban food security even as cities grow. The Shaggar City corridor, a vast new administrative construction ringing Addis Ababa, has become a laboratory for this dynamic at exceptional scale, and Burayu sits squarely within it.

The authors argue that the remedy requires integrating what has too often been separated: spatial monitoring and social protection. They call for integrated spatial-social monitoring systems that track land conversion and livelihood outcomes together, so that planners can see not only where the city is growing but who is being dispossessed in the process. They urge participatory land governance that gives peri-urban residents a genuine voice in decisions about expropriation, compensation and resettlement, rather than subjecting them to top-down decrees. And they emphasize formal protections for customary tenure, ensuring that families with generations of use rights are not rendered landless and undocumented by the mere arrival of the urban frontier. Ethics approval for the fieldwork was granted by Wollega University’s Research Ethics Approval Committee, and the study was conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki with informed consent from all participants.

The significance of the Burayu case lies in its warning about trajectory. A growth rate exceeding 31 percent in built-up land over 23 years, purchased at the cost of nearly 40 percent of cropland and the agrarian incomes of roughly three-quarters of surveyed households, describes a form of urbanization that concentrates risk on those least equipped to absorb it. Without deliberate intervention, the study suggests, the corridor’s remaining farmland will continue to convert plot by plot, and its displaced farmers will continue to drift into informal survival strategies that soften but do not solve their vulnerability. Whether the Shaggar City corridor becomes a model of equitable urban transformation or a cautionary tale of dispossession will depend, the authors conclude, on whether Ethiopia’s planners treat satellite maps and household surveys as parts of a single, urgent question: how African cities can grow without consuming the people and fields on their edges.

The temporal window of the analysis is methodologically significant. Landsat sensors, with a spatial resolution of 30 meters and a revisit interval of roughly 16 days, have provided an unbroken archive of the Earth’s surface since the early 1970s, making them the backbone of land change science in data-scarce regions. For a corridor like Shaggar City, where cadastral records are incomplete and informal subdivision outpaces official mapping, satellite archives often constitute the only consistent record of how the urban edge has moved. The 2000–2023 span chosen by the authors captures the period in which Addis Ababa’s metropolitan influence began reshaping its surrounding Oromia Special Zone settlements most intensively.

The study also illustrates a broader shift in displacement research toward household-level evidence. Earlier assessments of African peri-urban change frequently relied on aggregate land statistics, which could document shrinking farmland but not the distributional consequences of that shrinkage. By anchoring their survey in a complete institutional frame of displaced households, the authors could connect each hectare of conversion to identifiable families, an approach that makes the 73.1 percent income collapse figure interpretable as a population-level outcome rather than an anecdote. The triangulation of satellite classification, structured surveys, key informants and focus groups reflects current best practice in land change science, where biophysical measurement and social inquiry are increasingly treated as complementary rather than separate evidence streams.

Subject of Research: Quantifying peri-urban land conversion and its livelihood impacts on displaced farming households in Burayu Town, Ethiopia's Shaggar City corridor

Article Title: Spatial dynamics of per-urban expansion and livelihood impacts in the suburbs of Shaggar City in Ethiopia’s rapidly urbanizing corridor

Article References: Chimdessa, D., & Tolera, H. (2026). Spatial dynamics of per-urban expansion and livelihood impacts in the suburbs of Shaggar City in Ethiopia’s rapidly urbanizing corridor. Discover Sustainability. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43621-026-04564-0

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43621-026-04564-0

Keywords: Ethiopia, peri-urban expansion, urban sprawl, land use dynamics, livelihood impacts, Shaggar City, Addis Ababa, Landsat imagery, cropland loss, tenure insecurity, displaced households, urban planning

Reppe is located in the Kolfe Keraniyo Sub-city of Addis Ababa, where an open dumpsite established in 1964 has become surrounded by expanding residential communities. The site now receives ash from the nearby waste-to-energy plant, creating a direct connection between incineration residues and a long-used disposal area that lacks the engineered barriers found in a modern sanitary landfill. In such settings, rainfall can pass through waste and ash, producing leachate that dissolves or carries contaminants into surrounding soils and potentially toward groundwater. To investigate that pathway, the researchers collected three bottom-ash samples and three fly-ash samples from the plant’s ash-handling system, along with six surface-soil samples from a transect extending from the ash deposition zone toward the nearest residential area. The soil was sampled at depths of 0 to 15 centimetres, the biologically active surface layer most relevant to contact, dust and other exposure routes. Sampling took place during February and March 2024, the dry season, when rain-driven dilution was less likely to obscure contamination patterns.

In the laboratory, the team processed half-gram portions using United States Environmental Protection Agency Method 3050B, an acid-digestion procedure designed to release metals from soil and solid material before instrumental measurement. Chromium, copper, lead and zinc were measured with flame atomic absorption spectrophotometry; cadmium was measured with graphite-furnace atomic absorption, which is more sensitive at low concentrations; and mercury was analysed using a cold-vapour or hydride-generation approach. Each sample was analysed in triplicate. Quality-control procedures included certified reference materials, procedural blanks, daily calibration and replicate testing. Recoveries from the reference materials ranged from 92 to 105 per cent, while relative standard deviations were below 5 per cent. These checks indicate that the analytical procedures were precise for the samples tested, although the study’s conclusions remain limited by the small number of samples and the absence of a local uncontaminated reference soil. Instead, background values used in several calculations came from average upper-continental-crust concentrations, which may overestimate or underestimate enrichment at a particular Ethiopian site.

The most striking results came from the ash. The study reports mercury concentrations reaching 2,630 micrograms per litre and cadmium concentrations reaching 1,530 milligrams per litre in ash samples, with values varying substantially between locations and ash types. The reported mercury maximum was thousands of times higher than the comparison soil limit cited in the study, while the cadmium maximum was hundreds of times above the World Health Organization guideline used by the researchers. Because mercury and cadmium are toxic at relatively low concentrations and can be mobile under suitable chemical conditions, their presence in loosely managed ash is especially important. The study’s contamination-factor analysis identified mercury as the dominant contaminant, with ash values ranging from 12.9 to 65.8 times the chosen background. Cadmium showed moderate to severe enrichment, particularly in fly ash, whereas chromium, copper, lead and zinc generally displayed much lower contamination factors relative to the background used. The authors describe the resulting ash profile as mercury-dominated, followed by cadmium, with the other metals contributing less to enrichment.

The distinction between bottom ash and fly ash helps explain why combustion residues can concentrate particular contaminants. Bottom ash is the heavier material that remains in the furnace, while fly ash consists of finer particles carried with combustion gases and captured by pollution-control equipment. During incineration, volatile elements such as mercury and cadmium can enter the gas phase and later condense onto fine particles as the gases cool. Those particles may therefore carry a disproportionate share of certain metals. Statistical results from the Reppe ash samples support this interpretation. Principal-component analysis found that two components explained 94.5 per cent of the total variation. The first, accounting for 70.5 per cent, carried strong loadings for lead, cadmium and copper, a grouping the researchers associate with anthropogenic combustion sources such as mixed municipal waste, batteries and electronic materials. The second explained 24 per cent and was linked mainly to chromium and mercury, suggesting a combination of geochemical background and combustion-related behaviour. A strong positive correlation between lead and cadmium, reported as r = 0.91, further indicates that these elements may share a common source in the ash.

The risk calculations translate those concentrations into a broader ecological warning. The study’s total ecological-risk index for every ash sample fell between 1,086 and 3,000, well above the threshold of 600 classified as very high risk in the assessment framework. Mercury contributed more than 80 per cent of the total toxicity-unit values in the ash samples, reflecting both its measured concentration and its high toxic-response factor. Some bottom-ash samples had summed toxicity units above eight, while fly-ash values ranged from 2.93 to 4.88; the authors interpret these results as evidence that the material should be handled as hazardous waste rather than placed in an uncontained dump. The numbers are screening and assessment metrics, not direct measurements of human illness or exposure. They indicate the potential for ecological harm if contaminants are released, inhaled as dust, ingested or transported into water, but they do not by themselves establish the health risk to a particular resident. That distinction matters, especially because the study did not conduct biomonitoring, groundwater testing or epidemiological assessment.

Soils along the leachate-affected transect contained lower metal concentrations than the ash, yet mercury remained the dominant concern. Reported mercury values in the soil samples ranged from 205 to 1,015 micrograms per litre, and contamination factors ranged from 5.1 to 25.4 times the selected background. Three soil samples had ecological-risk indices at or above 600, placing them in the study’s very-high-risk category, while the full range for soils was 255 to 1,065. Cadmium was generally less enriched according to the contamination-factor analysis, and chromium, copper, lead and zinc were often near the chosen background values. However, correlations among chromium, copper and lead suggested that localized waste disposal or metal-bearing refuse had influenced parts of the transect. Mercury behaved differently: its inverse relationship with some of those metals and positive association with zinc were consistent with separate combustion and atmospheric-deposition pathways. The findings therefore do not describe a uniform plume. They show a heterogeneous site where some contaminants remain close to the ash source, while mercury may be redistributed through volatilization, condensation, leachate movement and re-emission.

Source-apportionment results estimated that anthropogenic inputs accounted for 58 per cent of the metal signal in ash and 38 per cent in leachate-impacted soil, with the remainder assigned to geogenic or mixed sources. Those percentages are model-based estimates rather than direct measurements of individual waste streams, and they depend on the background assumptions and the small dataset. Still, they reinforce the central message: the contamination cannot be explained solely by the natural composition of local soil. The authors recommend that ash, particularly fly ash exceeding hazardous-waste thresholds, be stabilized and disposed of in engineered facilities equipped with leachate collection rather than placed in the open dumpsite. They also call for groundwater monitoring, restricted access to high-risk areas, remediation of contamination hotspots and stronger national standards for waste-to-energy residues. Separating batteries, electronic waste and mercury-containing products before combustion could reduce the metals entering the ash. The study sampled a plant operating at less than half capacity, so contamination could differ with full operation or changes in the waste feedstock. Even with those limitations, the results offer a baseline for Addis Ababa and a broader warning: converting waste into energy does not eliminate hazardous elements, and the safety of the system depends on how its ash is contained after combustion.

The study’s dry-season design provides a snapshot of conditions when rainfall was unlikely to dilute surface contamination, but it cannot establish how concentrations change during wet periods. Seasonal sampling would help determine whether intensified runoff mobilizes metals beyond the sampled transect or instead redistributes them within the dump. Likewise, the six soil samples were selected purposively along visible leachate pathways, making them useful for identifying hotspots but unsuitable for estimating contamination across the entire dumpsite. Additional samples from uncontaminated soils, different depths and groundwater would improve comparisons and clarify whether metals are retained near the surface or migrating downward.

The reported measurements also require careful interpretation because the study expresses some ash and soil results in mass-per-volume units, whereas ash and soil are solid matrices. Direct comparison with soil guidelines therefore depends on the extraction and reporting basis used. Risk indices are valuable for prioritizing investigation, but they combine measured concentrations with toxicity factors and reference values; they are not substitutes for exposure measurements. Follow-up work could pair chemical testing with leachability experiments, dust monitoring and bioavailability analyses. Such evidence would show which fraction of the total metal burden can actually move into water, air or living organisms, helping regulators design controls proportionate to the site’s most plausible exposure pathways.

Subject of Research: Heavy-metal contamination in waste-to-energy ash and leachate-impacted soils

Article Title: Heavy metal contamination in thermal power plant ashes and leachate-impacted soils at Reppe dumpsite in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

Article References: Tamene, M., Admassu, T., Alemayehu, T., & Mekonen, S. (2026). Heavy metal contamination in thermal power plant ashes and leachate-impacted soils at Reppe dumpsite in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Discover Soil, 3(1), Article 145. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44378-026-00291-0

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44378-026-00291-0

Keywords: heavy metals, mercury, cadmium, waste-to-energy, fly ash, leachate, soil contamination, ecological risk, Addis Ababa, Heavy, metal, contamination