The Winners
Brief
This is Overdue Progress's first essay competition. We received 71 unique essays, covering everything from health to economics to agriculture and most things in between. I'm genuinely happy that this many people took part in our very first round, and I hope we'll see even more submissions in the competitions to come.
Evaluation happened in two stages. First, I read all 71 essays and took notes on each one, then used those notes to narrow the field down to a final 15. Those fifteen were distributed to judges, who scored them on the quality of their research, the originality of their thinking, the clarity of their writing, and the specificity and rigor of their analysis. From that, we turned the final 15 into a ranking, and the top 3 are the winners of this round.
Each of the three authors below wins 50,000 ETB. Congratulations to them, and thank you to everyone who wrote.
Winners
50,000 ETB each- 1 Addis Ababa's Water Progress Trap
- 2 Two Health Systems, One City: The Great Divide in Addis Ababa
- 3 Systems and Standards: A Lesson From the Ethiopian Commodity Exchange
Finalists
In the judges' ranking- 4 The Hardware Failure: Why Teff Milling is the Core of Ethiopian Macroeconomics
- 5 Between Tradition and Critique: The Contradictory Gaze of Diaspora Intellectuals
- 6 Progress Overdue in Ethiopia's Tax System
- 7 The Economics of Showing Up
- 8 Compliance as a Service
- 9 The Waiting Economy: How Time Became Ethiopia's Hidden Currency
- 10 Works in Education, Fails in Production
- 11 On The Chain That Decides The Plate
- 12 Are we Empowering Women or just helping them cope?
- 13 The EEU is Killing the GERD: How One Incompetent Utility Company is Sabotaging Ethiopia's Future
- 14 Ethiopia's Condominium Lottery Solved Housing by Putting It in the Wrong Place
- 15 Broken Systems, Blamed Farmers: Irrigation Reliability, Market Design, and the Politics of Accountability in Ethiopia
What's next
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The winners will receive their 50,000 ETB prize.[done] -
The website will be redesigned to look more like a real publication.[done] - Edited versions of the top 3 essays will be published on the redesigned site.
- Since all fifteen of these essays were strong, we'll likely publish more than just the top 3. Several of the others will appear on the redesigned site as well.
- And we'll keep going from there.
You can also browse every essay we received, grouped by theme.