Ermias Tessema Beyene

Ermias Tessema Beyene is an architect and a town developer with hands-on experience on various projects ranging from designing and constructing building elements, developing housing units, and urban level research projects. Currently, he is working as a town developer in a rural urbanization project called Tukuls to Dachas (T2D), a program aiming at transforming 4,500 rural homesteads into sustainable towns through a participatory approach. Ermias Tessema Beyene believes farmers in Ethiopia are economically capable; an inefficient system has made it difficult to utilize local asset for a sustainable solution to improve living standards in Ethiopia.For this sake, T2D devised a system to plan more populated small towns in the vicinity of farmland, to make the infrastructure provision more efficient and to create alternative economic activities without the need to leave farming. Ermias has been in this project for the past four years starting from its research phase. Now he is planning to go to one of the rural villages as a town developer to realize the proposed plan with the local people.