Education focuses
OLLAA creates and enhances opportunities providing language, professional and culture education, motivating and inspiring the Oromo Diaspora to embrace their identity and strengthen their Oromummaa. We focus on language, professional, culture and history education.
Language Education
The responsibility of teaching Afaan Oromo often falls on schools or families. As many are rediscovering their Oromummaa, the importance of the language has increasingly grown for the dispora and for those in Ethiopia who never got a chance. They face challenges similar to other immigrants across the world: feeling like an outsider, forgetting or never learning their language, living double lives, constantly questioning their identity, facing hostilities, experiencing discrimination, etc. OLLAA wants to used culture based education to counter this crisis.
Professional Education
ORSAS, a society of Oromo scholars and academicians, advances modern education through global information access to training and career opportunity development. ORSAS (also known as YOSA) strives to achieve its mission through providing short-term training; information and networking to education access and actively engaging in multi-sectorial research that influences public policy. They currently have a private Facebook group of over 28,000 members.
Culture & History Education
Knowledge about the Gadaa System is transmitted to children in their homes by the family. There are no schools that teach the Gadaa philosophy yet. The older people are dying, and the indigenous intellectuals are diminishing. However, since Gadaa is inscribed on UNESCO and the Ethiopian government announced to consider it for use as a guiding ideology, the interest on learning the Gadaa system is increasing. Therefore, the reform of Gadaa to the current Oromo reality is of great importance.