Zenebework Tadesse

Zenebework Tadesse (Amharic: ዘነበወርቅ ታደሰ) is an Ethiopian sociologist and activist. She is the first executive director of Association of African Women for Research and Development.

Early life and education Tadesse was born in Addis Ababa to a Catholic family. Her father worked for the government. She moved to Chicago, where she was involved in the civil rights movement and the Black Panthers. She later moved to Harlem.

Career Tadesse is an activist and sociologist who has undertaken significant research on democracy, gender and women's land rights in Africa. Tadesse is a founding member of the Ethiopian Forum for Social Sciences, and the principal vice president of the Ethiopian Academy of Sciences. She is an executive board member of the African Gender Institute and the African Governance Institute. Tadesse was also the Deputy Executive Secretary of CODESRIA from 1987 to 1993 and served as the head of their Publications Programme during her tenure, and later became the first woman to be president of the executive committee at CODESRIA from 2002 to 2005.

In 1977, she was a founding member of the Association of African Women for Research and Development, an organization that she became the first executive director of.

Tadesse has worked with several organizations involved with the United Nations, including being a member of the executive committee of the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development, as well as being a member of the Committee for Development Policy from 2016-2018.

Tadesse was a development consultant for Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy.

Selected publications In 1976 she wrote a book, The Condition of Women in Ethiopia, that is held in the Rome headquarters of the FAO, but has not been publicly published.

With Yared Amare, she wrote the paper Women's Land Rights in Ethiopia, published in 2000 in the Journal of Ethiopian Women Lawyers Association (No.1 (Summer): 25-51).

In 1984, Tadesse published "Breaking the Silence and Broadening the Frontiers of History: Notes on Recent Studies on African Women in History" as part of the UN Conference "Meeting of Experts on Theoretical Frameworks and Methodological Approaches to Studies on the Role of Women in History as Actors in Economic, Social, Political and Ideological Processes" in Paris during the same year.

Her essay "Africa: A New Look From the Inside" was published in The UNESCO Courier: A Window Open on the World, XXXIII, 7 in 1980.