Currently, Ethiopia is undertaking major reforms in its economic system through thernintroduction of a market-based economic policy. Among the effects of these are thernincrease in the volume of trade and interaction al relations and a shift ill the role of therngovernment in controlling the economy from macro-level to. The macro-levelrnmanagement (in particular, the formulation of tangible policies and plans tornmanage control macro-economic activities), in turn, requires more than any thing elserntimely and complete information on sociology-economic as well as spatial variables at variousrnlevels. However, problems in accessing even available information for the pll1posernindicated have been repeatedly cited at the Ministry of Economic Development andrnCooperation (the government organ in charge ill this respect).rnThis study, therefore, was undertaken to establish the information requirements and assessrnthe major problems of accessing available information at the ministry, with the view ofrnexploring the application of the features and capabilities provided by object-orientedrntechniques, in tackling the information access problems.rnExperts at the ministry were surveyed. on the basis of data gathered d1lring the survey,rnorganization-level information req1liremellts are identified; inventory of existingrncapabilities is made; the information provision problems are analyzed.rnDevelopment of an illiterate database system (with "multimedia" features, i.e., thatrnsupports text and image), is identified as one of the requirements in tackling the existingrnproblem. An attempt is also made to summarize the limitation of conventional approachesrnto implement such database, as well as demonstration of the application of object-orientedrndevelopment techniques (as an appropriate alternative) database thr01lgh prototyping.rnFurther, recommendations are made for consideration by the ministry tof1llly benefit from rnthe solution suggested by way of identifying major activities to be carried out to developrnthe prototype database into a fully operational (mature) database.