Efrem has been involved in Ethiopic computing development since 1983. He did his B.A. Sc. thesis in research and successfully implemented an Ethiopic character set on a personal computer in 1984 at the University of Toronto. He worked for IBM in national character sets implementation software development (1984-1987) for Japanese, Chinese, Hebrew, Arabic etc. and in parallel continued his research in Ethiopic implementations.
He continuously lobbied with members of Unicode consortium to extend the character set allocated to Ethiopic from the original defined by Dr Joseph Becker (the founder of Unicode and author of the first proposal for Ethiopic). He personally developed and implemented the first Ethiopic word processor that supported Unicode like 16 bit characters during 1990-1992. He later gave a presentation on this technology to Ethiopian science commission in 1993. This technology is currently being used to support the largest Amharic database in Ethiopia.
His company (ACIS) is currently completing a product that is among the first fully Unicode compliant Ethiopic word processor for the Windows 95/98 environment.