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Month: May 2026

Mistaking Development Theatre for Public Trust Has a Cost

Posted on by Digital Editor

Tomorrow, millions of Ethiopians are expected to vote in the seventh national elections. According to the national electoral agency, more than 50 million voters are registered. Yet the poll may be the strangest since the constitutional order began in the mid-1990s.

Tigray Regional State, a founding member of the federation, remains outside the contest, denying its citizens the constitutional right to vote. More than 60pc of federal seats face no challenger from parties other than the incumbent Prosperity Party, the Properitians. Voter apathy is visible in Addis Abeba and other towns. Armed insurgencies in Amhara and Oromia, the two largest regional states, are likely to keep many voters from polling stations.

For a government that came to power promising openness, this is a sobering turn. The vote is a test of whether official confidence can survive the public mood beneath it. In the capital, campaigns feel muted, while in conflict-affected areas, insecurity competes with ballots. In Tigray Regional State, the absence of voting is a sign that constitutional practice and political reality have parted ways. It was not supposed to be so. Nearly eight years ago, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s (PhD) Administration promised political “reform” and economic “renewal.”

Ethiopia now approaches another milestone as the government prepares for its second general election under his leadership. If one feature has come to define this period, it is a flow of forums, events, consultations, and public discussions with groups that party officials describe as different sections of society. These gatherings have become a political trademark, but their purpose is often unclear.

The criteria for choosing participants are rarely explained. It is uncertain whether those invited reflect the views, frustrations and priorities of the communities they are said to represent. The forums look less like places where hard public questions are debated and more like managed stages for messages the Prime Minister already plans to deliver.

In recent weeks, the Prime Minister and Addis Abeba’s Mayor, Adanech Abiebie, have spent much of their time inaugurating projects, launching facilities and cutting ribbons for development achievements. Such ceremonies have become platforms for wider claims about economic progress. But many are compelled to ask whether the speeches are about the ordinary Ethiopians or a parallel country detached from daily hardship.

A few weeks ago, while inaugurating an industrial park in Gelan Gura, on the outskirts of Addis Abeba, the Prime Minister criticised Ethiopians for failing to recognise what he described as the country’s remarkable transformation. He complained that visitors from Europe and the United States were impressed by Ethiopia’s development, while Ethiopians themselves did not appreciate it.

Although such remarks recur, the gap between official language and household reality is harder to ignore. Growth figures mean little if they do not translate into affordable food, steady work and better living standards. The citizens faulted for not recognising government achievements are facing rising poverty, unemployment and a cost of living beyond many wages.

Surveys by multilateral institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, and the World Food Programme (WFP) depict a far grimmer picture than that projected by senior officials. The government points to macroeconomic growth, infrastructure and investment projects. International reports point to widening hardship among ordinary households. World Bank estimates put Ethiopia’s GDP per capita at about 979 dollars a year, or roughly 2.7 dollars a day. In practical terms, that is far short of what is needed to cover food, transport, fuel, rent and utilities in cities such as Addis Abeba.

Poverty is also rising. World Bank estimates indicate that Ethiopia’s abject poverty rate increased from 27pc to 32pc between 2016 and 2025, compared with the sub-Saharan average of 30.2pc. Millions more have fallen below the poverty line in a country repackaged as one of Africa’s fastest-growing economies. Evidently, the gains from that growth are not reaching much of society.

Ethiopia has one of Africa’s youngest and fastest-growing populations, but its economy is not creating enough work for nearly two million people entering the labour market each year. Urban youth unemployment remains high, and many university graduates find few real opportunities. For many households, informal and unstable work has become the main means of survival.

Even where jobs exist, worsening security makes mobility difficult. Many citizens are unwilling to move to unfamiliar regions because they fear for their safety. In a country facing repeated militarised conflict and instability, opportunity alone does not guarantee movement.

Recent reforms have added pressure on households already struggling to cope. Measures meant to stabilise the economy, restructure debt, attract foreign investment and implement macroeconomic reform have helped push up inflation and the cost of living. Prices of basic goods and services have risen sharply, eroding the purchasing power of low- and middle-income families whose wages have barely moved.

International lenders, especially the IMF, continue to urge the Administration to maintain fiscal discipline, reduce subsidies and pursue market-oriented reforms. Supporters argue these steps are needed to stabilise the economy and avert a deeper economic crisis. Critics warn that they place a heavy burden on citizens already unable to afford basic needs.

The disconnect is visible in Addis Abeba. While inaugurating feeding centres in Lideta District, Mayor Adanech came under fire for saying she did not understand the reason anyone would beg on the streets of Addis Abeba. She made the statement while promoting the city administration’s 29 feeding centres, which reportedly provide one meal a day to about 40,000 people. The claim sounded detached from the distress visible across the capital.

Indeed, a casual visitor driving along Africa Avenue (Bole Road) can see Addis Abeba changing. Roads are wider, bike lanes have expanded, new asphalt roads have been built and decorative lights brighten major corridors. The city’s appearance is changing.

Behind the infrastructure, however, many residents face deep poverty and growing food insecurity. For thousands of households, even one meal a day has become difficult to put on the table.

For people on stagnant salaries or unstable income, the cost of living has become unbearable. Food, fuel, transport and utility prices have risen far beyond what many households can afford. Food insecurity is among the country’s gravest problems. The WFP estimates that more than 10 million Ethiopians face severe food insecurity, while nearly 15 million rely on humanitarian food assistance. Conflict, inflation, climate shocks and disruptions to agricultural production have worsened conditions.

Against this background, claims that there is “no reason” for begging sound remote from the streets of the capital. The question is not whether roads, industrial parks or feeding centres are being built. It is whether citizens feel secure enough to benefit from them. Poverty, joblessness, inflation and insecurity keep many Ethiopians from sharing the optimism in official speeches.

Feeding centres may ease hunger for a day, but they cannot replace durable work, safe mobility and income that covers basic needs. The task is to create conditions in which citizens can work safely, earn steady incomes and afford necessities without emergency support.

In the week when citizens are urged to express their political views, there is a political lesson here. The EPRDF under Abiy’s predecessor, Hailemariam Desalegn, fell to popular discontent after nearly 30 years in power, only seven months after it declared a “popular mandate” through the fifth national elections. Failing to read the undercurrent and mistaking electoral results for public confidence, and conflating officials’ speeches with reality on the ground, can be grossly, if not costly, misleading.

A Cold Shower for the AI Mania

Posted on by Digital Editor

Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools will undoubtedly transform the nature of work. Large language models can already generate referee reports on my own research papers that rival those by human referees.

Unlike humans, who are always pressed for time, an LLM “knows” or can access much more of the literature in an instant, and often exhibits fewer biases. AI points out my analytical weaknesses, checks proofs, and makes suggestions for improvement. Only rarely are human reports better, typically because they connect the dots and offer new insights.

Nonetheless, the market euphoria around AI has become worrisome, especially given the scale of debt issuance in the sector. It is, therefore, worth considering where in the AI supply chain things could go wrong.

The supply chain starts with producers and designers of AI infrastructure. These are firms like TSMC and Samsung, which fabricate chips; Nvidia, which designs them; and Cisco, which provides connectivity. Then come the hyperscalers like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. They are building data centres for their own AI models and to sell compute (processing power) to others. In addition to the hyperscalers, there are more specialised companies like Equinix (data centres) and, of course, Anthropic and OpenAI, the developers of foundational LLMs.

Finally, there are the individual and corporate end users of AI services. Individual use is growing fast, and corporate use in some areas (software development and customer support) is exploding.

But most large businesses, while experimenting intensely, have yet to implement end-to-end uses. Many still need to organise their historical data to train AI for their own purposes, and to restructure their traditional operations so that AI can be deployed to improve with experience. Many firms rightly worry about data security, AI errors, and hallucinations that could destroy their brand image. Still, as less conservative younger companies find more AI uses, they will put competitive pressure on older, larger firms to change.

The AI rollout could nevertheless be interrupted in several ways, posing risks for debt-funded players. For instance, if graphics processing units, CPUs, and memory chips become faster and more energy efficient, the equipment filling existing data centres could depreciate rapidly, making it harder for them to amortise their costs. And LLMs, which have become extraordinarily capable through essentially next-word prediction, could plateau until a new technique emerges.

For now, AI labs are investing massive sums to train newer and larger models, on the assumption that the first model to reach some magic point where it becomes self-improving will rule the AI world, and reap enormous profits. But this scenario seems implausible. Even if there is such a point, competitors could still match the first mover’s model (including by hiring away key employees to obtain technical trade secrets).

So far, no AI model seems to have gained a sustained advantage. Unless Gemini (Google), Claude (Anthropic), and ChatGPT (OpenAI) can eventually differentiate themselves by appealing to specific user segments (or by merging or colluding), it is hard to see where the profits justifying their enormous training investments will come from.

Moreover, although politicians have been largely standing on the sidelines so far, policy interventions to address AI risks and concerns are inevitable. Since data centres consume tremendous amounts of power, driving up the power price for everyone, state and local governments will be under increased political pressure to limit their construction. In Indiana, for example, multiple counties recently proclaimed a moratorium on data-centre construction.

Projections for next year already suggest that hardware makers and data centres will be unable to supply enough US compute capacity. And as compute shortages mount, end users will have more reasons to delay implementation. We cannot reorganise all our operations around AI if we have good reason to worry about future access reliability or reasonable pricing.

Worse, whereas broader use may take longer than many expect, malevolent use by hackers and deepfakers, as well as unsupervised use by children, is growing rapidly. It is not difficult to imagine disaster scenarios, such as a deadly cyber incident, gross data misuse by AI agents, or poorly trained AI models advising children to commit acts of violence against themselves or others (something that has already happened). The chorus demanding regulation and more liability for AI models will only grow louder.

The risks posed by rogue AI could even prompt a sorely needed dialogue among major powers, perhaps leading to some kind of AI Geneva Convention.

Perhaps the most important trigger for political intervention would be massive AI-related job losses. Fearful of political or social backlash, even firms inclined to adopt AI may hesitate to shed redundant employees outside a recession, thereby reducing any gains from AI deployment and diffusion.

Given all these uncertainties, it is far from clear how widely and quickly AI will be rolled out, and who will profit. Hardware manufacturers and designers seemed well-positioned, given the tremendous demand for computing. But if data-centre construction is interrupted, that could shift profits to hyperscalers and AI labs. They might reduce the amount of compute dedicated to training better models, which gives them only fleeting advantages, and shift to selling the compute they have sewn up to firms using their already capable models.

Such shifts are also likely if model capabilities plateau. Regulation might also force modellers to spend more effort on improving the training and safety of existing models, building broader public trust.

The good news is that a more limited and careful AI rollout could give firms more time to find labour-augmenting (as opposed to labour-displacing) uses, and governments and workers more time to adjust. The bad news is that euphoric visions of quick exceptional profits could be unfounded, a particular problem for AI firms that have to make unforgiving debt payments. AI advances will likely pay off eventually. But not every provider will profit, or even survive.

In Addis Abeba, Comedy Finds Its Voice in What Others Fear to Say

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I went to the show prepared to distrust it. I had never really been to a stand-up comedy show, at least not in the way people mean when they speak of a room, a microphone, and a crowd waiting to be won over.

What I knew of the form came mostly from the small and sharp clips that circulate online, many of them built around shock, insult, or the pleasure of making someone uncomfortable. They had kept me away from the experience for years. But once I decided to write about Addis Abeba’s comedy scene, it became clear that a judgment based on fragments would not do. I had to sit in the room, hear the jokes in full, and watch how people responded in real time as laughter broke out.

Gladly, that decision changed the story.

Two weeks ago, the stage was set at the Marriott Executive Apartments for “Saq Jam”. Before the comedians appeared, Saq Central filled the room with smooth jazz, giving the evening a soft, almost unhurried opening. Guests arrived early, many in the casual office clothes they had worn to work, accompanied by friends, coworkers, or spouses. The room felt less like a formal entertainment venue than a weekly gathering of people who already knew one another.

Influencers and media outlets moved between tables, filming short clips, greeting performers, and waiting for the show to begin.

Then the lights dimmed, and the first comedian took the microphone. The audience became part of the act at once. Laughter moved through the room in waves, sometimes loud and loose, sometimes careful and uneasy. Much of the material drew on current trending news, including public tensions around MMA fighters and the dispute between comedian Eshtu Melese and Hana Gidey, better known by her virtual brand “Bambi Habesha”.

The stories were familiar, but the ways of approaching them were not. One performer leaned on sarcasm, another on exaggerated storytelling, and another on quiet observation. The same news, passed through different temperaments, became different jokes.

Saq Central has spent the past four years trying to make such rooms possible. It has become one of the few places where local comedians regularly share a stage, though its beginnings were modest. Asayehegn Asfaw, the founder and event organiser, started from a simple problem. There were too few places for comedians to test material before live audiences. After coming up short again and again, with only a handful of available venues, he decided to build one himself.

What emerged was Saq Central, a platform meant to develop local comedy talent and to grow an audience for the art.

The larger showcases tell only part of the story. Saq Central also runs “Mukera 1.2”, a weekly Friday stage at Atmosphere, where comedians, poets, and musicians try unfinished work, fail in public, try again, and improve. Many of the performers who later appear on the main stage begin there, shaping their material one joke at a time before an audience willing to watch the process. Although Saq Central has existed for four years, it has organised only five major events. Still, the community around it has continued to expand.

To understand why that matters, it helps to place the evening in a longer line.

Stand-up comedy, as a global form, carries old roots, from ancient performance traditions to medieval jesters, 19th-century American minstrel shows, and the Vaudeville era of the early 20th Century. It later settled into the raw and intimate monologue now associated with the form. Across Africa, it has long been tied to oral storytelling traditions and communal joking relationships. Over the past three decades, it has grown into a localised industry, shaped by socio-political satire and amplified by digital platforms.

In Ethiopia, the lineage has its own path. Modern stand-up draws on Azmari storytelling, a centuries-old tradition of sharp, improvisational verbal wit. Formal stage comedy took shape in the mid-20th Century through comic theatre, while figures such as Tesfaye Sahlu wove folk tales into performance, helping prepare the ground for later comedians. In the 1990s, Dereje Haile and Habte Mitiku helped define observational sketch comedy and gave the stage a recognisable “Ethiopian character”.

By 2007, promoters such as Yisakal Entertainment pushed stand-up toward a more formal space. Today, the form survives as a young subculture, moving between social media and live stages.

At the show I attended, nine male comedians and one female comedian performed. Three of them were making their debut. Each arrived with a different rhythm, and the strongest moments came when the performers trusted the room enough to let silence, surprise, or discomfort do some of the work.

Seife Dayo, known professionally as “Comedian Seife”, remembered the moment when comedy became more than a performance.

“I was in a really dark place, and comedy became an escape for me at the time,” he said.

His description of writing jokes was plain but revealing. Comedy begins for him with observing the world around, then thinking about something until it changes shape and becomes funny. In most situations, he noted, they are not funny as they happen. The work lies in finding the joke hidden inside a serious moment and presenting it so that people can laugh without pretending the seriousness has vanished.

That idea challenged one of my own assumptions. I had believed that comedians who touched sensitive subjects had a duty to educate while making people laugh. Since comedy is an art, I thought the joke should carry instruction as well as humour. But listening to the performers that night made the standard feel too narrow. Political, religious, and ethnic jokes are already largely avoided, forcing comedians to move carefully through the social boundaries while still trying to surprise an audience.

To demand that every difficult joke also become a lesson would leave even less room for invention.

My reluctance was not abstract. Rape jokes sit at the base of what is often called the “Rape Culture Pyramid” because they can normalise the dehumanisation of victims and make sexual violence seem trivial. That kind of humour was one reason I avoided stand-up for years. Yet Saq Central’s show forced me to think again about how sensitive subjects can be brought to the stage without being celebrated or cheapened.

Tsilate Solomon, the only female comedian on the bill, has been performing for five years. She put the matter in a way I had not fully considered before.

“Comedy isn’t a simple entertainment but a space where sensitive topics get pulled into the light,” she said. “Where other conversations might avoid certain subjects, the stage gives them room.”

Her point stayed with me, and it returned later in the evening, when Fraol Bedada, the last performer of the night, made a feminist joke and made it well.

He did not treat the subject as a punchline, nor did he use it as a way to reduce women to easy laughter. The joke worked because of its timing, delivery, and confidence. I laughed harder at it than at almost anything else that evening, while still feeling that the subject had not been cheapened. It was then that I understood something I had missed. Comedians do not always have to choose between education and humour. Sometimes the joke is not there to mock the issue but to reveal something honest inside it.

I had entered the story with a premise that comedians who handle sensitive material must make the laughter mean something. I left less certain of that. A well-executed joke about a difficult subject does not need to become a lecture to matter. When the craft is strong, the form can open a door on its own. Laughter inside discomfort is not always an escape. Sometimes it is the first sign of acknowledgement.

What the industry needs, then, is not more restrictions but more room, more stages, more practice nights, and more audiences willing to sit with material that tests them. Saq Central is trying to create that space. Other platforms, including Saq Meda, are also helping build the live comedy ecosystem, bringing established and emerging comedians together for hours of performance, storytelling, and crowd work.

The scene is still young and still finding its shape. The audiences are growing, while the comedians are getting sharper. In a city that has often undervalued stand-up as a serious art form, the stage at the Marriott offered evidence that something real is being built, one joke at a time.

The Political Class Bet on Mega-projects, Pushed State Banks to the Brink

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Ethiopia’s developmental state experiment was less a model of economic discipline than a response to political necessity. It offered public goods, from roads, dams, and railways to factories, as substitutes for legitimacy.

Public infrastructure became the language of power. Feasibility studies, institutional checks and financial prudence often gave way to speed, symbolism and political command. The promise was as straightforward as growth buys time, and visible projects would soften popular demands for accountability and consent, at least for a while.

Interestingly, the model itself was not born as a rigid theory. It began as an empirical account of East Asian practice and was later shaped by scholars such as Chalmers Johnson. Ethiopian policymakers borrowed the label but not the institutional foundations that made the East Asian record credible. South Korea and Japan, for instance, used directed lending alongside feedback, discipline and eventual correction.

However, and unwittingly, Ethiopia turned banks into instruments of political ambition, pushed megaprojects with weak commercial cases and drew heavily on domestic savings to finance them. The problem was not the absence of theory, inasmuch as it was the distortion of one. Finance became the centre of the experiment’s pressure point. By subordinating banking to politics, the state built a fragile system in which deposits were channelled into long-term projects with limited prospects of repayment. Banks carried short-term liabilities against long-term, but non-performing assets. Liquidity thinned, private banks were squeezed, state banks were drained, and, by the late 2010s, the tremor inside the system had become hard to ignore.

All commercial banks, but the Commercial Bank of Ethiopia (CBE), were compelled to divert more than a quarter of their deposits into bonds issued by the Development Bank of Ethiopia (DBE).

The policy stripped liquidity from the sector without providing market returns or tradable instruments. It was not merely a reserve requirement, as it was a structural distortion that deprived the private sector of credit and narrowed the banking industry’s capacity to finance productive enterprises.

State-owned enterprises absorbed even larger sums through directed loans and rolled-over bonds. The Ethiopian Electric Power Company (EEPCo) borrowed hundreds of billions without repaying a single Birr. The Ethiopian Sugar Corporation (ESC) pressed ahead with projects that failed or stalled, yet financing continued. The Corporation and Metal & Engineering Company (METEC) became drains on public resources, taking loans without matching accountability.

Under the mandate of advanced industrialisation and agricultural expansion, the Development Bank of Ethiopia (DBE) engaged in undisciplined lending practices. A distinct lack of professionalism in feasibility assessments, combined with questionable loan appraisal processes and deliberately inflated collateral valuations, led to a bypass of standard risk management practices. This systemic malfeasance directly triggered a service financial crisis, culminating in a non-performing loan ratio that exceeded 50pc.

Warnings about liquidity risks and the dangers of subordinating banks to political objectives were raised but dismissed. Board chairpersons of state-owned banks treated caution as an attack rather than a safeguard. The tremor was, therefore, not a surprise. It was the result of advice ignored, amid weakened monetary discipline. Banks were forced to extend credit without sufficient consideration for repayment capacity.

Monetary expansion accelerated, inflationary pressures mounted, and the National Bank of Ethiopia’s (NBE) ability to control money supply was undermined. What looked like development finance increasingly resembled a transfer of risk from state projects to the financial system.

The Commercial Bank of Ethiopia (CBE) became the main casualty. Long regarded as the backbone of the financial sector, for mobilising over 80pc of the country’s finance, it was turned into a sacrificial institution. Its liquidity was drained, and its balance sheet was weighed down by loans to state-owned enterprises that were unlikely to be recovered on standard terms. Its solvency came to depend on the government’s willingness to roll over obligations indefinitely.

The foreign-exchange crisis deepened the damage. Reserves were depleted, the parallel market expanded, and the official exchange rate lost credibility. By 2018, CBE had been hollowed out by liquidity shortages and paralysed by foreign-currency scarcity. Had the Bank failed, the shock would have spread across the system, trembling the wider economy, which also showed the same imbalance.

Although its expansion was real, the economy rested on fragile foundations. Indeed, it maintained average GDP growth above eight percent for more than a decade, but the headline figures concealed structural weakness. Corruption flourished around state-led projects, inflation eroded household purchasing power, savings were weakened, and competitiveness suffered.

Debt mismanagement added to the pressure. Obligations were rolled over instead of resolved, creating a debt overhang that constrained growth. By 2025, external debt reached 33.3 billion dollars. That level may appear moderate by global standards after restructuring, but the composition and service burden left the economy vulnerable to recurring stress.

By 2018, the banking industry was on the verge of an abyss, forcing the new Administration to take corrective measures to prevent a collapse. Liquidity injections kept CBE afloat, and the decisive step came when more than 900 billion Br of liabilities were assumed through fiscal measures. This was a rescue operation designed to absorb a systemic shock, demonstrating that institutional safeguards, though delayed, could still function when the cost of inaction became too large.

Policy reforms, such as restructured and prudential limits, helped CBE regain some footing. At the height of the crisis, the Bank’s foreign-exchange liability was 400pc above its capital base, far beyond limits under the Central Bank’s open position directive. More than liquidity, correcting that imbalance required structural reform and tighter supervision.

However, the whole episode left behind a crucial lesson that subordinating finance to politics is not development but an utter distortion. Banks cannot be treated as captive vaults, and debt cannot be rolled over indefinitely without consequence. Directed lending to state firms helped build visible monuments, but it weakened institutions, undermined monetary control and left the financial sector exposed.

Capital Market Opens Before Investors Get Ready

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For a country that spent decades without a capital market, the emergence of a trading platform for intangible values should be more than another economic policy reform. It marks the start of a cultural shift, one that asks citizens to think differently about savings, risk and opportunity.

The launch of the Ethiopian Securities Exchange (ESX) last year has stirred excitement across the business community. Government officials hailed it as a historic step toward economic modernisation, while executives of financial institutions see a way to raise capital beyond conventional bank lending.

The younger generation, rather shaped by global digital finance trends, views it as an opening into wealth creation that long seemed available mainly to large corporations and connected elites.

However, the optimism could mask a harder reality. Ethiopia may have launched a stock market, but building a genuine investment culture is a slower and more demanding task.

For generations, Ethiopians trusted assets they could see and touch. Land, and investment in particular, became a preferred store of value. Gold, livestock and trade inventories were easier to understand than corporate shares or equity ownership.

Now, asking ordinary citizens to trust a digital marketplace built on financial disclosures and future earnings requires more than new rules. It demands belief, as the curiosity is already visible.

Some people see shares as the next “big opportunity,” while others speak about investing with a limited understanding of risk, valuation or long-term returns. Social media discussions increasingly carry speculation, inflated profit expectations and rumours about which companies may perform best once public participation expands.

This should not surprise, as it is common in emerging markets. Many young exchanges have opened amid early waves of enthusiasm, driven more by emotion than by financial literacy. Ethiopia risks following a similar path if public education does not keep pace with capital market expansion.

The problem is not optimism itself as the danger lies in unmanaged optimism. When markets are poorly understood, investing can quickly become gambling dressed as opportunity. People buy assets because others are buying them. Expectations drift away from economic fundamentals. Disappointment follows, and public trust can be damaged for years.

Ethiopia can ill afford that outcome. The country is entering the capital-market era while facing wider economic pressures. Inflation continues to reduce household purchasing power, while foreign exchange shortages remain a burden for businesses.

Youth unemployment and rising living costs have deepened frustration among many urban residents.

In such conditions, a stock market can easily become emotionally charged, seen less as a long-term investment platform than as a quick answer to financial hardship. The success of the ESX will depend not only on how many companies list their shares, but on how responsibly the market is managed in its early years.

Regulators face pressure to establish credibility quickly. Transparency, disclosure standards and investor protection will decide whether citizens develop confidence in the system. A single major scandal involving insider trading, misinformation or manipulated reporting could weaken public trust before the market has matured.

Those in charge of the Ethiopian Capital Market Authority (ECMA), therefore, have a historic and pioneering responsibility that goes beyond technical supervision. They should build trust in an environment where public scepticism toward institutions often runs deep.

Companies entering the market carry an equal burden, too. Listing on an Exchange should not become a branding exercise meant to attract attention or raise quick capital. They have to understand that a securities market demands accountability. Investors deserve accurate financial reports, honest communication and consistent governance standards.

Without these foundations, the market could become accessible mainly to financially sophisticated insiders, while ordinary citizens carry risks they do not fully understand.

Despite these concerns, the young population could become one of the strongest sources of future market participation. Digital banking is expanding amid financial technology platforms reaching users beyond traditional banking halls. A generation connected to global financial conversations through smartphones is beginning to view investing differently from earlier generations.

This gives Ethiopia a rare opening. Handled well, the capital market could widen economic participation, offering small investors access to wealth-building opportunities previously unavailable to them. Businesses could secure financing without depending entirely on bank loans. Corporate transparency could improve as public scrutiny rises.

None of this, however, will happen automatically.

The fledgling capital market should not be seen as a test of technology or financial infrastructure. It is a test of national economic confidence. Citizens will take part meaningfully only if they believe the rules apply fairly to everyone. Prospective investors will remain patient only if institutions demonstrate consistency and credibility during difficult periods, not merely at ceremonial launches and hopeful announcements.

A stock exchange alone does not create wealth. Trust does. Ethiopia is not simply opening a marketplace for shares. It is trying to introduce a new relationship between citizens, capital and opportunity.

Whether that relationship succeeds will depend on something deeper than economics. It will depend on public confidence in the system, and on the belief that the opportunity is genuinely within reach for ordinary Ethiopians.

Taking Women Farmers Seriously

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As the war in Iran disrupts fertiliser supplies and undermines food security around the world, the need to build more resilient food systems has never been clearer.

The hundreds of millions of women who farm across the Global South have a vital role to play in meeting this challenge, but their ability to do so continues to be systematically undermined. Though women comprise over 40pc of the agricultural labour force in developing countries, women farmers are less likely than their male counterparts to have access to quality seeds, fertilisers, and tools and less likely to be connected to markets.

They are also less likely to be visited by extension agents responsible for delivering agricultural innovations and practical solutions directly to farmers. And agriculture researchers are less likely to consider their experience and interests.

These failures compound one another, undermining yields, nutrition, incomes, and, ultimately, economic growth and development. Meanwhile, pressure on the global food system is intensifying, owing not only to conflicts like the Iran war, but also to population growth and proliferating floods and droughts, which climate change is making fiercer and more frequent.

One crop, the Bambara groundnut, illustrates the cascading costs of overlooking women farmers and illuminates a potential pathway toward strengthening food security. This protein-rich legume, widely cultivated by Africa’s female farmers, is a marvel of resilience, capable of thriving in harsh and drought-prone conditions. It also fixes nitrogen in depleted soil, thereby improving fertility. And women farmers grow it much as their mothers and grandmothers did, planting unimproved seeds, passed down from season to season, in fields fed by fickle rains.

The resulting yields average some 300Kg to 800Kg a hectare. That is less than a third of what researchers believe could be produced even with unimproved heritage seeds. With more advanced seeds, the gains could be tremendous. A triple dividend of significantly higher yields, enhancing nutrition, improved soil health, and economic empowerment of women can be achieved. And yet, the Bambara groundnut has received scant attention from agricultural researchers.

Ghana’s Council for Scientific & Industrial Research–Savanna Agricultural Research Institute is seeking to change this and to ensure that women, in particular, reap the benefits. With support from organisations such as Grow Further, separate large-scale surveys of male and female farmers were conducted to determine what they wanted in an improved Bambara groundnut variety.

This gender-based approach is rare in agricultural research, and the results were revealing. Whereas the men wanted simply to increase yields, the women emphasised the importance of quicker maturation. As they explained to researchers, when the planting season approaches, they should first help their husbands with their planting before turning to their own fields. This is not personal preference but a reality of gendered labour patterns. That delay leaves less time for women’s Bambara groundnut crops to mature, impacting the harvest.

This is precisely the kind of game-changing insight that goes unnoticed for decades, simply because women have no opportunity to voice it. Instead, solutions are designed to suit a generic, implicitly male, farmer and framed as being for everyone. The result is land-titling systems that document male ownership by default; credit markets that demand collateral that women are legally or customarily barred from holding; and policy processes that discuss food security in aggregate terms, ignoring the gendered distribution of its costs and benefits.

Rather than designing solutions for half the farming population while leaving the other half struggling to adapt to systems not built for them, researchers, policymakers, and others whose decisions affect agricultural operations and outcomes should consider the specific needs and preferences of female farmers. That means using gender-disaggregated data, like that collected by the CSIR-SARI. It also means collaborating with women in research and policy design, instead of treating them as passive beneficiaries. And it means redesigning financial systems, land frameworks, and extension services to reflect the reality of women’s lives.

Technology also has a role to play. AI is accelerating the pace of crop improvement by enabling researchers to analyse genetic traits, predict breeding outcomes, and identify groundbreaking seeds in a matter of months rather than years. And genomic editing technologies are putting unprecedented precision and power in the hands of breeders and researchers. These are powerful tools, which should be harnessed to serve the interests of male and female farmers equally.

The Bambara groundnut has been dubbed a hidden superfood, astonishingly resilient, capable of sustaining communities, and tragically overlooked. The same could be said about the women who grow it. In an era of intensifying food insecurity, that is not an oversight the world can afford. This year, which the United Nations has declared the International Year of the Woman Farmer, offers a critical opportunity to correct this mistake.

As Savers Gain Choices, Banks Face a Quiet Reckoning

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As the capital market moves past its initial stage, a more important change is likely underway within the financial system. It is not being led by speculation, a sudden taste for risk or a rush into new products. It is being led by households slowly gaining more choice, which will likely change the role of banks.

In mature financial systems, the moment households begin to compare options is the moment banks start moving beyond custody. They become guides, explainers and managers of long-term relationships. Such a shift does not arrive in a single announcement but grows through behaviour, confidence and expectations. Ethiopia is nearing that point.

For decades, the relationship between households and banks was simple. Deposits were less a deliberate financial decision than a default habit. Alternatives were few as liquidity patterns were predictable. The emergence of capital-market infrastructure is beginning to alter this arrangement, in which trust was often assumed but not actively managed.

The change does not require a large exchange, complex instruments or mass participation. It requires only the perception that alternatives exist. Once households sense that, depositors behave differently, comparing returns and asking questions. They reassess where their money sits and why. This is not a mere cultural change but a structural one.

Several developments have converged in a relatively short period. Capital-market institutions have become operational. Brokerage access for individuals has expanded. Collective investment structures are being discussed. Deposit-rate flexibility has increased under recent monetary signals. Foreign-exchange directives have gradually become more flexible in ways that affect cross-border liquidity and financial decision-making.

Each of these developments, in isolation, may look modest. Together, they introduce optionality into a system long built around passivity. They also reinforce a broader shift in which financial behaviour is becoming more comparative and decision-oriented.

Households may not move their money immediately. But they begin to compare banks with other options such as yield, liquidity, responsiveness and clarity. Those comparisons increasingly occur in ordinary settings, including branch visits, customer service calls, and conversations with relationship managers. That is where institutional readiness begins to matter.

In a traditional deposit-led system, liquidity tends to be stable because behaviour is stable. In a system shaped by expanding choice, liquidity becomes more conditional. Deposits do not always leave because another product pays more. They often move because confidence has not been explained clearly enough, prompting depositors to ask practical questions.

“Why am I earning this return? What risk am I taking? What changes if market conditions shift? Who explains the outcome if expectations are not met?” are capital-market questions, but they are also relationship questions.

As access expands, intermediaries begin to sit between institutions and households. Their role is not only transactional, but also absorbs expectations, confusion and reputational pressure when markets become less predictable. If institutions cannot answer questions consistently, liquidity movement becomes harder to anticipate. The problem may not be sudden outflows. More often, it is a gradual drift in behaviour that becomes visible too late.

It is tempting to describe this transition as a contest between banks and capital markets. However, it misses the deeper issue that capital markets do not, by themselves, destabilise banks. Misaligned readiness does.

Risk emerges when access expands faster than institutional clarity does, especially while responsibilities around disclosure, advisory conduct, and expectation management are still developing. In early-stage systems, intermediaries often move faster than the institutions that have traditionally anchored trust. The result can be a gap between access and reassurance. That does not necessarily signal failure. It often reflects acceleration. The danger comes when acceleration outruns preparation.

The first serious period of volatility in a developing market is rarely only a test of returns. It is a test of institutional posture. When prices move unexpectedly, households do not question only the asset. They question the institution that introduced them to it. Who explains what happened? Who reframes expectations? Who absorbs reputational pressure?

Those questions are answered less by regulation alone than by institutional behaviour. Markets that wait to define these responsibilities until participation becomes widespread usually learn under pressure.

There is a temptation to postpone readiness discussions until the market becomes deeper and more sophisticated. That logic is backwards. Readiness comes before products. It involves clarity in governance, internal escalation paths, responsibility mapping, communication discipline, and agreement on pacing. These elements shape institutional outcomes long before large trading volumes arrive. They are difficult to build quickly once confidence is tested in public.

Ethiopia is not late. Participation is still emerging. Institutional roles remain fluid. Household behaviour is still forming. That gives the country a useful window to build discipline before scale arrives.

The early years of a capital market are never neutral. They determine which institutions become trusted entry points for households and which struggle to adapt. The strongest systems are not always the fastest. They are usually the ones who clarify responsibility before pressure exposes the gaps.

Household participation is not an elite concern. It is a normal stage in the development of a financial system seeking depth, resilience and broader inclusion. But participation that outpaces institutional readiness carries costs that later become difficult to contain.

For banks, the task is not resisting choice but making choice understandable, credible, and durable for households early on.

Ethiopia still has time to ensure that market growth and public confidence reinforce each other. What matters now is not merely the pace at which access expands. It is whether banks, intermediaries and regulators prepare deliberately before confidence is tested in public.

When Ordinary Lives Rewrite Poverty

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There are moments in life that leave people changed forever. A few days ago, I attended a conference at a religious institution I regularly attend, which became one of those unforgettable moments. The conference focused on poverty, human dignity, and the responsibility each person carries toward the poor. It was not filled with empty speeches or polished promises. It was deeply emotional, bringing many participants, myself included, to tears while also filling the room with hope. The stories revealed not only the pain of poverty but also the power of compassion, sacrifice, and human determination.

What made it remarkable was that the speakers were not wealthy philanthropists. They were ordinary Ethiopians who chose extraordinary lives of service. Many began helping vulnerable people while they had little money, support, or opportunity. Yet their courage transformed lives. Some raised orphaned children who became professionals. Others dedicated themselves to children with special needs. Several spent decades changing young lives simply by refusing to ignore suffering.

Among them, one elderly man left a strong impression. He was a respected Ethiopian figure known to law students: Shiferaw W. Michael. Now in his eighties, he has devoted over sixty years to orphaned and vulnerable children. His journey began with personal pain. As a child, he saw poverty firsthand when his parents were evicted from fertile land by a local administrator. Overnight, life with his eight siblings collapsed. His family fell into deep poverty, and the emotional impact stayed with him.

Instead of bitterness, Shiferaw turned suffering into compassion. Though he had the chance to study in the United States and live abroad, he returned to Ethiopia because his heart remained with his people. For decades, he has supported poor children, educated communities, and advocated social justice.

One insight he shared was his view of poverty. Poverty is not only empty pockets. It crushes spirit, steals opportunity, limits imagination, and blinds people to potential. His research in Ethiopia links poverty to global policies, weak systems, dependency, and harmful mindsets. He argued it is also lack of vision, creativity, and access.

To illustrate, he recalled a man living near a lake who remained dirty despite abundant water around him. The story became a metaphor for communities trapped in poverty despite nearby resources and talent. Ethiopia is rich in land, water, youth, and resilience, yet struggles persist due to mismanagement and limited access.

Another figure was Konjit B. Eshetu, who showed that change does not require great wealth. She opened libraries in poor communities and provided meals for children using her own resources. Rather than waiting for donors, she mobilised local support and encouraged contributions from ordinary citizens.

She left a lucrative international career to serve vulnerable children. Today, many she supported are educated, employed, and helping others. Her work shows compassion creates a chain reaction across generations.

Listening to them was moving because both studied at Addis Abeba University Law School, where I also studied. We shared campuses and systems, yet they chose lives of service over personal success. Their lives forced reflection on achievement. Success is often measured by salary or status, but perhaps it is better measured by lives transformed.

The conference also highlighted that helping others is not occasional but a lifestyle. Poverty cannot be solved only by governments or aid. It requires communities that care. Small actions matter. One may not build a hospital, but can support a child, neighbour, or family. One life changed can have huge impact.

Practical solutions emerged. Education is key to breaking deprivation. Libraries, vocational training, and schools empower children. Communities must encourage entrepreneurship and self-reliance. Ethiopia’s youth have talent that can drive growth if supported. Local initiatives and cooperatives can create jobs and dignity.

Another solution is changing attitudes toward poverty. It should not be seen as personal failure. Many are trapped by injustice, lack of opportunity, or history. Compassion and empathy are essential. Empowerment requires mentorship, education, and access, not charity alone.

Religious institutions also play a role. They have trust and influence to mobilise compassion. The conference showed how such gatherings can inspire both emotion and action.

As it ended, one message stayed with me: helping others is an investment with lasting returns. Luxury spending fades, but kindness lasts through generations. A child educated today may become a doctor or humanitarian tomorrow. Compassion multiplies.

In a world driven by ambition, people like Shiferaw and Konjit show a greater purpose. Ordinary people can create extraordinary change through love and sacrifice. Poverty is old but not unbeatable. If more choose generosity over indifference and action over silence, societies can change.

The conference did more than discuss poverty. It challenged everyone to act. Responsibility belongs to all, not only governments or donors. If each person shared knowledge, time, or resources, poverty would lessen. Change begins when we ask, what can I do today to change one life? That question is not rhetorical but practical, demanding reflection in daily choices, priorities, and relationships, because even the smallest act of support can alter the direction of another person’s future in ways that are often impossible to measure immediately. These outcomes may not always be visible at once, yet they accumulate quietly over time, shaping stronger communities, stronger families, and more stable futures grounded in shared responsibility and care. Each individual decision contributes to a wider social fabric that slowly but meaningfully reshapes collective wellbeing across generations in ways we often overlook.

Beyond the Scoreline, How Foreign Football Becomes Local Identity

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The recent celebrations in Addis Abeba following Arsenal’s success were, to put it bluntly, hard to watch. While I acknowledge that fans who have waited over twenty years for a title feel a deep sense of loyalty, the sheer scale of the reaction, the street-filling intensity, the deafening noise, and the emotional obsession are completely disproportionate to the actual reality of our lives. Watching thousands of people lose their minds over a scoreline from a league thousands of miles away makes you realise that we are no longer just dealing with “fans.” We are looking at the mechanics of a cult.

As someone who has always loved football, I speak from a place of experience. I grew up playing the game, and for me, the joy of football has always been in the physicality of it, the actual act of running, the tactical thinking required in getting past the opposite team’s defence, dribbling and all that that comes with playing a match. I even used to be one of those people who watched it on TV. But somewhere along the line, I stopped being a passive observer. I realised that sitting in a dark, crowded lounge, screaming at a screen for a team that does not know I exist, was becoming an unhealthy habit. The love for the sport should shift back to the field, where the impact is real and personal. Because of this perspective, seeing the way others treat these foreign clubs is even more jarring to me.

When you look at the behaviours on display in our streets and cafes, the parallels to a cult are impossible to ignore. A cult demands absolute devotion, a suspension of critical thinking, and the elevation of a distant, unreachable symbol above one’s own immediate family or community. That is exactly what we see here. These fans speak about Arsenal as if the club’s success or failure is a personal milestone. They carry the “trauma” of losses and the “triumph” of wins as if their own lives have been fundamentally altered by a group of players who do not even know they exist. It is a closed loop of irrational emotional labour. You do not have to be a doctor, a teacher, or an activist to belong; you just have to wear the jersey and parrot the same talking points as everyone else in the circle.

What is truly unsettling is the total absorption of identity. In a healthy society, a person’s identity is built on their contributions to their family, their neighbourhood, and their city. But for fans in Addis, the “Arsenal” identity has replaced that. They feel a sense of pride that is not earned through hard work, but through association. This is a massive drain on our collective social capital. We have pressing, life-altering issues here in Addis, that I will not even get into, the energy that could be used to solve these problems is being siphoned off into the ether of foreign football.

The cult-like nature of this fandom acts as a powerful social sedative. It provides a false, low-effort sense of belonging. It allows people to feel like they are part of a “movement” without having to face the messy, difficult work of addressing the real-world problems in their own backyards. You can go to a bar or sports lounge, scream until your voice is gone, and walk home feeling like you have been part of something great, all while the actual quality of your life and the lives of your neighbours remains exactly the same. It is a way to bypass the frustration of our own reality by hiding in the results of a game. They have essentially created an “us versus them” mentality based on team colours, effectively dividing our own people over irrelevant foreign matches while the things that actually impact our survival go ignored.

We are spending an incredible, almost staggering amount of mental and emotional energy on something that offers zero return on investment for our actual lives. If we applied even a fraction of that intensity towards the social issues that plague us, the change in our day-to-day lives would be massive. Instead, we choose to prioritise the scoreboard of a game that does not care about us.

It is time to be brutally honest: this obsession is a luxury we cannot afford. We are acting like spectators in our own lives, waiting for a foreign entity to provide us with the joy that we should be building for ourselves. The temporary high of a championship in London does not pay the bills, it does not heal our social divisions, and it does not make our city a better place to live. We need to wake up, break the spell of this sports worship, and start acting like citizens who have real, difficult, and important work to do right here at home. The real victory is not found in a trophy across the ocean; it is found in the work we do for each other, right here in Addis Abeba.

“We can’t ignore that; we can’t deny that.”

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Ervin Massinga, the United States ambassador to Ethiopia, posted a video on the Embassy’s official social media account following his recent two-day visit to Bahir Dar in the Amhara Regional State. He said there has been a “lot of pain” in a region that has “gone through much.”

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The percentage of merchandise trade in Africa intermediated by banks on the continent in the four years beginning 2020, down from 40pc between 2011 and 2019. Ethiopia’s 2024 merchandise imports totalled 16.77 billion dollars, about 4.6 times its exports that year. Exports of goods and services were 6.6pc of GDP and imports at 14pc, revealing how small and imbalanced the external trade base was relative to financing needs.