Jul 7 , 2026
Manufactured exports are projected to generate more than one billion dollars next year, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed (PhD) told Parliament today, the boldest forward claim in an end-of-fiscal-year address that presented the economy as a country transformed.
The Prime Minister portrayed an economy growing faster than any in Africa, pulling in “38 billion dollars in foreign exchange in a single year.”
The projection, modest against the headline totals, may be the most consequential number in the speech. Domestic factories have historically exported a few hundred million dollars a year; crossing the one billion dollars threshold would mark the first evidence that an economy carried by gold, coffee and an airline is beginning to sell what it makes. It came wrapped in a manufacturing story the Prime Minister told with relish.
Abiy claimed industrial capacity utilisation up from “below 47pc” before his reforms to “67pc now,” manufacturing output up 24pc this year, cement up 16pc, and the industrial sector as a whole expanding 12.7pc.
The address, delivered as the fiscal year closed, was a fusillade of superlatives. The Prime Minister projected that the economy will grow between 10.2pc and 10.3pc this year, calling it the “largest growth in Africa.” Goods exports brought in slightly over 11 billion dollars, a sum he framed with a flourish.
“From 1984 to 2000,” he told lawmakers, “Ethiopia earned 11 billion dollars from exports in total. We’ve now generated that 17-year total in a single year."
The foreign-exchange record he presented adds up, at least internally. Goods at 11 billion dollars, services at 9.5 billion, remittances at 7.9 billion, and foreign direct investment (FDI) near four billion dollars. The Central Bank confirmed a record 32.1 billion dollars in foreign exchange inflows in the fiscal year that ended in July 2025, up from 24.7 billion dollars the year before, after the government floated the Birr in July 2024 under a 3.4 billion dollar, four-year IMF programme.
Abiy’s fiscal claims were no less sweeping. The deficit came in around 218 billion Br, below 1.2pc of output.
“The treasury,” he said, “closed the year without borrowing a single Birr from the Central Bank, financing itself through treasury bills instead, and took no commercial loans.”
He insisted on restructuring the country's defaulted Eurobond. He disclosed a revenue collection growth by more than 1.5 trillion Br in a year, against a “cumulative one trillion Birr collected over 27 years.”
Foreign reserves, by his account, have grown more than 20-fold during this period.
The IMF put gross international reserves at 4.4 billion dollars at the close of the last fiscal year, up from 1.4 billion dollars a year earlier, a tripling, and a long way short of 20-fold even with another strong year.
The Prime Minister told Parliament, agriculture supplied the pastoral counterpoint, with “29 million hectares cultivated, some 1.3 billion quintals harvested, 7.7pc sector growth,” and a claim to have become Africa's second-largest avocado exporter. Services, projected to grow 9.8pc, got their emblem in the more than 200 international summits he said Addis Abeba hosted.
On jobs, the sore he pressed in the same session with his demand that Ethiopians learn to hold multiple jobs, Abiy reported 4.9 million people employed domestically this year and more than 600,000 placed abroad, alongside seven completed airports, a plan for 1.5 million houses and a road bill he priced at over two trillion Birr.
The numbers, for now, are his alone. The verdict on them belongs to the data that starts arriving when the new fiscal year's books open.
The fiscal year ended a day before he spoke on July 8, 2016.
The Prime Minister closed today’s session on politics, thanking the opposition and calling on Ethiopians abroad and "those currently imprisoned" to come together, "let us release those we can, bring back those who have fled."
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