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.”
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.
A fleet of heavy-duty excavators, bulldozers, and dump trucks lines the muddy banks of a river near the German Square area. The concentrated presence of machinery signals the scale and speed driving the city’s Corridor Development Program.
The aggressive infrastructure push is reshaping the capital’s urban form, but the intensity of earthworks at the river’s edge also exposes a fragile tension. Rapid transformation and environmental protection sit side by side, each pulling against the other as construction advances along the waterfront.
A heavily damaged utility pole lies across a pedestrian sidewalk in the Gofa Camp neighborhood, with loose wiring exposed and a crushed metal sheet fence nearby. The scene points to a disrupted urban landscape where basic infrastructure repair has lagged behind visible damage.
The lingering wreckage underscores growing concerns over delayed responses to hazardous public property failures.
Revenues Bureau personnel, identifiable in branded vests and body cameras, stand in a dense commuter queue at the Qera taxi terminal. Their roles are rooted in field enforcement and policing the informal economy, yet their off-duty reality looks no different from the citizens they regulate.
The capital’s strained public transport system turns routine commuting into a shared struggle, where municipal employees and the wider workforce wait side by side, exposed to the same delays, congestion, and uncertainty of movement across the city.
The Council of Ministers forwarded two concessional loan agreements totalling 237.3 million dollars to Parliament for ratification, targeting rural infrastructure and food security. The package includes 46.3 million dollars from the African Development Bank (AfDB) for climate-resilient infrastructure in pastoralist regions. A second credit facility of 191 million dollars (146.1 million SDR) from the International Development Association (IDA) is earmarked for the sixth phase of the Productive Safety Net Programme (PSNP-VI). These programs serve as primary fiscal instruments to protect food-insecure households from inflationary shocks.
The Council of Ministers, led by Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed (PhD), approved Ethiopia’s first unified trade policy last week, ending a three-year deliberation period to fill a decades-long regulatory vacuum. This institutional milestone mandates the Ministry of Trade & Regional Integration (MoTRI) to overhaul consumer protection frameworks, specifically requiring a rigorous revision of the Trade Competition and Consumer Protection Proclamation to eliminate market distortions and the proliferation of sub-standard goods.
The policy identifies “regulatory complexity” as a primary bottleneck and seeks to mitigate trade costs by digitizing registration and licensing procedures. To resolve the significant gap between producer and consumer prices, strategic interventions include the expansion of “Sunday Markets” to facilitate direct linkages and the development of modernized market infrastructure. These reforms are anchored in a macroeconomic commitment to protect purchasing power by managing high inflation and narrowing the disparities between official and parallel exchange rates.
Ethiopian Electric Power (EEP) generated 365.99 million dollars from regional exports in the first nine months of the fiscal year as national capacity reached 9,579MW. The revenue followed the sale of 24,940GWh, representing 91pc of gross generation.
Hydropower remains dominant, providing 9,500MW. To diversify assets and mitigate climate risks, the utility integrated the 100MW Asela Wind Power Project. The transmission network has expanded to 148,600km to secure domestic industrial supply and export corridors. While generation scales up, the utility faces high capitalisation costs.
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