With the main aim of addressing economic imbalances and sustaining growth, a team of experts under the Office of the Prime Minister drafted a three-year economic reform programme.

Dubbed the Homegrown Economic Reform Programme, the document was prepared by experts from the Office of the Prime Minister, the National Bank of Ethiopia and the Ministry of Finance. It follows the economic reform document that was approved by the Council of Ministers on June 1, 2019.

The reform, which is expected to be implemented in the coming weeks, aims at stimulating the country’s economy, ensuring sustainable development, reducing unemployment, maintaining macroeconomic stability and transforming the economy from state-led to private sector-led.

"It is designed in response to our needs, as well as the problems and inefficiencies of the economy," Mamo Mihretu, senior advisor to the Prime Minister and the country's chief trade negotiator, told Fortune.

The reform identified five major problems in the economy and targets how to address them. Unemployment, inflationary pressure, foreign currency crunch, debt stress and credit problems are the major challenges spotted by the document.

The programme targets to address these problems in three dimensions via macroeconomic, structural and sectoral reforms. Under the macroeconomic overhaul, the programme outlines implementing conservative fiscal policy; reforming the state-owned enterprises; increasing foreign currency earnings; controlling inflationary pressure; and ensuring the healthiness of the financial sector.

Structural reform will focus on creating a conducive investment climate by revising and amending legal frameworks, administrative procedures and policies. It also considers reforming the logistics, power and telecommunications sectors.

Under the sectoral reform, the document calls for accelerating productive sectors to be more effective. Assisting the agricultural and manufacturing industries to create more jobs and exploiting the industries that were not productive previously, are the critical areas of the sectoral reform. It picked mining and tourism as the areas that can potentially create jobs and generate foreign currency.

It also pinpoints the ICT and creative industries as a new source of growth and requires special attention in the reform.

Getachew Asfaw, an economist who has a track record of publishing a couple of books on the macroeconomic conditions of Ethiopia, appreciate the new initiative from the government in starting talks on macroeconomic issues.