Addis Abeba to Launch Sweeping Crackdown on Construction Safety Failures

Jul 6 , 2025. By YITBAREK GETACHEW ( FORTUNE STAFF WRITER )

In a city rising skyward at breakneck speed, a reckoning has arrived. Authorities in Addis Abeba have declared a sweeping crackdown on unsafe construction practices, putting thousands of developers, contractors, and consultants on notice.

Beginning July 12, 2025, the city will deploy a task force to conduct surprise inspections of over 24,000 active building sites, in a bold move city officials frame as "long overdue" and potentially life-saving.

A task force led by Wendimu Seta, the city’s general manager, will undertake unannounced inspections of active building sites. Any site lacking sufficient personal protective equipment, sound scaffolding or routine safety briefings will face immediate suspension, and existing structures in violation of the code could be ordered suspended.

The announcement capped a high-level panel discussion convened at the Stay Easy Plus Hotel near Addisu Gebeya roundabout, on July 5. Organised as part of the city’s ongoing safety-awareness campaign, the event drew representatives from the Mayor’s office, real estate developers, consultants, contractors and officials from the Addis Abeba Construction Permit & Control Authority. Participants were reminded that safety shortcuts carry steep human and financial costs.

“We'll no longer overlook these tragedies,” said Wendimu at the close of the forum. “When we overlook safety to save money, we should think about the damage it will cause later.”

His remarks echoed a tally presented by Abebe Eshte, the Authority’s deputy director, who reported that between January 2022 and June 2025, at least 142 construction workers lost their lives on sites across Addis Abeba. Those deaths, Abebe said, were only the ones recorded. Informal and on-site settlements often obscure the true toll.

Lemi Kura District registered the highest number of fatalities, with frequent falls from unstable heights and chronic shortages of hard hats, harnesses and other protective gear. In one particularly harrowing case, a single site recorded 33 worker deaths over a two-year period. That site, Abebe later noted, had relied on wooden scaffolding so weak that entire ground-plus-two structures collapsed under minimal stress.

“Wood is naturally prone to accidents,” Wendimu said, referring to the prevalence of makeshift wooden scaffolding. “This isn't something we can just ignore or pass.”

Inspectors have consistently found daily safety briefings absent, emergency plans nonexistent and hazard-reporting systems unimplemented. Unlike in other countries where safety officers sign off before any work begins each morning, Addis Abeba’s sites have no such ritual.

“We need to learn from international best practices,” Abebe urged the audience. “Safety is not a luxury; it is a basic responsibility.”

Industry representatives acknowledged the problem but pressed the need for collaboration.

According to Yesuf Mohammed, president of the Construction Contractors Association of Ethiopia, no single group can resolve the crisis. Ethiopia suffers from an acute shortage of trained safety professionals, he said, recalling a past effort to train 1,000 site safety officers that stumbled because no qualified local trainers came forth.

“Lack of professional trainers leads us depend on Germans,” Yesuf said. "The Association had to bring in a German instructor to complete the course."

To embed safety into every project, he argued, it should be budgeted at the outset. He also announced a new partnership with Addis Abeba University, which will soon offer dedicated courses in construction safety.

In its latest annual review of the 2024/25 fiscal year, the Construction Permit & Control Authority reported that only 1,557 of the 2,681 inspected sites met minimal safety thresholds. No less than 11,748 new sites, opened during the same period without adequate oversight.

Hiwot Samuel, the Authority’s general director, called those figures “shocking.” She said letters detailing preventable deaths arrive in her office almost daily.

“Life is more than everything,” Hiwot said. “Yet, we continue to find workers returned to the same hazardous conditions the next day.”

To enforce compliance, Hiwot and Wendimu unveiled a new inspection team that will fan out across the city. Any of the active sites falling short of the new material and training requirements will be halted immediately. The officials uncompromising position comes after a joint study by Addis Abeba and Bahir Dar universities rated the national construction-safety regime at 2.7 out of 10. The study also found that 99pc of Ethiopia’s construction workers have received no formal safety training.

Under the task force’s new mandate, sites using substandard wooden supports will have to replace them with approved materials or face suspension. Task force officials will check that iron or steel scaffolding meets the load-bearing requirements laid out in the 2008 national safety code, which Abebe Dinku (Prof.) of Addis Abeba University lamented has never been meaningfully enforced.

“Construction safety is everyone’s responsibility,” Abebe told Fortune. “That includes contractors, banks, regulators and even consultants.”

He advocated registering all accidents, irrespectve of its size, as a foundation for stronger future safety laws.

“We don't have that here,” he noted. “And that makes all the difference.”

Financial considerations remain a sore point for many developers. At the forum, Africon Group shareholder, Zinabu Tebeje, urged banks to extend credit or offer duty-free access to steel scaffolding, arguing that the transition to safer materials imposes heavy upfront costs.

“We're expected to assess how and why a person died,” he said. “Saving lives should not be linked to punishment. It is a moral imperative.”

Zinabu also called for the formation of an industry-wide think tank, including financial institutions, to discuss standards and share best practices.

PUBLISHED ON Jul 06,2025 [ VOL 26 , NO 1314]