ONE TRAFFIC LIGHT, TWO ADDIS ABEBAS

Jul 4 , 2026. By Blen Hailu ( Blen Hailu (blenmahi12@gmail.com) studied marketing, management and law. She works in communications and digital content creation, with a focus on human rights, equity and youth engagement.  )

As the towers rise over Africa Avenue Bole, the middle class that once held the capital together is dissolving into an inflation it cannot outrun. writes, Blen Hailu (blenmahi12@gmail.com) studied marketing, management and law. She works in communications and digital content creation, with a focus on human rights, equity and youth engagement.

There is a street in Addis Abeba where two worlds meet for the length of a red light.

A mother stood at the edge of the road, one child strapped to her back, another gripping the hem of her skirt. As the cars stopped, she moved from window to window, holding out her hand.

Among the waiting vehicles lined a new Tesla, its finish mirroring the apartment towers, the upscale butcher shops with their carefully arranged display windows, and the malls still gleaming from recent construction. When the light turned green, the cars pulled away, the Tesla among them, and the mother was left where she began.

She watched the traffic vanish, then turned to face the next red light.

This was not a metaphor or a staged contrast. It is the ordinary reality of one street in one city, where great wealth and deep poverty touch for a moment before moving off in opposite directions.

Addis Abeba is changing, and the change is visible to anyone walking through its expanding neighbourhoods. New developments announce themselves on every block.

Luxury apartments rise behind construction fences. Restaurants post menus priced in thousands of Birr. Glass-faced commercial buildings mirror the sky. On the surface, it looks like progress, a city on the way up. Beneath the dust and the towers, though, a different story is unfolding, one the skyline does not tell.

The city is splitting, but not physically, and not along a single border. Increasingly, it is divided socially and economically in ways that feel permanent.

The upper class is building upward. The lower class is pushed further from the resources it depends on, from healthcare, schools, and the neighbourhoods it once called home. And the middle, the working Ethiopians who held the space between, are dissolving into an inflation they cannot outrun.

It was not always this way. Addis Abeba once had what most functioning cities depend on, a middle. A working class that earned enough to rent a decent room, feed a family, pay school fees, and put a little aside.

Ironically, this class has not vanished overnight. It has been worn down steadily by pressures that have made ordinary life feel out of reach. Rising rents have pushed families out of central neighbourhoods and into informal settlements at the city's edges.

Food prices have climbed faster than wages, while transport costs eat into whatever is left. And all the while, the city has been rebuilt not for these families but around them, and at times over the very places they used to live.

These are pressures that cannot be ignored much longer. Higher inflation, layered on top of one shock after another, means more families are struggling to cover basic needs. What was once an ordinary cost has become a daily threat.

This is not only an economic fact but an experience on the ground, lived by families who do not eat enough, by parents who choose rent over school fees, and by sick people who go without treatment because care is no longer within reach.

For many, life is less about gaining more and more about not losing more.

About 70-80pc of the city's population lives in informal settlements, areas with scarce infrastructure, unreliable water, and insecure tenure. These settlements take up nearly 50pc of the city's built-up area, largely without the services and protections that formal housing provides.

The wealthy districts, such as Bole, with its cafes, tar roads, and apartment blocks, read like another city altogether. The contrast is built into the ground, coded into the wiring and lighting of buildings and streets.

Researchers tie these differences to the pace of urbanisation, housing shortages, and unequal access to opportunity, noting that development has too often proceeded without factoring in the people already living on the land. The gap is at its sharpest when neighbouring parts of the city are set side by side.

According to a study by Addis Abeba University, Qirqos District is twice as poor as Bole District on the Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI), a measure that captures deprivation across health, education, and living standards rather than income alone. Qirqos, with an MPI of 0.39, counted 66.5pc of its people as poor, against 32.8pc in Bole, whose index stood at 0.15.

Two districts in the same city, with two very different lives.

The gap is not necessarily one that market forces created, and not one that market forces will close. Nowhere is inequality more brutal than in healthcare, where the gap decides not convenience but whether a person lives or dies.

A pregnant woman in a wealthier part of Addis Abeba has more than a 90pc chance of receiving the minimum antenatal care visits, the routine check-ups recommended during pregnancy to catch trouble before birth.

In the poorer parts of the same city, that figure falls to between 54pc and 67pc. The consequences are not theoretical.

Children born into the poorest households face nearly twice the risk of dying in their first month as children born into wealthy ones. By the age of five, that gap widens to three times. In a city where private hospitals advertise European-standard care, children die of preventable causes because their families cannot buy the right treatment at the right moment.

This is what inequality actually looks like. It is not about the car a family drives. It is about what is likely to kill them. In Addis Abeba, wealth shapes beyond housing and diet, deciding whether a child survives its first week of life.

There is something disorienting about Addis Abeba’s present moment.

The glamour and the new developments are real. So are the restaurants, the malls, and the busy butcher shops. And the grief is just as real, with the mother on the pavement reminding those in posh vehicles of families displaced with nowhere to go, the settlement two kilometres from a glittering tower.

The city is not divided because development is missing. It is divided because that development is not reaching most people. Growth without distribution is pressure. And Addis Abeba is storing it up quietly, beneath the noise of construction.

Whether the city is growing is not in question. It plainly is. The question is for whom it grows, and for whom it stays a pavement to sit on and watch.

A city that houses two extremes while slowly dissolving the buffer between them is heading toward a fragility no tower can fix. The middle class is not only an economic category. The teachers and nurses, the small business owners and civil servants were meant to be the social tissue that holds urban life together.

When they can no longer afford to live in the city they serve, and staff its schools, clinics, offices and shops, something is lost that money cannot replace.

Addis Abeba is becoming two spaces that share a name, a geography, and the same morning traffic. They do not yet share the same future.

Whether they ever do will depend on choices made not by the market but by the people and institutions with the power to build a city that works for more than a narrow few.

PUBLISHED ON Jul 04,2026 [ VOL 27 , NO 1366]