Content: Opinion

This year marks a milestone in China-Africa trading relations. It is the year that trade between China and Africa has surpassed 200 billion dollars, making China Africa’s biggest trading partner, up from just 10 billion dollars in 2000. Through a complex network of state-owned enterprises, and direct government engagement, Sino-Africa corridors represent a brisk trade […]

Consider a simple statistic. Every month in the developing world, more than five million people migrate to urban areas, where jobs, schools and opportunities of all kinds are often easier to find. But when people migrate, the need for basic services – water, power and transport – goes with them, highlighting the boom in infrastructure […]

No country in recorded history has grown as fast – and moved as many people out of poverty – as China over the last 30 years. A hallmark of China’s success has been its leaders’ willingness to revise the country’s economic model when and as needed, despite opposition from powerful vested interests. And now, as […]

When I think of gender and development practice, what immediately comes to mind are endless workshops, conferences, seminars, roundtables, policy briefings and media statements, addressed to the converted, semi-converted and pretenders. All these are helpful, of course. We need to challenge the structural sources of inequalities inherent in policies, laws, institutional mechanisms and thinking. However, […]

Sub-Saharan Africa grew at a rate of five percent in 2013, and is expected to grow by six percent this year. Impressive data, but unless this growth is accompanied by a deeper economic transformation, the continent will face challenges in sustaining it for much longer. If the proceeds of the natural resources boom are not […]

No one knows the exact amount of remittances Africans send home, since not all of it goes through official channels. World Bank figures show that remittances to different regions in Africa hover between one percent and five percent of gross domestic product (GDP), with West Africa receiving around four percent of its GDP in remittances. […]

In recent years, the narrative of a “Africa rising” has been embraced by some and debunked by others. But all agree on what social engineers call “inclusiveness” – the degree to which members of a society share in its prosperity. With it, say the boosters, Africa will rise. Without it, say the skeptics, it cannot. […]

The huge gap between the world’s richest and poorest countries remains one of the great moral dilemmas for the West. It also presents one of the greatest challenges for development economics. Do we really know how to help countries overcome poverty? In his eloquently written and deeply researched new book, Angus Deaton of Princeton University, […]

Last year, a bipartisan group of 23 members of Congress, hosted by the Aspen Institute, travelled to Ethiopia to get a firsthand view of the progress the country was making in modernising agriculture and smallholder farming. This was the largest congressional delegation to visit sub-Saharan Africa in decades – maybe ever. This trip served to […]

Millions of the world’s poorest people face serious water-related challenges – from lack of access and shortages, to disputes over supplies. This has profound implications for security, economic development and environmental sustainability. As world leaders design a development agenda to succeed the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which expire in 2015, addressing these issues should be […]

Soon after the global financial crisis erupted in 2008, I warned that unless the right policies were adopted, Japanese-style malaise – slow growth and near-stagnant incomes for years to come – could set in. While leaders on both sides of the Atlantic claimed that they had learned the lessons of Japan, they promptly proceeded to […]

The roads of our fair city are not only witnessing a revamp as a result of the huge public investment being put into them by the statist ruling elite, but also by the beeping horns of fleets of cars celebrating the marriage of numerous couples. As our fair nation has no strong regulator of noise […]

I was recently engaged in a detailed conversation about the establishment of family and having children with a newly married friend of mine. I have had similar talks with many of my friends before, but this one was unique in that our debate involved macro issues. It is not the debate that left me bewildered, […]

With only a year to go until the next national election, the upper circle of our fair nation is witnessing a kind of uneasiness. Both the ruling and opposition parties are adjusting their kitchen in some way. No doubt that declarations of making the next election free, fair and democratic will soon fill the air. […]

In some sense, we Ethiopians seem to live in the same way that our Aksumite ancestors used to. Consider risk taking, for instance. Traders involved in the bartering of the time were so sensitive to risks that they used to hedge it by leaving a risk margin within the very commodity under exchange. After the […]

It was only last week that I found the time to visit the newly opened grand mall around Megenagna – dubbed Zefmesh Grand Mall. The word ‘grand’ seems to rightly capture the sense that I felt when entering the Mall. I doubt whether there is another shopping centre as grand as this one in our […]

Since coming to power in 1991, the ruling elite have been testing their spatially differentiated development strategies. As a result, we have been witnessing easily discernible development gaps between rural and urban areas. Until 2005, the elite had no specified urban development strategy.  Their approach was rather shaped by the centre-periphery dependency theory. If one […]

I am not so much into drama television series. My experiences with 24, starring Kiefer Sutherland, and Mad Men, starring Jon Hamm, were not so thought-provoking. I would not deny, however, that I was amused by the story-telling ability ofHollywoodscreenwriters. I was, however, equally biased by my implicit objection of having Americanism thrust throughout the […]

My experience at two recently inaugurated international hotels in our fair nation left me with a sense of anger, confusion and hopelessness. It even pushed me to browse through the archive of my memory to look for some kind of trend and reach some sort of conclusion. The trend I discovered, I found a little […]

Amongst the stories that I was told during my childhood, the most memorable one was about the struggle my dad had to pass through to make his own way in life in Addis Abeba. My dad migrated to Addis Abeba when he was 16 years old. As he had an elder brother who had an […]

There can be no experience more shocking than watching fellow humans being abused and tortured to death. It only takes being human to understand the cruelty of the doer, when an action entails the suffering of another able person. But that is was what happened last week inSaudi Arabia. Illegal migrants who were not able […]

We seem to live in a society whose stories are filled with antagonism and rivalry. Its heroes are those who had the essential rage and cruelty to kill as many of their fellow human beings as possible, under the guise of a struggle for power. Our history books are deprived of leaders with the wisdom […]

Our statist mentality seems to have provided us with comfort, even if the very fundamentals of our economic system are experiencing serious problems. We seem to find it okay harbouring ourselves under the creditor of the last resort – the state. But the reality seems to contradict with our very comfort. Ever since the global […]

It was while ago, as a fourth grade student that I got the chance to see the largest river of our fair nation, the Blue Nile, locally known as Abay. I still remember the sentiment I felt when I was told that we had reached Abay. We needed to cross the river to reach our […]

Last week, I saw the funniest thing I could ever imagine. I was not, however, attending one of the stand-up comedy shows frequently being hosted at the five-star hotels in our fair city. Rather, I was glued to my television set, watching the news on ETV. The correspondent seemed to be so excited and energetic. […]