Ethiopia committed to further strengthening ties with China: top official

Addis Ababa, March 11, 2021 (FBC) -The Ethiopian government is committed to further strengthening cooperation with China, a senior Ethiopian government official has said.

China and Ethiopia have forged close socio-economic and investment cooperation for more than 50 years, and the partnership is expected to flourish in the years ahead, Yasmin Wohabrebbi, Ethiopia’s state minister of finance, said in a recent interview with Xinhua.

“China’s positive engagement in our two countries’ relations is evident in terms of financing large-scale infrastructure projects in Ethiopia, which include road, energy, and railway projects such as the Addis Ababa-Djibouti Standard Gauge Railway,” she said.

The state minister also emphasized the two countries’ ever-growing cooperation in trade and investment.

She stressed that the Ethiopian Ministry of Finance is undertaking various initiatives to strengthen strategic cooperation between the two sides, emphasizing that the ministry will further boost its efforts to elevate the ties between the two countries.

“The partnership between Ethiopia and China is, in particular, expected to deepen in line with China’s massive potential and role in the implementation and realization of Ethiopia’s recently endorsed 10-year development plan,” she said.

The East African country recently endorsed a 10-year development plan, in which the manufacturing industry took the lion’s share.

As Ethiopia aims to become the hub of light manufacturing in Africa in the foreseeable future, China’s engagement can help a lot.

According to recent figures from the Ethiopian Investment Commission (EIC), Chinese companies, with close to 1,564 projects that were either operational or under implementation during the past two decades, are the top players in Ethiopia’s investment landscape both in terms of the number of projects and the financial capital.

From the 1,564 Chinese investment projects in the nation, 987 of the projects are in operational phase, 186 are under the implementation phase, while the remaining 391 are in pre-implementation phase, it was noted.

Out of all the Chinese projects, 1,133 of them are in the manufacturing sector, which is a major priority investment area by the Ethiopian government, according to the EIC.