JICA says working in collaboration with Ethiopia in various areas including technology

Addis Ababa, July 21, 2023 (FBC) – Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) is collaborating with Ethiopia in various areas, including agriculture, private sector development, water and sanitation, energy growth and transportation, education and health, among others, Agency Chief Representative in Ethiopia Katsuki Morihara said.

In an exclusive interview with ENA, the Agency chief representative noted that Japan has a long history of development cooperation in Ethiopia with over 50 years covering many sectors.

Many projects have been implemented this fiscal year with an annual budget of about 50 million USD, he said, adding that it has been supporting and strengthening competitiveness and productivity of the manufacturing sector through adopting the Japanese companies philosophy of Kaizen.

JICA has been supporting the then Ethiopian Kaizen Institute and today’s Kaizen Excellence Center. The new headquarters of the center built with about 25 million USD will be soon completed, Morihara revealed.

Noting that digital technology has huge potential in terms of contributing to the improvement of the day-to-day life of the Ethiopian people, he said there are lots of opportunities in Ethiopia to apply digital technologies.

“With digital technology, we may be able to reach out more students as well as teachers to improve their capacity by utilizing digital transformation technologies; and also in the agriculture sector we have seen many developments in adopting the digital technologies. In the health sector, many things can be done with technology.”

Therefore, the whole idea is that we will be able to identify better and more effective ways of addressing social problems by utilizing digital technologies, the chief representative underlined.

Speaking about the recent memorandum of understanding JICA signed to establish a joint working group for the realization of Digital Ethiopia 2025, the chief representative said under the framework of the MoU working groups will be established to discuss in detail what exactly they can do.

JICA is particularly expected to play active role in business eco-system, regulatory frame work, job creation, and capacity development.

With respect to the business eco-system, JICA has been supporting Ministry of Innovation and Technology activities to improve the ecosystem for healthy development and start of companies or entrepreneurs, Morihara added.

Regarding the regulatory frame work and capacity development, he said JAICA will organize training program in Japan for high ranking officials for Ethiopian Communication Authority (ECA) to discuss how Ethiopia can improve the regulatory framework to make it more friendly to private companies like Safricom Ethiopia and others interested in joining the market.

According to him, JICA is going to start pilot phase of digital talent development program together with Safaricom Ethiopia and Sumitomo Corporation and Ministry of Innovation and Technology.

Initially, we are planning to provide training for software engineers and target 15 people in 2023.

“We are hoping to increase the number of beneficiaries to 750 by 2025. And if everything is smooth, we are hoping that we will be able to train as many as 10,000 software engineers by 2030.’’

The agency chief representative finally pointed out that JICA alone or any other company alone can’t achieve those goals.

“So, we need other stakeholder to come in and support these working groups that we are going to establish under the MoU. The MoU is going to be an idea venue to discuss ideas and how to improve things on the ground by inviting others stakeholders.”