For decades Ethiopia’s financial sector was defined by costly and risky cash and cheque based transactions. So when the National Payment System (NPS), which was supposed to clear and settle payments electronically, was launched in June 2011, it was seen as a transition to modernity.
The number of African billionaires in the Forbes richest people list of 2014 has surged to 29 from only two a decade ago, in 2003. The two people listed then were both from South Africa and its has been growing diversified and reached 20 last year.
At a time when the government is only left with a year and half to fulfil its export targets set in the Growth and Transformation Plan (GTP), the textile sub-sector, the third largest manufacturing industry in the country in terms of value addition after food processing and beverage and the leather sub sectors, registered another dissatisfactory export performance in the last six months of the current fiscal year. The nation’s six month export revenue released by the Ministry of Trade (MoT) last February revealed that textile companies operating in the country exported only USD57.5million worth of garments and textiles. This has increased the combined export revenue from the sub sector to USD301.9 since the launching of GTP.
Recently it has been common to see a long queue of vehicles around petrol stations in Addis Ababa searching for fuel, particularly gasoline, commonly known as ‘benzene’. People including taxi drivers and other private vehicle owners run here and there filling up their tanks if they get lucky. The lineups near the stations have exacerbated the high traffic jams that are already annoying people throughout the city.
“We could see her do something special in anything from 1,500m to 10,000m, but certainly in the 5,000m,” the legendary British athlete Paula Radcliff, commented on BBC sport, about Genzebe Dibaba, after she broke three world records within 15 days, last February.
For Americans, the beginning of 2014 marked the launch of a new healthcare system popularly known as “Obamacare”. This health insurance coverage is expected to cut the number of uninsured in half, or about 25 million people, in the next 10 years. Under the much publicized scheme, the US government plans to reshape the healthcare system by allowing as many as seven million people to buy insurance and 8.7 million new beneficiaries to enroll in 2014 alone.
Many Ethiopian migrants, who send money for their relatives and families from abroad, previously paid an average of 12 Pct of the remitted amount for the money transferring agents. Sending remittances to Ethiopia, which is one of the top 10 remittance receiving countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, has been costly though the amount varies depending on the remitted amount, the service chosen and the destination. The cost of a money transfer for an average transaction in Ethiopia ranges from as low as around 1 Pct to a maximum of 20 Pct of the amount remitted. The most expensive are the services of global money transferring companies.
When African leaders met to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) in Addis Ababa last year, their hope was that years of conflicts and poverty would soon be over. A year later, a galaxy of African heads of state joined last month during the 22nd African Union (AU) Summit in Addis Ababa to push forward a great leap towards the pan-African quest for economic growth and unity through “Agenda 2063”, a hopeful blueprint for a socio-economic and political transformation of the continent.
The world’s 85 richest people own the same amount of wealth as the bottom 3.5 billion, Oxfam revealed in a new report released January 20th, before the opening of the 2014 Davos World Economic Forum. These 85 people have USD 1.7 trillion, similar to the wealth of the bottom half of the world’s population.
Jafar Shifa owns a book store and it keeps him constantly busy. At Jafar Bookstore located at the back of the Ethiopian National Theater, on Ras Abebe Aregay St. in Addis Ababa, he distributes books for retailers and street book venders and also sells to individual customers. Though he started the business by selling books on the streets a decade ago, now he has one of the biggest book stores in the city and “business is very good” for him. He even struggled to find a few minutes to talk to EBR and requested humbly to be called after 9:00pm, when the hectic business hours ended.
Ethiopian Business Review