Eight years of reform, one default, and a float that stuck
The reform sequence matters more than any single number: liberalization came first in telecoms, then a sovereign default forced the debt question, then the 2024 float and IMF program reset the price system. The timeline below treats positive and negative milestones identically — the default, the collapsed bondholder talks of May 2026, and the GERD inauguration are all the same kind of fact.
The float chart is the single most information-dense reading on reform execution. Before July 2024, the official and parallel rates were two unrelated prices, more than 100% apart; by mid-2026 the gap is roughly 12%. The spread narrowing is shown, not claimed — and it is also not zero.
A farm-heavy economy that imports far more than it sells abroad
Agriculture still produces a third of GDP and employs most of the workforce; manufacturing remains under a twentieth. That structure shapes the trade account: even 2024/25's record $8.3B export year — driven by gold and coffee — covered roughly two-fifths of an import bill dominated by machinery, fuel and food. The deficit is the structural fact of this economy.
One corridor carries most of Ethiopia's external trade
Geography is the investment story: power generation sits in the highlands and the Rift, industrial zones cluster along the single rail-and-road corridor to Djibouti, and the minerals are in the Danakil and the south. Every feature below is encoded by status — solid is operational, hatched is under construction, outline is announced. The map states status; it does not state promise.
Geocoding: only Gad-II is published with exact coordinates in source documentation; all other features are placed at town/zone centroids and flagged as such. Geometry: Natural Earth; alignments simplified. The Bishoftu site appears as an outline against Hawassa's solid marker — a feature's status is always legible at a glance.
A nearly all-renewable grid, still mostly unbuilt
Energy is the cross-cutting variable: it underwrites the industrial, EV and export theses simultaneously. Installed capacity reached 9,752 MW in May 2026 — roughly double seven years earlier, and still a fraction of assessed potential. Two figures from the source document do not survive verification and are excluded below, with reasons.
Six sectors on one schema — no scores, no stars
Fourteen promotional chapters reduce to six comparable profiles. Each card carries the same fields, each figure carries its provenance, and there is deliberately no composite ranking: equal-weight facts let a reader sort by whichever variable matters to them. Comparison is this page's substitute for adjectives.
announced projects, — and one of them is most of it
Explore the full pipeline — projects, filterable, with per-row sources and CSV download →
The instruments, by number and date
Descriptions below are mechanical, not evaluative. Where the source document asserts an incentive without naming its legal instrument, the row is not published until the instrument is identified.
The trust engine
Everything on this page can be traced: a source register by section, the conversion and encoding rules, and a register of corrections applied during digitalization. The verification work behind every figure is documented, and source documentation is available to investors and partners on request.