ADDIS ABABA – Ethiopia has secured more than 152.7 million US dollars from manufacturing products’ made in its industrial parks (IPs).
The revenue was generated from exports made in the first nine months of the current 2021/22 fiscal year, said Sandokan Debebe, CEO of the Industrial Park Development Corporation (IPDC).
The revenue, the Corporation said, has shown a 29% jump as compared to the same months of the previous fiscal year.
In the same period, the IPs also supplied products worth $113.5 million to the local market in support of the government’s import substitution push and cut foreign currency spending.
The figure is 8.5 million dollars short of the $122 million target officials set for the reported period.
Apart from generating revenues, Sandokan said factories inside the IPs also created more than 44,000 new jobs.
Nearly 38,000 or 80 percent of the newly hired workers are women, said the manager of government’s Industrial Parks.
In the nine-month period, the Corporation also faced several challenges that affected both its efforts to bring in new investors and the manufacturing process in the IPs.
Electric power outages, issues related to compensation and demarcation in IP development sites, insecurity and the ban from AGOA trade deal were among those its officials mentioned.
Most of them are now easing, said Sandokan, helping the interest to invest in the IPs is also picking up now.
IPDC’s CEO Sandokan said the measures taken to withstand the possible impact of the ban from AGOA resulted in positive outcome.
And, therefore, “no manufacturing company has stopped production due to AGOA for the past nine months,” confirmed the CEO.
The IPDC manages twelve industrial parks across Ethiopia, hosting manufacturing companies from a range of countries across the world, and another one is currently under construction.
