Ethiopia's Industrialization Needs Human Development: UNDP Report 2018

Addis Ababa December 12/2018 Ethiopia’s industrialization needs to have human development as its primary end goal to achieve sustainable outcome, according to Ethiopia Human Development Report 2018. Speaking at the launching of the Ethiopia Human Development Report 2018 today, UN Resident Coordinator Aeneas Chuma said the report deliberately chose the theme industrialization in line with the country’s ambition of becoming the major hub of light manufacturing industry in the continent. This objective is central to Ethiopia’s ambition of becoming a lower middle income and carbon neutral country by 2025 and fundamentally a drive for promoting sustainable human development, he pointed out. Chuma highlighted that the benefit and cost of industrialization process in Ethiopia must be managed for inclusive growth and keep human development as the primer goal. According to the coordinator, the government needs to invest in the removal to barriers to gender equality and women’s empowerment as women’s participation and leadership is also critical outcome of industrialization process. “We need to leverage innovation in industrial parks and harness new approaches such as establishing innovation labs to re-design public service delivery, drawing on data revolution to implement and monitor both the national and international development commitments,” he elaborate. Chuma further noted that Ethiopia has sustained strong progress in the last 15 years if you look at the global human development reports over the years. The Ethiopia Human Development Report 2018 states that overall human development trends in Ethiopia have shown improvement in recent years. The human development index (HDI) increased from 0.283 in 2000 to 0.448 in 2015. This puts Ethiopia at a rank of 174 out of 188 countries.