Ireland provided more than 5.1 billion birr for development programs in Ethiopia between 2014 and 2019, and its ambassador said in July 2019 that Dublin would keep supporting social protection and humanitarian work, the state Ethiopian News Agency reported in a story published on ReliefWeb. “For Ireland this is our biggest development cooperation partnership in the world,” Ambassador Sonja Hyland said.
Hyland said Ireland’s six-year strategic plan for Ethiopia, which was ending in 2019, was worth about 5 billion birr, or 160 million euros. The main areas were social protection, especially the Productive Safety Net Programme, which supports poor rural households, along with maternal and infant health, governance, gender and rural agriculture.
She said maternal deaths in Ethiopia had fallen by more than half over the previous 15 years, though the rate remained high. “The ability for women to make decisions about how many children to have, to get good prenatal and postnatal care, and have healthy children right from birth and has been incredibly important achievement,” she said.
Ireland also backed the political opening ahead of the 2020 national elections. Around the same time it signed an agreement to give 700,000 euros, about 23 million birr, to the National Electoral Board of Ethiopia through the UN Development Programme’s Supporting Elections for Ethiopia’s Democracy Strengthening project, The Reporter said. “We really want to support the National Electoral Board of Ethiopia to deliver on their priority and to deliver in large and complex agenda to try and make sure elections in Ethiopia are fully free, fair and transparent,” Hyland told the news agency. She said Ireland was also interested in helping parliament hold the executive to account.
Hyland compared Ethiopia’s economic plans to Ireland’s own experience. “Like Ethiopia now, we had a lot of monopoly in energy, financial services, insurance, and monopolies in telecoms and all of those we had to break up and put in well regulated environments and competitions,” she said. Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar visited Ethiopia in January 2019 and held talks with Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed and President Sahle-Work Zewde.