Ethiopia will send 50,000 workers to the United Arab Emirates in the 2019/2020 fiscal year and is discussing sending 200,000 over three years, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed told parliament in Addis Ababa on Monday, 8 July 2019, as part of what he called short-term measures against unemployment.
“Ethiopia is planning short-term measures to reduce unemployment in Ethiopia and to cope with the increasing job demands of our people,” he said, according to AFP. “One of these short-term programmes is sending our skilled labour to foreign countries.”
The workers would be trained in fields including driving and nursing, would earn higher wages and would “boost their capacity”, Abiy Ahmed said. He said similar agreements were being discussed with Japan and with European countries, and argued that a young workforce trained abroad would help the economy.
The plan reflected the UAE’s growing weight in the Horn of Africa. Abu Dhabi had helped Saudi Arabia broker the 2018 peace between Ethiopia and Eritrea and in 2018 pledged $3 billion in aid and investment to Ethiopia. AFP noted that the Gulf states’ interest in eastern Africa had grown as they fought Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen.
The Gulf is a familiar destination for Ethiopian job seekers, and a painful one. Ethiopia banned its citizens from travelling to the Middle East for domestic work in October 2013 after reports of abuse and complaints that agencies were luring people into illegal and appalling conditions. The International Labour Organization counted about 460,000 Ethiopian workers in the Middle East that year, Arab News reported. The ban was lifted in early 2018 after parliament passed a new overseas employment law that regulates recruitment agencies and bars deployment to countries without a bilateral labour agreement, workers under 18 and those without a certificate of occupational competence.
By late 2018 Ethiopia had binding labour agreements with Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Jordan, which oblige host countries to protect workers’ safety, dignity and rights, the Ethiopian News Agency reported. The announcement in parliament did not say how many of the 50,000 would go into skilled trades rather than domestic work, or how the UAE scheme would protect them.
Sources: The Business Times (AFP), Horn Diplomat (AFP), Arab News (AFP, 2018), Völkerrechtsblog, Ethiopian News Agency (2018)