Loline's Year in Review: Ethiopia's Business and Tech Breakthroughs in 2018 E.C.

Ethiopia's 2018 E.C. did not move in one direction. It moved in five at once. Tech built a national identity system from near scratch. Finance cracked open doors sealed since the 1970s. Infrastructure switched on the biggest hydropower plant Africa has ever built. Diplomacy pulled Ethiopia into rooms it has never sat in before. And trade got hit by a war eight thousand kilometers away. Here is the year, sector by sector, with a source behind every number.

Tech

Fayda, Ethiopia's national digital ID, is the single biggest tech story of the year. At the start of 2018 E.C., enrollment stood around 16.9 million people. By late August it had rocketed to 49.1 million, nearly tripling in under a year and putting the government's 90 million target within reach. That growth ran on 12,000 biometric registration kits deployed nationwide, feeding a system now integrated with 150 separate agencies and responsible for more than 194 million digital identity checks to date. Ethio Telecom did the heavy lifting on the ground, single handedly registering 69 percent of everyone enrolled, more than 20 million people in this fiscal year alone. Fayda is now mandatory for opening a bank account and, starting this year, for enrolling a child in school, with kids as young as five issued biometric IDs that replace paper birth certificates outright.

Artificial intelligence moved from policy paper to physical infrastructure. In February, the government inaugurated the AI UniPod in Addis Ababa, a research and innovation facility built with UNDP and Addis Ababa University to nurture homegrown AI talent rather than import it. The bigger signal came in April, when Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed was appointed the African Union's Champion for Artificial Intelligence and Digital Health, a continental role that puts Ethiopia at the center of how Africa governs AI going forward. Ethiopia also became a founding member of the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization, signing on alongside 29 other countries at a Shanghai summit, placing the country in the same room as the world's largest AI powers rather than watching from outside.

The telecom sector had its own tech breakthrough disguised as a subscriber war. Safaricom Ethiopia's 90 day active customer base hit 14.7 million by June, up 46 percent year on year, while M-Pesa's active users more than doubled to 5.2 million. Ethio Telecom answered by restricting Safaricom's M-Pesa app on its own network, a defensive move that regional bank executives cited directly when explaining why they are moving cautiously in Ethiopia. Telebirr, the incumbent, still commands 58.61 million subscriptions, a scale gap that is going to take years to close no matter how fast the challenger grows.

Business and Finance

Gold quietly became bigger than coffee, and almost nobody outside Ethiopia noticed. Gold export earnings hit 3.5 billion dollars in fiscal 2024/25, overtaking coffee as the country's single largest export earner for the first time in its history. Production tells the real story: output jumped from 3.9 tons to 38.87 tons in a single year, a tenfold leap, while the price of a gram of 24 karat gold climbed from 3,901 birr to 20,607 birr between January 2024 and October 2025. Oddly, a Ministry of Mines report found that artisanal miners with pans and shovels are still outproducing the large industrial operations backed by foreign capital.

Then came the biggest single deal of the year. Chinese mining conglomerate Zijin agreed to acquire Allied Gold for roughly 4 billion dollars, with the centerpiece being the Kurmuk gold project in Benishangul-Gumuz, a site projected to produce more than 240,000 ounces annually over its first decade. The Egyptian firm that once held a stake in the project is walking away with roughly 375 million dollars from the sale.

Banking finally cracked open. On November 28, 2025, Standard Bank Group became the first foreign financial institution re-licensed under Ethiopia's amended Banking Business Proclamation, the first real dent in a wall that has stood since the 1970s nationalizations. Kenya's KCB Group, East Africa's largest bank by assets, has narrowed its search to a single Ethiopian acquisition target and is racing to close before year end, even as foreign ownership stays capped at 40 percent. Domestic banks are cashing in on the moment regardless. Across the sector, total assets grew 44.5 percent to 4.7 trillion birr, and net profit after tax rose 61.3 percent to 93.4 billion birr, the highest annual profit the industry has ever posted.

Ethiopia's stock market had its first real year of headlines. In May, Ethio Telecom officially listed on the Ethiopian Securities Exchange after a public offering that drew more than 47,000 investors, the first time a major state enterprise has gone public in the country's history. Exchange leadership says the listing pipeline now holds more than 70 companies considering going public.

Infrastructure

The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam is the infrastructure story of the decade, not just the year. On September 9, 2025, right at the start of 2018 E.C., Ethiopia inaugurated GERD at its full installed capacity of 5,150 megawatts, more than doubling the country's prior electricity generation capacity in a single project. The dam is expected to produce 15.76 terawatt hours annually, enough to meaningfully extend power access to a population where more than half still lack it. The project cost roughly 5 billion dollars, financed largely by Ethiopians themselves through bonds and public contributions rather than foreign debt.

That new power supply is already feeding a genuinely unusual transport bet. Ethiopia remains the only country in the world that bans the import of new gasoline and diesel vehicles, and by late 2025 roughly 115,000 electric vehicles were on Ethiopian roads, about 8.3 percent of the national fleet. EV owners now spend around 4 dollars a month charging their cars, against roughly 27 dollars a month for gasoline before the ban took hold.

Addis Ababa itself kept rebuilding its own skeleton. The Corridor Development Project's second phase spans 132 kilometers from Kazanchis to Estifanos, rebuilding roads, bike lanes, and pedestrian walkways across the capital under a three billion birr contract. One completed segment, the International Convention Center-Goro-VIP Corridor, spans a 290 hectare area with a 12.74 kilometer corridor and over 15 kilometers of dedicated bike and pedestrian lanes, directly connecting Bole International Airport to CMC Road.

International Stage

Ethiopia spent 2018 E.C. actively rewriting its place in the global system. Its accession to BRICS, finalized in January 2024, produced its first full year of visible dividends. In May 2026, Ethiopian Foreign Minister Gedion Timothewos joined the BRICS Ministers of Foreign Affairs Meeting in New Delhi, using the platform to push for reform of global financial governance and to advocate for developing countries inside institutions that have historically excluded them.

The World Trade Organization bid, nearly two decades in the making, hit real momentum. Ethiopia's WTO application has moved through six completed negotiation rounds, addressing more than 1,050 formal questions from member states, with officials targeting accession by 2026 to align with the WTO's ministerial conference.

The IMF relationship became the backbone of the country's entire reform story. Through the fifth review of Ethiopia's Extended Credit Facility, completed on July 1, 2026, the Fund released a further 464 million dollars, bringing total disbursements under the program well past two billion dollars. The same review confirmed an agreement in principle with Eurobond holders, a critical step toward resolving the debt distress Ethiopia fell into after missing a Eurobond interest payment in December 2023.

GERD also kept Ethiopia in an uncomfortable international spotlight. The dam's inauguration drew Egypt's foreign minister to formally call the project a violation of international law before the United Nations Security Council, even as the presidents of Kenya, Djibouti, Somalia, and South Sudan attended the ceremony in a public show of regional solidarity that Egypt notably did not join.

Trade

Coffee still had a record year on paper. Export earnings hit 3 billion dollars in fiscal 2025/26, up from 2.65 billion the year before, pushing total national export revenue past 10.7 billion dollars, a new all time high. But the real trade story of the year was not what Ethiopia sold. It was what it could not buy.

On February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel launched a war against Iran that shut down commercial traffic through the Strait of Hormuz by more than 90 percent, one of the largest disruptions to global oil markets on record. Ethiopia, which sources more than half its fuel from the Gulf, felt it almost immediately. The government introduced fuel rationing, prioritized critical sectors, and ordered non-essential public employees onto leave to cut consumption. Addis Ababa residents reported essential commodity prices rising by nearly 40 percent within weeks of the shortage taking hold.

The damage reached further than gas station lines. Diesel supplies essential for military logistics reportedly fell by half, farmers lost access to fuel for tractors and irrigation pumps at a moment when food inflation was already climbing, and manufacturers running on diesel generators faced production interruptions. Ethiopia normally spends more than 4.2 billion dollars annually importing fuel, almost entirely from Gulf suppliers now caught in the crossfire of a war it had nothing to do with. It is a brutal reminder that a landlocked economy running record coffee and gold exports can still be brought to a standstill by a conflict thousands of kilometers away, over a resource it cannot produce a drop of itself.

The Takeaway

Five sectors, five very different stories, one common thread. Ethiopia spent 2018 E.C. betting on structural change it cannot fully control the outcome of. It built a digital identity system before it had finished building reliable roads to reach everyone with it. It opened its banking sector to foreign capital it still caps tightly. It sold record gold and coffee while a war on the other side of the Red Sea decided whether it could actually fuel a truck to move any of it. The bets are real. So are the risks riding alongside them.