Why Ethiopia Has an Electronics Shortage and a Growing E-Waste Crisis at the Same Time

Walk through Merkato in Addis Ababa, and you will find two things that should not coexist. Shoppers hunting for a working secondhand phone because new stock is scarce, and a few alleys over, piles of dead electronics being picked apart by hand. Ethiopia is short on devices and drowning in the waste they leave behind. That is not a contradiction. It is the result of a broken supply chain that nobody in the country fully controls.

The scale of the problem

Ethiopia generated close to 88 million kilograms of e-waste in 2022, the highest volume in East Africa, according to the UN's Global E-waste Monitor 2024. That report also found that Africa as a continent formally collects and recycles less than 1 percent of the e-waste it produces, the lowest rate of any region on earth. Globally, the picture is not much better. The world generated 62 billion kilograms of e-waste in 2022, a figure on track to hit 82 billion kilograms by 2030, and only 22.3 percent of it was properly recycled.

Ethiopia's wider waste system is just as strained. The country produces over 6 million tons of municipal solid waste yearly, expected to hit 10 million tons by 2030. Only about 40 percent gets collected at all, and just 4 percent is recycled in any form. E-waste, buried inside that stream, gets almost none of it back.

The paradox, explained

A forex crunch that throttles new imports. Ethiopia's National Bank has spent years rationing foreign currency, and in 2022 froze letters of credit for 38 categories of goods to protect reserves for essentials. By 2024, total reserves sat around $3.78 billion, covering under two months of imports, below the recommended safety margin. Importers of new electronics often wait months for currency allocation. That scarcity does not kill demand. It redirects it toward secondhand devices, which are cheaper and often already close to the end of their working life when they arrive.

Repair culture keeps devices alive, then kills them for good. A 2025 lifecycle study from Adama Science and Technology University and KU Leuven found Ethiopian electronics outlast comparable devices in reference countries, averaging 12.0 years for LCD TVs, 11.0 for monitors, 10.7 for laptops, and 6.4 for smartphones, largely due to local repair and reuse. That sounds like good sustainability news, and partly it is. But it also means devices get patched together well past the point of clean disassembly. When they finally fail, they are harder to recycle and more likely to be scrapped by hand.

There is almost nowhere for a dead device to go. Ethiopia has no functioning formal e-waste collection network to speak of. A 2018 hazardous-waste law, Proclamation No. 1090, exists on paper but is barely enforced. Instead, a study of workers in Merkato's Addis Ketema sub-city found the sector runs on informal scavengers, known locally as Qorales, alongside unregistered dismantlers and sellers, with 92 percent of dismantlers showing poor awareness of the health risks in their own work. This is where the shortage and the surplus meet. Broken devices do not disappear when new ones are scarce. They accumulate, get stripped for resalable parts by hand, and the unusable remainder is dumped or burned.

The Human Cost

The consequences are measurable in blood, not just kilograms. Pure Earth, a nonprofit working on pollution in Ethiopia, documented roughly 1,600 informal battery recycling workshops across Addis Ababa alone, most without protective equipment, often inside or beside family homes. Reporting from one such site in Lideta described workers carrying lead dust home on their skin, exposing children who greet them at the door. A recent public health review found soil lead levels in parts of Addis Ababa exceeding 100 mg/kg, comparable to industrial contamination zones elsewhere. Unsound recycling can release close to 1,000 different chemicals into the environment, lead chief among them, a metal with no safe exposure level for children.

What comes next

None of this points to a single villain. It points to a pipeline with holes at every stage: import policy that limits new devices without expanding disposal capacity, a secondhand market that fills the gap with electronics nearing the end of their life, a repair culture that delays the problem instead of solving it, and a legal framework never resourced to work. Ethiopia's Ministry of Innovation and Technology has begun researching metal extraction from e-waste with South African universities, and Pure Earth is now coordinating with a new National Lead Coordinating Committee. Whether that turns into functioning collection points and licensed recyclers, rather than more workshops in Merkato, will decide if the problem keeps growing quietly or finally gets addressed in the open.