Cognizant of the merits of digitization to create more decent jobs and become globally competitive, Ethiopia invites Chinese companies to invest more in the digital economy, especially in the building of cloud data centres in Ethiopia, Yeshurun Alemayehu, State Minister of Innovation and Technology said.
He told Xinhua that the government of Ethiopia has significantly improved the legislative level of the digital economy, including the cyber-security law, law against unfair competition and e-commerce, providing a legal basis for digital governance in Ethiopia.
He said the digital economy in Ethiopia is nascent, but if guided by appropriate policies and strategies, it will have an immense potential to trigger productivity in all sectors of the economy.
"The Chinese are a digitized society and they can get all services just with one sign-in. They do not interact without digital technologies. So, there is a need to draw lessons from China to create a digitized society," said Alemayehu, adding Ethiopia uses China as a benchmark to make its big population a digitized one to promote national development.
Ethiopia can draw from China's digital transformation, including strong political commitment, exploitation of indigenous knowledge and local capacity, to advance digitization in the East African country, Alemayehu’s colleague, Abiyot Bayou, a senior adviser at the Ministry said.
"China invested a lot at the grassroots level and that helped the nation make a breakthrough in digital economy development and become globally competitive, especially in e-commerce. Like China did, Ethiopia should integrate ICT and its social and economic development plans," he suggested.
According to the adviser, the number of data users in Ethiopia has reached 35 million from 17.5 million three years ago as the cost to use digital technology has declined to 3.3 percent of monthly income in 2024 from 9.5 percent in 2020.
The East African country "Digital Ethiopia 2025," a new strategy aims to issue 70 million digital IDs, triple digital payment which currently stands at 1.2 trillion birr (about 21.15 billion U.S. dollars) per year and increase interactions among government, private sector and citizens by 2025.
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