Industrial Parks Development Corporation said a right of way is challenging industrial parks and their operation. As the corporation said mostly city administrations are not available to fulfill their responsibilities in protecting boundary of industrial parks.
Behaylu Kebede, Marketing and Communication head of the corporation told Capital that even if the corporation is trying to have different dialogues with city administrations to solve the problems there is no concrete result on the issue, and some of the cases have been taken to the court. ICT, Bole lemi, Dire Dawa, and Adama industrial parks are some which are suffering by the cases.
As Behaylu said the case of right of way is limiting investors from building internationally qualified industries, and in some cases there has been also interruptions of operations in the industrial parks due to security issues as a result of right of way cases. The corporation is also closely working with the society to solve the problem and also in creating awareness as the parks is important for the society.
Beside right of way, Behaylu said the city administrations are not cooperating with the corporation in building basic infrastructure around industrial parks, which is making it harder in the operation of the parks.
Furthermore, the corporation has said in its program that in order to build housing for employees based in industrial parks is not receiving full support from the city administrations as it was planned. “The corporation wants the city administrations to consider industrial park employees in their housing scheme programs, whereas most of the administrations are not willing to do so,” it expressed.
The corporation said that in order to solve the housing problem that employees are facing and to increase efficiency of their production there are three options, that is: by facilitating bank loan for those who have land around industrial parks and build houses that can be affordable for employees, secondly, by giving land for the investors to build dorm kind of houses for their workers and lastly by working with private developers.
Recently, the Corporation had inked an agreement with Corner-Stone Housing Development Group to build housing for its employees based in Hawassa Industrial Park.
Housing shortage is regularly cited as one of the main constraints of work force recruitment and retention in the IPs. The Industrial Parks Development Corporation (IPDC) and Ethiopian Investment Commission (EIC) have initiated various initiatives to tackle this affordable housing shortage for IP workers.
Currently, there are more than 83,700 employees working at 13 industrial parks, and in 2020/21 budget year the industrial parks have created job for 56,236 employees.
In the 2020/21 completed budget year, the corporation had raised 247.9 million dollar revenue from the planned 400 million dollar, and as the corporation said, slowdown in export as result of Covid-19, and the complete closure of Mekelle industrial park during the law enforcement had raised as some difficulties in the budget year.
The public enterprise, manages 13 industrial parks including: Mekelle, Semera, Bahir-Dar, Kombolcha, Debre Birhan, Dire Dawa, Kilinto, Bole lemi, Adama, Jimma, and Hawassa industrial parks
In the coming 20 years the corporation is planning to increase the number of industrial parks to 100, however, the corporation has no plans to build new parks for the 2021/22 budget year.