Ethiopia reveals the first ever national entrepreneurship strategy plan in order to drive more employment opportunities for the coming years focusing on supporting entrepreneurs in small and medium enterprises.
The strategy which is said to be formulated based on international best practices is tested by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) which has partnered with UNIDO.
The strategy will be implemented in the coming five years, and should create more than 40 million job opportunities
The National Entrepreneurship Strategy covers three cross-cutting areas in the rural-urban linkage, women and youth entrepreneurship, and green economy.
“The aim of the strategy is to capitalize synergies among the different policy, strategy and programmatic initiatives that are underway in the country as well as identify and addressing gaps in various policies while providing guidance in creating an enabling environment for the development of entrepreneurship,” said Aurelia Patriza representative of UNIDO.
Productive work for youth and women through medium and small enterprise in the country is underway with funding from Austria, Canada, and Italy which has also a stake in formulating the national strategy.
The federal small and medium manufacturing industry promotion authority, which was established two years ago is responsible for the harmonization of the initiatives in the field of entrepreneurship and supervision of the strategy implementation at both national and regional level.
Asfaw Abebe, Director-General of the Federal Small and Medium Manufacturing Industry Promotion Authority, vow to provide technology, finance, and capacity building in the manufacturing sector, urged all actors, including the private sector, to help potential youth, women and farmer entrepreneurs.
“This strategic document is very instrumental in improving the entrepreneurial eco system of the country towards its goal of becoming a middle income country by 2025 with the significant role that media plays in achieving the goal, said Teka Gebre Yesus, State Minister of Trade and Industry.
The Jobs Creation Commissioner Ephrem Tekle said the country plans to create over 3 million jobs in the 2012 Ethiopian fiscal year in order to combat growing unemployment and realize its vision of poverty reduction.
According to the commission, Ethiopia has more than 10 million unemployed citizens, meeting only less than 33 percent of the prevailing unemployment number.
The strategy has detailed action plan for implementation that can be evaluated every year.