Northeast African Studies

Development and Social Inequality: The Case Foreign Direct Investment in Ethiopia

2025-01-08T09:25:12-05:00

Over the period from 2004 to 2018, Ethiopia was among the fastest growing non-oil producing economies in Africa, and had one of the highest growth rates globally of nearly 10 percent per year.[i] The Ethiopian government, led by the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) from 1991 to 2018, made ambitious plans for transforming the Ethiopian economy through the help of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI), aiming at making Ethiopia a middle income country within 2025. Following the political transformation in 2018, these ambitions were carried on by a new political leadership in the country, by prime minister Abiy Ahmed and the Prosperity Party. In its ten-year development plan (2020-2030) it clearly stated the value of the promotion of quality foreign direct investment not just for the inflow of foreign currencies but also for technological transfer and creation of job opportunities.

[i] https://www.worldbank.org/en/country/ethiopia/overview

A Continuum of Choices and Constraints: Women’s Everyday Working Lives and Sense of Agency in the Ethiopian Garment Industry

2024-06-18T10:10:46-04:00

This study critically engages with the assumption that factory jobs will benefit both women themselves and overall development in Ethiopia, whose industrial policy is dedicated to labor-intensive light manufacturing. Drawing on fieldwork data collected in and around an export-oriented garment factory, it delves into the impact of women’s employment on their intra-household decision-making power, agency, and well-being. By taking a feminist political economy approach centered on the dynamics of social reproduction in the everyday, the findings add nuance to mainstream policy discourses by showing that despite miserable working conditions, different kinds of agency emerge and are mediated by gender norms and various worker identities beyond the factory floor.

Labour Rights Abuses as the Cold Currents of Economic Globalization in Multinational Apparel Exporting Firms in Ethiopia

2024-06-18T12:25:12-04:00

In the current context of economic globalization, global apparel brands monopolize the decision-making process during price and lead time negotiations by putting cost and time pressures on their supplier factories in late-industrializing countries, such as Ethiopia. However, scholarship on the implications of the hypercompetitive nature of the global apparel transaction on the labour rights of local industrial workers is rare. Hence, this article argues that global brand-motivated low prices and shortened schedules for production and delivery of goods to high street retail stores have contributed to labour rights abuses. The finding revealed that global brand buyers put downward price and time pressures against the apparel-supplying firms under enquiry. These pressures, in turn, squeezed each employing firm to compromise the minimum labour standards of the local industrial workers. Brands' poor planning and delayed payments also contributed to the persistent poverty wages, highly suppressive labour practices, denial of associational rights, and violations of overtime and occupational safety and health standards by the individual exporting firms. Unless tangible measures towards viable global economic governance exist, existing corporate-led labour compliance management mechanisms of the global apparel brands and individual supplying factories will further deteriorate the country's fragile labour rights context, particularly in those multinational apparel exporting industrial sites

Gendered Employment and Feminization of Migration in the Garment Manufacturing Industry in Ethiopia

2024-06-24T18:26:59-04:00

“The production lines in the factory are a showcase of biher biheresaboch (nations and nationalities)…giggles… They are full of female workers . Of the fifteen of us working in one finishing line, some are from southern region, some are Amharas, Oromos and there is a Garage and a Tigrean as well. You can hardly find someone who is originally from Addis Ababa as most workers in the industrial park are metes (migrants). Stepping onto the service bus ferrying workers to and from the factories, one is greeted by a symphony of languages.” ( FGD, 11 Oct 2023, Addis Ababa)

Abstract

The FGD excerpt above aptly captures two key characteristic features of the garment manufacturing industry in contemporary Ethiopia, namely; the female face of the industry, and the migrant background of workers. Despite the significant presence of female migrant workers in the textile and garment manufacturing industry in Ethiopia, there is an observable gap of research examining the gendered industrial jobs and labour migration associated to the sector. By drawing on the lived experiences of female migrant workers in Bole lemi industrial park, the paper expounds how the interplay of various factors account for the gendered labor patterns existing in the industry. The paper examines how multitudes of structural factors ranging from labor demand, policy regime, to sociocultural factors come into play in shaping the gendered employment pattern and migration trajectories of female migrant workers employed in the industry.

Agency and Upgrading in Ethiopia’s Global Production Networks

2024-06-22T20:50:10-04:00

Ethiopia’s quest for export-led industrialization through manufacturing is seen by many development economists as a test case for the larger potential of African countries to benefit from global value chains. In recent years this quest has run into difficulties, prompting other scholars to question the social and economic advantages of this strategy. This article takes a novel approach to this question by examining the rise and fall of one prominent international investment that failed, namely the Turkish textile/apparel firm Ayka Addis. It does so through the lens of agency in global production networks (GPNs), arguing that a multi-stranded understanding of the constraints and opportunities faced by different actors related to the case can shed light on possibilities for economic and social upgrading. Drawing on interviews with these actors, as well as on multiple primary and secondary written sources, it finds a variety of complex and overlapping levels of agency between and within actors such as the government, consumers, the main buyer, the firm management itself, and workers. An initial alignment in goals increased the agency of many of these actors, putting the GPN on the path to social upgrading. But economic upgrading was more difficult to achieve, especially when key actors’ ambitions began to diverge in later years. The responsibility to create durable value chains is diffuse, and no one party can be blamed entirely for Ayka’s failure. Nor can GPN actors “parcel up” the work required: just as economic actors such as firms must increasingly work to ensure worker wellbeing and social upgrading, actors concerned with social progress must also concern themselves with economic sustainability.

Does investor origin matter? The multidimensional wellbeing and mental health of female workers in foreign-owned flower farms and apparel factories in Ethiopia

2024-06-19T22:09:26-04:00

Investors from various origins in FDI employ a large number of female workers in Ethiopia, but one of the areas whether there is lack of research is the wellbeing consequences of such jobs and whether these are uniform across investors from various origins. To address this gap, this study examined how investor origin is associated with the multidimensional wellbeing and mental health of female workers using survey data on 2515 workers employed in foreign-owned flower and apparel sectors in Ethiopia. The investor’s origins are classified in the study into those who come from OECD or non-OECD countries. Our findings revealed investor origin was not associated with the multidimensional wellbeing and mental health of female workers. This suggests that investors from both OECD and non-OECD countries, despite differing Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) practices, still operate within Global Value Chains that homogenize production systems and working conditions across various investors. This study has also uncovered other crucial findings: Having adequate income for daily sustenance was strongly and positively associated with worker multidimensional wellbeing and mental health. Besides, having larger financial social support network and higher education levels were associated with better workers’ multidimensional wellbeing whereas longer years of work in a farm or a firm and frequent migration were negatively associated with their mental health. These findings raise a policy dilemma regarding worker wellbeing in FDI industries reliant on cheap labour.