Ambassador Joachim Schmidt in Ethiopia

There are many different aspects to German-Ethiopian relations. Firstly, Ethiopia is an important partner nation for us when it comes to economic cooperation. Although Ethiopia will remain one of the world’s poorest countries in the near future, it has achieved impressive growth in recent years. Ethiopia is considered one of the most successful countries when it comes to meeting the UN’s Millennium Development Goals. In this context Germany supports Ethiopia particularly in the fields of sustainable land management, education and biodiversity.

However, Ethiopia is also an important partner for us on issues of regional security. It acts as a stabilizing factor in a highly-volatile region. Ethiopia is the main supplier of troops for UN and African Union missions on the continent and plays an important role as a mediator in conflicts like the current civil war in South Sudan.

For Ethiopia, the main focus of our mutual cooperation is clearly on securing German investors for Ethiopia. We are working together on improving the overall economic framework for German investors in the country.

What special ties are there between Ethiopia and Germany and where would you like to intensify relations?

The oldest ties between Germany and Ethiopia take us back several hundred years to 1652, when Ethiopian monk Aba Gregorius visited the court of the Duke of Saxe-Coburg Gotha and worked closely with the scholar Hiob Ludolf. Ever since, Ludolf and Gregorius have been regarded as the founding fathers of Ethiopian Studies, and Germany as the country that gave birth to the discipline.

Official diplomatic relations have existed since 1905, so can we look back on a long, albeit very chequered history of relations between our two countries spanning 110 years. In the first decades of the 20th century, politics does not seem to have been the paramount joint topic; rather, German academics played an important role in archaeological digs and research trips both in the Ethiopian highlands and in the plains. 

The character of relations changed markedly after 1945. Today, it is almost forgotten that Ethiopia was one of the major supporters the fledgling Federal Republic of Germany after the upheavals of the Second World War. The then Emperor of Ethiopia, Haile Selassie, had humanitarian supplies of blankets and coffee sent to Germany when he heard of the suffering of the German population. And in 1954 the Emperor was the first foreign head of state to pay an official visit to the young and not yet fully sovereign Federal Republic of Germany. After the fall of the Communist Mengistu regime in 1991, the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia based its new constitution on the model of German federalism.

We thus have strong ties extending back a long way on which we can base our relations. I would very much like to see us intensify these relations in the economic sphere. One prerequisite for this is that German firms pay greater attention to Ethiopia as a future market. The cliché of a country riddled by civil war and famines is very much out of date. Today, alongside a population of some 96 million, Ethiopia boasts a consistently high rate of economic growth. It is only a matter of time before it emerges as one of the most important markets on the African continent. 

On the other hand, a lot of work remains for the Ethiopian government. In order to attract German investors, the country needs to open up more for investment, simplify the excessive red tape that hampers so many business initiatives, and rectify deficits in the rule of law – above all in investment protection.

Addis Ababa is considered the capital of development cooperation. Why is this? And what players are active in the city?

The fact that the orchestra of international development policy in Addis Ababa is so diverse and has so many voices can be attributed to the interaction of two factors. Firstly, the Ethiopian government pursues a highly ambitious national development strategy with a remarkably high level of expenditure on social sectors like health and education; it is also investing heavily in the country’s infrastructure, above all in the energy supply and in road and railway construction. 

And Ethiopia can boast a number of successes, even if its democratic development is not keeping pace to the same extent. For some years now, economic growth rates have been in the double-digit range; school-enrolment rates have also risen markedly over the last decade. Ethiopia may not meet the Millennium Development Goals in all fields, but the progress it has made in recent decades is nonetheless remarkable.

Secondly, Addis Ababa is the capital of Africa – headquarters of both the African Union and the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA). It is no coincidence that over 35 institutions and UN organizations – e.g. UNICEF and the World Food Programme – have offices in Ethiopia. German development cooperation organizations such as GIZ and the KfW Development Bank, which liaise with Ethiopia and the AU on behalf of the German government or other donors, can also boast impressive figures: over members of 650 staff – 530 of them German?? employees – work for GIZ and KfW as development helpers or as integrated experts.

And as happens with even the best orchestras in the world, one or the other instrument might not always perfectly tuned; but all the musicians are highly committed and harmonize extremely well with each another. 

In July 2015 the UN Conference on Development Financing took place in Addis Ababa, one of three world summits on key issues of sustainable global development in just six months. Do you discern progress in the run-up to the UN General Assembly in September 2015, when the post-2015 development agenda is to be adopted, and the climate summit in Paris in December?

In the words of German Minister Dr Müller, who led the German delegation to the conference, the decisive point was that the developing nations, emerging markets and industrialized nations all agreed on a new global agenda for the future; this applies in particular to the question of how the global challenges are to be financed.

For a long time the international discussion focused largely on “official development assistance” (ODA) and the related goal calling for the industrialized nations to set aside 0.7% of their gross national product for ODA. The conference ventures beyond this classic North-South dichotomy and explicitly calls for greater efforts by the Global South and the emerging markets. The ODA funds would complement the countries’ own efforts – and the German government has set clear signals by increasing German ODA funds in its draft budget for 2016. 

But the decisive point is that two additional elements were emphasized: firstly that the partner nations demonstrate good governance, fight corruption and mobilize their national resources to a greater extent; and secondly that more private finance and investment be secured in order to fund development.

The conference was thus a very important intermediate step on the road to the September Summit in New York – and the expected resolution on the post-2015 development agenda means that the community of states will establish a new global partnership requiring the industrialized nations to also make greater commitments to, and investments in, sustainable development. It should not be overlooked that the German Energy Transition is playing a pioneering role in this context.

There is often a difference between internal and external perceptions of a country. Based on your personal experience, what needs to be said about Ethiopia?

Ethiopia is a country with an ancient, advanced civilization and a 3,000-year history. And since the discovery of the fossilized vertebra of human ancestor “Lucy”, it is also regarded as a cradle of humankind. Moreover, after Armenia, Ethiopia is the second-oldest Christian country in the world. Unlike many other African nations, Ethiopia has never really been colonized. It has a unique written language, culture and cuisine. The Ethiopian people are justly very proud of this heritage. 

However, few people in Germany are aware of these aspects of Ethiopia. Rather, the civil wars and famines of the 1980s are deeply imprinted on the collective international consciousness. It would be a welcome development if we in Germany could gain a more up-to-date picture of this unique country. Today, enormous dams, electrified tram and railway lines, as well as hundreds of thousands of kilometres of all-weather roads are being built in Ethiopia. In Ethiopian Airlines – a Lufthansa Star Alliance partner – the country has the longest-standing and most successful airline of the entire African continent. Naturally, here too, all that glitters is not gold – but we should take greater note of the immense development the country’s efforts and progress than we have to date.

For me personally as ambassador, this means working every day to promote a more differentiated perception of Ethiopia outside the country, an image that does full justice to the nation’s complexity. Ethiopia is a very close and reliable partner in the areas of security and development. On these topics the two countries speak with one voice. On the other hand, we in Germany are concerned about the plurality and the freedom of opinion in the country. The recent victory of the ruling alliance, which won 100 percent of the seats in parliament in the May 2015 elections, was not an indication of the country’s move towards a healthy multiparty democracy, and there are still activists, journalists and bloggers in Ethiopian prisons. We make a point of voicing these concerns to our Ethiopian partners, too, and they concede that there is much room for improvement in this regard.