MAKING corporate business, economic development plans, strategies and action plan strategies workable is not a rosy task.
This is evident by several national economic development strategies in various countries that have failed over the years.
For this article, let’s start by looking at tangible results of what a nation’s ability to address insurmountable economic strategy development and implementation obstacles has visibly resulted into.
We will then look at what Ethiopia has had to address to achieve this feat.
Once again, I have singled out Ethiopia for this case study owing to the fact that the World Bank created developmental strategies for Ethiopia for a start and eventual use in other developing countries.
Thankfully, Ethiopia has lived to exceed the expectations in its vivid economic strategy development and implementation success story.
Remarkably, Ethiopia’s ability to address the obstacles in its economic developmental strategies could be best summed up by Hong Kong based Epic Group Chairman and Chief Executive Officer (CEO), Ranjan Mahtani’s sentiments over the country’s Construction of its 1.4 million square meters apparel factory in Hawasa in a record nine months.
As Mr. Mahtani puts it, “The one thing unique in Ethiopia is that there’s never been such an organized road map dedicated to apparel and textile, not in any country in the world”
That’s mesmerizing, isn’t it!
It should be clearly noted that the construction of the Hawasa factory is representative of the nation’s strategies owing to the main thrust of its strategies – national Agricultural and Industrial strategies complementing and supplementing each other .
As earlier alluded to, it’s a sum-total of Ethiopia’s socio-economic developmental strategy- Democratic Developmentalism (DD) and the Agricultural Development Led Industrialization (ADLI) vis-à-vis the Sustainable Development and Poverty Reduction Program
In a nutshell, what does Ethiopia have to show for the much touted robust economic developmental strategies?
Remarkably, by 2017, Ethiopia had attracted an estimated US$250m investment from TAL apparel, one of the renowned global investors in the apparel and fashion industry.
Additionally, Ethiopia’s horticulture sector contributes around US$500 million annually to the total export proceeds of the country and employs over 200,000 Ethiopians.
The Ethiopian horticulture and floriculture industry has in the last 15 years developed to be a full grown global player.
Following on, to accelerate the export capacity the country has built a dry terminal cargo covering a total area of 150,000 square, one of the largest perishable cargo terminal with cool chain.
Additionally, Ethiopia by 2017 was the lowest hydroelectricity power producer in the world with generation rate of US$0.03 Kwh.
For now, what has motivated Ethiopia to craft the DD and the ADLI?
Ironically, according to the 2007 census, Ethiopia recognised that the country is essentially an agrarian society in which more than 80 percent of the population reside in rural areas earning their livelihood from land.
Additionally, the country’s political leadership resolved to salvage its people out of a repressive political system that was rent seeking from its people and therefore contributed to poverty levels of the people.
Think of it, a political and governance system that depends on the people to ascend into power, extracts from its people without creating a corresponding increase in their socio- economic well-being!
A governance system where people elect their leaders, then the leaders miraculously become excessively wealthy while the citizen’s welfare degenerates into further abject poverty!
Ethiopia, therefore recognised one most critical elements of state-led systemic economic transformation – leadership.
Leadership includes both the quality and capabilities of the top national leader as well as the appropriateness of the visions and principles that guide national economic transformation.
Therefore, in both corporate and national economic development strategy development and implementation, the importance of leadership can never be overstated.
It should be noted that particularly in developing countries, the scarcity of genuine corporate and national leaders is the greatest obstacle that hampers the successful development and implementation of corporate and national economic development strategies!
However, this is what Ethiopia has had to overcome!
One amazing feature of Ethiopia’s national strategic capabilities has been its ability to tailor World Bank prescribed policies – Workable strategies – to what is workable in the Ethiopian setting.
The World Bank’s 1997 World Development Report proposed a two-part strategy that called for constant effort to be made to improve policy capability while increasingly difficult policies were to be adopted over time to match the acquired policy capability.
Ethiopia complied with this prescription of making general improvements in “rules and restraints,” “competitive pressure,” and “voice and participation”
In addition to this, Ethiopia has always preferred to improve its policy capability through problem-solving.
Moreover, the Ethiopian economic strategy implementation has been flexible, adaptive and able to improve on and inter-connect with other related strategies and objectives.
For a start, the economic development strategy was rolled out on the ADLI but the policy makers clearly state that agriculture development led industrialization will not be so forever… Once the agricultural development led industrialization strategy has been actualised it will be changed to industry led development strategy.”
In 2002, the Ethiopian Government expressed the ADLI, a long term developmental strategy in the form of a medium-term economic program.
In this regard, the Government put the main ideas of ADLI into the poverty reduction strategy paper – the Sustainable Development and Poverty Reduction Program (SDPRP) 2002/03-2004/05. This program sought to promote agricultural development and poverty reduction in rural areas.
It’s interesting too to note that the Ethiopian Government in 2005 recognised that there were considerable problems associated with the agricultural development strategy.
It was essentially recognised during the implementation of the first phase of the ADLI that this strategy was exclusively rural centered.
Therefore, a subsequent modified plan, the Plan for Accelerated and Sustained Development to End Poverty (PASDEP) 2005/06-2009/10, was prepared
The PASDEP made important adjustments over SDPRP by broadening the policy scope from smallholder agriculture to other sectors, especially the industry sector and the urban sector. In what may be called Enhanced ADLI, strong emphasis was placed on growth acceleration.
This was to be attained through the two main thrusts of commercialization of agriculture and private sector development.
Following on, at the outset of the DD and the ADLI, Ethiopia realized it needed to overhaul institutional mind-sets – put new wine into new wine skins.
Additionally, the country’s human resource development levels were at one of the lowest in the region and could therefore not sustain the rigorous demands of the new developmental programmes and strategies.
Ethiopia’s Capacity building strategy has over the years been a systematic combination of human resources, working systems and institutions that would enable the country to foster the DD, ADLI and other strategies.
Ethiopia’s capacity development strategy emphasis has been on transforming institutions.
Ethiopia too has put in place institutional measures and systems in national Strategic planning processes, subsequent national plans; to ensure that public and private sector institutions are ‘speaking to and agreeing with each’.
In the Agricultural sector the Agricultural sector Transformation Agenda (TA), main task is to devise strategic interventions designed to unlock systemic bottlenecks.

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The author is the Managing Consultant at G. N Grant Business Consultant, a Chartered Certified Accountant (ACCA), a Master of Business Administration (MBA) holder, with a Specialism in Strategic Planning, and a candidate for the Herriot Watt University (Scotland) Doctor of Business Administration (DBA