Addis Ababa: City report

Working Paper 31

Tegegne Gebre-Egziabher

August 2025

Abstract

The African Cities Research Consortium’s (ACRC’s) holistic framework for urban development was used in Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia. The framework has three integrated components – politics, city of systems and development domains. The study investigated the political settlement at national and city level, seven city systems, and the domains of housing, structural transformation and youth and capability development. Both qualitative and quantitative approaches were used in the study. Qualitative data were collected from relevant experts using semi-structured interviews. The quantitative data were collected from published sources.

The political settlements analysis showed that during the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) period (1989-2019), the national political settlement was classified as narrow-concentrated, while during the Prosperity Party (PP) period (2019-present), power still remains concentrated, though it has been gradually dispersed. National elites dominate city-level elites in terms of power over decisionmaking, including the implementation of mega projects. The city of systems section revealed that the services across multiple systems, including water, sanitation, energy, solid waste management, transportation, education, healthcare and finance are inadequate. Systems in the city are characterised by fragmentation and poor coordination and integration. In addition, some systems in the city are found to be exclusionary, due to poverty, spatial (geographic) location and technical reasons. Housing in the city is also inadequate, as manifested in huge backlogs and deficiency. In order to ease the problem, the government is currently implementing multiple modalities of housing provision. In the youth and capability development domain, it was found out that the youth (aged 15-29) has huge demographic weight (31% of the total population of the city) and a high level of unemployment (30%). The case studies on youth looked at different spaces – the informal labour market, feminised labour in industrial parks and adolescent sexual reproductive health. The structural transformation section found that only a small proportion of microenterprises successfully progressed from their initial start-up phase to various stages of development, with a lack of finance and work premises and marketing problems pinpointed as major challenges. With regard to large and medium manufacturing industry (LMMI), inputs were important determinants of total productivity, and firm exit and survival were affected by firm-specific factors, such as age, size and contextual challenges. Various ministries and institutions were involved in the formal governance, while informal state-business relations determine informal governance of structural transformation. The foregoing analysis showed that Addis Ababa is a contested city, characterised by the prevalence of informality, inequality and exclusion in the provision of services, housing and jobs. Gender disparity, finance and climate change were found to be relevant to different domains and systems.

Keywords

National and city level politics, contested city, system fragmentation, housing inadequacy, job creation, governance