When the World Lost Its Balance, Ethiopia Found Its Stride
Addis Ababa, September 21, 2026 (FMC) — There were years when the ground seemed to shift beneath almost everything: a pandemic crossing borders without passports, supply chains snapping across continents, food and energy prices surging, conflicts redrawing calculations, climate extremes deepening uncertainty and a world economy repeatedly discovering new fault lines.
Ethiopia did not stand outside that turbulence.
It was hit by it, tested by it and forced to make difficult choices within it.
Yet somewhere in those unsettled years, another picture began emerging.
The country kept moving.
Not always smoothly. Not without setbacks. Not without unfinished questions. But forward.
And Ethiopia’s challenges went far beyond the shocks sweeping across the world.
The country was forced into a devastating struggle against armed insurgents determined to derail its march toward prosperity. The TPLF’s treasonous assault on the Northern Command in November 2020 plunged the country into a conflict that tested the strength of the state at a moment when Ethiopia was already undertaking a far-reaching national transformation.
Behind the armed insurgencies stood external adversaries seeking to exploit Ethiopia’s internal divisions and prevent the country from consolidating its rise. Local insurgents became the Trojan horses through which hostile forces sought to destabilize the country, weaken its institutions and obstruct its development ambitions.
It was an attempt to turn Ethiopia’s own internal fractures into weapons against its future.
But Ethiopia did not stop.
The conflict imposed immense costs. It consumed resources, disrupted communities and placed extraordinary pressure on national institutions. Yet even amid those pressures, the country’s development drive continued.
More importantly, the government moved to ensure that conflict would not become the country’s permanent political language.
Peace, reconciliation and dialogue increasingly became central to the national response. Rather than allowing every political disagreement to become another confrontation, the government expanded platforms for consultation and sought to bring competing views into peaceful political processes.
The objective was larger than ending individual disputes: it was to build a political culture in which differences could be addressed through discussion, compromise and consensus before they hardened into another cycle of violence.
That approach culminated in the National Dialogue, bringing together thousands of Ethiopians to deliberate on the country’s most difficult national questions.
In 2026, participants reached consensus across all eight agenda pillars, covering peacebuilding, religious affairs, corruption and good governance, government structure and the political system, nation-building, federal cities, institution-building, rule of law and human rights, and socio-economic issues affecting farmers and pastoralists.
The significance was not simply that people were brought into the same room. It was that a country with deep political disagreements demonstrated that national questions could be taken to a table rather than a battlefield.
The government also moved further along the path of reconciliation. Ahead of the Ethiopian New Year, executive clemency was extended to hundreds of inmates, responding to calls emerging from the consultation process and reinforcing a broader push toward peace and national unity.
Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed declared that the era of resolving differences through force had passed and emphasized an inclusive political landscape built around dialogue and peaceful engagement.
The message was clear: Ethiopia could not afford to keep sacrificing development to recurring confrontation.
Peace was not being treated merely as the absence of fighting. It was increasingly being positioned as a condition for economic reform, national reconstruction, democratic participation and long-term development.
The government therefore continued to combine the defence of national sovereignty and state institutions with a preference for political dialogue and reconciliation wherever political differences could be addressed peacefully.
Public dialogue platforms expanded, with consultations involving citizens across regions and communities. The National Dialogue process itself became an effort to move Ethiopia’s most persistent disagreements from confrontation toward consensus.
Ethiopia kept building.
While the world was grappling with disruption and the country was confronting grave security challenges, Ethiopia pushed ahead with projects and reforms designed to enlarge its productive capacity—harnessing rivers for electricity, opening new agricultural frontiers, extending roads and urban corridors, expanding digital infrastructure, restoring degraded landscapes and widening the foundations of domestic production.
The economic transformation has been broad. Ethiopia has been shifting from a restrictive, state-led economic model toward a more enabling, resilient, diversified and market-oriented economy, with reforms aimed at strengthening private investment, productivity and structural transformation.
Agriculture has become one of the clearest expressions of that shift.
Ethiopia has moved from longstanding dependence on imported wheat toward self-sufficiency and growing export capacity. Cluster farming, irrigation, mechanization and diversification have expanded the productive reach of agriculture.
Wheat has become an increasingly visible symbol of the country’s effort to turn a longstanding vulnerability into productive strength.
The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam represents another dimension of that transformation.
What began as one of Africa’s most ambitious infrastructure undertakings has moved into the realm of power generation, turning the Abbay into a foundation for Ethiopia’s energy ambitions while giving concrete form to a national project built around domestic mobilization and self-reliance.
Then there is the Green Legacy.
Since its launch in 2019, the initiative has grown into one of Ethiopia’s largest mass environmental campaigns, bringing millions of citizens into a national effort to restore degraded landscapes, expand tree cover and strengthen climate resilience.
The scale has become extraordinary: in 2026 alone, Ethiopia planted more than 805 million seedlings in a single day, with more than 26 million people participating.
Elsewhere, another kind of infrastructure was being assembled.
Fayda began building the foundations of a national digital identity ecosystem. Digital payments expanded. Telecommunications opened to competition. Artificial intelligence and digital skills entered the country’s development vocabulary. Digital Ethiopia 2030 has carried the country’s technological ambitions into a new decade.
The leap was not confined to screens.
New roads and corridors cut through cities. Irrigation expanded the productive reach of agriculture. Industrial and logistics projects pushed the boundaries of connectivity. Tourism developments opened new possibilities around places such as Wenchi, Gorgora and Koysha.
Aviation ambitions grew to a scale reflected in the planned Bishoftu International Airport, conceived with an initial annual passenger capacity of 60 million and an ultimate master-plan capacity of 110 million.
Then came the bigger horizon.
At Guba, alongside the inauguration of the GERD, Ethiopia announced a new generation of major projects spanning nuclear energy, fertilizer, natural gas, oil, housing and aviation.
The message embedded in that expanding portfolio was larger than any single project: a country seeking to move from consuming more of what it imports toward producing more of what it needs—and increasingly more of what regional and international markets need.
That shift matters most in an era when global disruptions have exposed the vulnerabilities of dependence.
When shipping routes become uncertain, production capacity matters.
When food markets tighten, agricultural productivity matters.
When technology reshapes economies at breathtaking speed, digital capability matters.
When climate pressures intensify, the health of land and water matters.
And when financing becomes harder, external shocks multiply and security threats persist, the strength of domestic institutions and productive systems matters even more.
Ethiopia’s response has increasingly been to build those foundations.
That does not mean the pressures have vanished.
They have not.
The country remains exposed to climate risks, global commodity movements, financing constraints and regional instability. Its transformation remains uneven, and some of its largest ambitions are still works in progress.
But that is precisely why the journey matters.
Resilience is easy to describe when nothing is at stake.
It becomes meaningful when a country is forced to keep creating while circumstances keep changing—when a pandemic closes economies, when drought strains livelihoods, when insurgents take up arms, when hostile external forces seek to exploit internal divisions and when the country must still find the strength to build.
Ethiopia kept building.
A field became a production frontier.
A river became electricity.
A forest campaign became a national movement.
A mobile network became an economic platform.
A digital identity became a gateway to public services.
A logistics corridor became a link between producers and markets.
A difficult global moment became an argument for building greater capacity at home.
And the country’s confrontation with insurgency became another chapter in its determination not to surrender its national development trajectory.
This is where Ethiopia’s recent journey acquires a broader African resonance.
Across the continent, countries are confronting the same fundamental questions: how to feed growing populations, create productive jobs, move beyond raw-material dependence, harness technology, finance development and build resilience against shocks they did not create.
Ethiopia’s answer has increasingly been written in scale.
Scale in infrastructure.
Scale in agricultural production.
Scale in environmental restoration.
Scale in digital transformation.
Scale in industrial ambition.
And increasingly, scale in the country’s conception of what it can contribute to an integrated African economy.
The significance is not that Ethiopia has somehow escaped the forces reshaping the world.
It has not.
It is that the country has sought to use an unstable era to accelerate the construction of things that can make it less vulnerable to the next one.
That distinction changes the story.
It turns resilience from a defensive posture into a development strategy.
It also gives deeper meaning to Ethiopia’s determination to keep building in the face of forces that have sought to interrupt its progress.
The Ethiopia emerging today is not the Ethiopia that entered this period in 2018.
The country is still carrying the scars and unresolved questions of difficult years.
But it is also carrying something else: a larger productive horizon, a broader development ambition and a growing conviction that its future cannot be built by waiting for easier circumstances.
The world may not have regained its balance.
Ethiopia, meanwhile, has been finding its stride.
By Mesafint Brlie