Country Information

The population of Ethiopia is approximately 75 million. The population is ethnically diverse. The largest ethnic groups are the Oromos and Amhara who live mostly in the highlands. Somalis and other Muslims live mostly in the desert lowlands. At least 70 languages are spoken as mother tongues. The predominant languages are Amharic, the former official language, and Tigrinya. Christianity and Islam are the religions that are most practiced, with Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity and Islam constituting 40% and 46% of the population respectively.

Political and Economic Environment

Ethiopia was a monarchy for much of the 20th century, which included a brief period of colonial rule by Italy in the 1930s. The emperor, Hailie Selassie, was toppled by Marxist revolutionaries in 1974, who after a series of purges, established a centralized dictatorship, known as the Derg, ruled by Mengistu Haile Mariam. Mengistu’s policies of forced collectivization and forced grouping of traditional settlements into new centrally located villages helped produce the devastating 1984-85 famine, which killed over one million people.

In 1991, a coalition of armed opposition groups, led by the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front and the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front, overthrew the Derg. The leader of the TPLF, Meles Zenawi, was elected Prime Minister in 1995. The government has followed a policy of decentralization by establishing 10 semi-autonomous administrative regions. These regions are ethnically based. Nonetheless, ethnic conflict continues to plague Ethiopian politics and Zenawi’s government, while nominally a democracy, restricts the civil and political rights of the people. The government has also failed to pursue a comprehensive land reform based on land to the tiller, leaving the country constantly vulnerable to food deficits.

In 1993, Eritrea voted to secede from Ethiopia and became an independent country. Ethiopia and Eritrea, despite being led by two former allies in the struggle against the Derg, engaged in a bloody and costly border war between 1998 and 2000. Relations between the two countries remain tense and pose a threat to Ethiopian security and stability. UN observer forces monitor the border, but Eritrea continues to contest the internationally agreed demarcation.

Ethiopia is one of the poorest countries in the world. It has an estimated annual per capita income of about US$100. More than 80% of the population depends upon agriculture, mainly subsistence farming, for a living. Crop production is subject to fluctuations in yearly rainfall, an increase in severity of droughts and soil erosion. Ethiopia’s population suffers from a permanent food deficit as the population outweighs the agricultural sector’s productive capacity. Ethiopia’s primary export is coffee.

It is difficult to envision a promising future for Ethiopia's people without reforms of the economy and the land tenure system, plus a long period of favorable conditions for economic growth and development. As assets, the country has a stable and enduring culture and tradition, a large corps of skilled manpower, and some excellent farmland which is now mostly over-populated and used for subsistence crops.

Social indicators reflect the poverty of the country: literacy is only 49.2 percent for males and 33.8 percent for females. The infant mortality rate per 1,000 births is just over a 100.

Humanitarian Situation

Drought and hunger in Ethiopia have played a major role in the politics of the country. A severe drought and famine led to the fall of Emperor Haile Selassie in 1974. Similarly, it was contributed to the fall of his successors, the Derg, in 1991. It is likely that more people in Ethiopia have died of hunger over the last thirty years than in any other country.

At least 5.5 million Ethiopians are dependent on food assistance. In the event of drought or a natural disaster, the need for food assistance could drastically increase. Failed rains in southern Ethiopia in 2005 caused an additional 1.75 million people to urgently need humanitarian assistance. Ethiopia has a well-established government organization for distribution of food but is dependent on foreign donors for food donations.

Ethnic conflict in Ethiopia has been responsible for the internal displacement of between 151,000 and 168,000 people. This includes people who have been displaced as a result of the 1998-2000 war between Ethiopia and Eritrea as well as internal ethnic clashes. Ethiopia hosts about 115,000 refugees from Somalia and Sudan. Some 125,000 refugees have been repatriated since movement started in 1997.

Malaria continues to be a serious health problem in Ethiopia and the HIV/AIDS epidemic is of particular concern, considering the nation has one of the highest percentages of HIV/AIDS cases in its population. There have been nearly 3 million clinical cases of HIV/AIDS reported. Ethiopia began distributing antiretroviral drugs in January of 2005.

Updated June 2006