Education and Economic Development in Ethiopia, 1991–2017

This chapter critically examines the major achievements and challenges of the education sector in Ethiopia between 1991 and 2017 from the perspective of long-term economic development and structural transformation. The chapter finds that Ethiopia has achieved enormous success in terms of increasing access to all levels of education throughout the country but the achievement has been at the cost of a vicious cycle of low education quality. In addition, the chapter argues that failure to significantly change the productive structure of the economy has resulted in persistently high levels of unemployment, underemployment, and brain drain of the better-educated human resources of the country. The chapter concludes that there is a need for synergistic, dynamic, context-specific, and comprehensive policies and strategies aimed at progressively moving the Ethiopian economy away from its current specialization in nature-intensive, low-skill, low-knowledge, low-technology economic activities towards ‘mind-intensive’, higher-skill, and technology-intensive economic activities.