Infrastructures and services in rural Ethiopia
Ethiopia has recently gained great visibility with the finalisation of its mega project on the Blue Nile. The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) inaugurated in September 2025, stands 170 meters tall and 1,800 meters long at the crest, with a reservoir capacity of 74 billion cubic meters flooding 1,874 km². It boasts an installed capacity of 5,150 MW across 13 turbines—producing over 15,700 GWh annually—making it Africa’s largest hydropower plant and ranking among the world’s top 20. This $5 billion project, primarily government-funded, now supplies significant electricity to Ethiopia’s grid, with six turbines operational by early 2025.
Ethiopia has rapidly expanded its road network over the past three decades, growing from about 126,000 km of all‑weather roads to roughly 170,000 km and raising road density from 24.1 km to 148.3 km per 1,000 km², largely through multi‑billion‑dollar investment programs. From the capital, Addis Ababa, this network is structured around major radial corridors and a 52 km multi‑lane ring road that connects the city’s five main “gates” (towards Jimma, Debre Zeit/Adama, Asmara/Dessie, Gojjam, and Ambo), allowing heavy traffic to bypass the center and feed into national highways.
Key intercity routes include the Addis–Adama expressway and the broader Addis–Djibouti corridor, which carries more than 95% of Ethiopia’s import–export trade and is being upgraded with World Bank financing to improve logistics efficiency between the landlocked capital and the port of Djibouti. Part of this initiative are the gates installed along the road of the major cities the corridor encounters.
At the time of our field trip in Ethiopia in August 2025, these corridors appear like cathedrals in the desert of still bumpy and dangerous roads along the main arteries of the country, leaving mud and almost no roads in the vast majority of the territory we visited. Indeed in the surroundings of Debre Birhan, located at an altitude of xx meters, it rains almost all year long and the roads made of stones and soil are often soaked if not completely unusable other than with a 4×4 car.
Most of the people in the remote villages surrounding Debre Birhan, as Etege, etc move my foot, while horses and chariots are the only available alternatives but quite rare in our experience.
This rural village isolation translates into long distances to reach primary services such as schools, health posts, banks. In the villages reached by the fieldwork, the average time for a way of walking one way to the bank, market and hospital is more than 1 hour and 30 minutes; while for schools it is about 45 minutes. The role of infrastructure, particularly in rural areas is crucial.
Improvements in market access, due for example to road construction, has been observed to decrease the share of agricultural activities and increase the number of workers in the service sector, not in the manufacturing one (Fiorini and Sanfilippo, 2022). Specifically, when focusing on the construction of roads connecting rural villages to market centers, researchers have observed an increase in agricultural income due to a reallocation of lands to more profitable crops (Kebede, 2024).
Etege is a village in the surrounding area of Debre Birhan. It hosts groups of a few houses with one or two families, distanced a few hundred meters from the next group of houses, with approximately xx houses in total. All these settlements are isolated from the main roads and can be reached only by walking for over an hour from the nearest city or on the back of animals.
Sebli Hailegebriel, 60, walks on the flooded main road to her farm which can only be reached on foot. Her household has no grid electricity, relying instead on a personal solar panel, no direct access to clean water, and no toilet. The closest hospital is 240 minutes away.
Transports systems in the remote areas of Debre Birhan are all done by foot, and exceptionally on the back of horses, or with chariots. No car, but fully cross-country vehicles, can face the roads which are often soaked in mud because of the local climate which guarantees rain all year long.
Transports systems in the remote areas of Debre Birhan are all done by foot, and exceptionally on the back of horses, or with chariots. No car, but fully cross-country vehicles, can face the roads which are often soaked in mud because of the local climate which guarantees rain all year long.
