BY DARGIE KAHSAY
Now a days, the participation and engagement of Ethiopian Diaspora is increasing drastically following the reform in 2018. Ethiopian Diaspora is actively following the developments and changes at home and playing crucial role in protecting Ethiopian National interests.
To increase the participation of Ethiopian Diasporas’ overall participation at home, the Ethiopian Diaspora Agency (EDA) is working to mobilize the diaspora. Especially, EDA’s focus is to strengthen Public Diplomacy and mobilizing them to participate in national developments, to contribute their own shares in national economy, in nation building process and so on.
In this regard, EDA stated that during 2020/21 budget year, it has prepared 1042 discussion forums with the Diaspora community mainly through webinar. Over 150 thousand Diaspora community members were participated in these discussions, according to EDA.
At the same time, in this fiscal year, to exploit the capacity of the Diaspora in diplomacy 23 Public Diplomacy teams in 12 missions were strengthened and 53 new Diaspora public diplomacy teams were also established in 31 different missions.
Through these continuous efforts and the continued motivations of the Ethiopian Diaspora, during the 2020/21 budget year the Ethiopian Diaspora donated over 1.1 billion Birr for national projects, to support internally displaced people, to support the Ethiopian National Defense Forces and other activities at home including over 192 million Birr financial support for GERD. Not only that, the Diasporas’ investment and trade engagements increased highly as 83 new Diaspora investment projects with over 3.9 billion capital became functional during this budget year and create job opportunity for over 13 thousand citizens at home.
In the just ended budget year, 1,192 new Diaspora business projects with registered working capital of 37.8 billion have presented business proposals to engage in different business areas and got pre-implementation supports and are on the way to invest in their motherland.
In addition to the direct financial support for different national activities, the Diaspora sends over three billion USD remittance during the past 11 months of the fiscal year, EDA told The Ethiopian Herald. These Diaspora supports and participations help the country during the critical time of this year as COVID-19 has affected the economy and the country faced internal problems like the crisis in Tigray.
In the diplomacy sector and in image building, the Diaspora played crucial role in depicting the reality on the ground in response to the critical challenges realted to the crises in Tigray, the ongoing negotiation between Ethiopia, Egypt and Sudan on the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) and the Ethio-Sudan border crises as Sudan invaded Ethiopian land.
To aware these serious situations of Ethiopia to the world community and to condemn external interventions on Ethiopia’s internal affairs, the Ethiopian Diaspora organized a lot of rallies on over 20 countries across the world. In addition, The Diaspora Public Diplomacy teams have expressed concern to the major actors in international relations to protect Ethiopia’s national interest.
These Diaspora communities’ efforts have played their roles in defending the external pressures coming from the international community and exposing the misinformation and fabricated agendas on Ethiopia.
Dr. Mohammed Indris, Deputy Director-General of EDA told The Ethiopian Herald that so far there was no trend of classifying the Diaspora in terms of age group. The mobilization was focused with no age matter classified only as a Diaspora. But, during the 2020/21 budget year, the agency has given due attention to mobilize the youth Diaspora members.
Ethiopia is believed to have three to four million Diaspora community members of which the youth account for a significant proportion. Hence, the agency gives due attention by initiating new activities to mobilize the Ethiopian youth Diaspora this year for the first time. Good improvements were shown and various youth Diaspora movement groups were established for different purposes.
According to Mohammed when we say Youth Diaspora, it means the youth due to age matters and secondly connecting the foreign born youth Diaspora with their country of origin. So far organizing and mobilizing this Diaspora was challenging, but this year, the initiative has brought new chapter in this regard.
With these efforts, in 2020/21 budget year, 45 new Youth Ethiopian Diaspora teams were created in different countries and they started contributing their roles in protecting Ethiopia’s national interests and engaging on different voluntary services, Mohammed said.
These new youth Diaspora teams have played key role in strengthening Diaspora public diplomacy as the youth are energetic, familiar with each country’s culture and fluency in languages. In addition, the youth Diaspora are also educated, familiar with technologies and more pragmatic to understand national and international developments and familiar with the social media.
Especially in defending Ethiopia’s interest mainly on GERD, the youth Diaspora community play a crucial and key role mainly in promoting Ethiopia’s stance on social media in different languages, defending misinformation and disinformation both on social media and the mainstream media.
These effort births a lot of youth activists on promoting the GERD in Middle East and other corners of the world which opens new chapter as new energetic scholars from different parts of the world joined the campaign of defending Ethiopia’s interests on GERD. Now, the agenda of GERD at international community is not solely government’s agenda, but also all Ethiopians from all corners of the world are becoming ambassadors for GERD and the youth contributes a lot in this regard.
This new youth public Diplomacy project becomes one part of the public diplomacy and the youth continues on feeding real developments of Ethiopia to the world through different methods.
Through this new initiative of Youth Diaspora mobilization project, 206 youth Diaspora members started different voluntary services for their country and 189 youths from the Diaspora engaged in image building of their motherland, Mohammed stated. They also contributed financial supports for different national projects at home in addition to the image building and defending Ethiopian national interest abroad.
Beyond their supports at this initial time, the emotion and the interest they have shown to participate and to follow Ethiopia’s development and other national activities is satisfactory and opens a new chapter. This is also a message to invest on mobilizing the youth Diaspora to strengthen the public diplomacy sector.
Planning and Monitoring Head with the Agency, Tesfaye Demie on his part said that mobilization of the youth Diaspora was a new initiative in this year in the public diplomacy sector and to strengthen the tie with the youth Diaspora community, awareness were created for over 2,100 Diaspora youths on major national issues, national interest priorities and national projects which needs Diasporas support. Especially the youth Diaspora generation project focuses to boost public and digital diplomacy. The efforts and campaigns of the youth Diaspora in digital diplomacy attracts attentions at this time and becomes voices for Ethiopia in different issues.
The Ethiopian Herald July 2021
