Ethiopia's Ministerial Council Approves Digital 2030 Strategy

Ethiopia’s Council of Ministers has approved the Digital Ethiopia 2030 strategy, rolling out a new multi-year roadmap aimed at accelerating the country’s digital transformation. The strategy sets out broad ambitions, expanding internet penetration, strengthening digital financial inclusion, and making e-governance systems widely accessible nationwide.

It arrives five years after the launch of Digital Ethiopia 2025, a sweeping plan approved in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. That earlier strategy was framed around four pillars, infrastructure, enabling systems, digital applications, and ecosystem development and sought to push Ethiopia from a primarily agrarian economy into a digitally enabled one. The government envisioned progress through sector-specific “digital pathways” in agriculture, manufacturing, tourism, and IT-enabled services.

Over time, Digital Ethiopia 2025 became the blueprint for many of the country’s reforms. Nearly 900 government services have been digitized. The number of licensed digital firms surpassed 3,000. Mobile money, once nonexistent, has grown to almost 60 million subscribers. In digital ID, the Fayda system has moved from concept to enrolling more than 24 million Ethiopians.

Connectivity also improved. The end of Ethio Telecom’s century-long monopoly, combined with expanded 3G and 4G networks, helped increase the number of internet users from about 26 million in 2020 to a around 40 million by 2025. Electricity access remains uneven, still hovering around 55 percent, which continues to limit how deeply digital services can take root. But the launch of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam expanded generation capacity and is expected to ease long-term supply constraints.

Digital finance emerged as one of the clearest success stories. Electronic transactions reached 9.7 trillion Birr last fiscal year, driven by platforms like telebirr and new private operators. Yet gaps persist: only 49 percent of adults have bank accounts, and most digital services remain concentrated in urban areas.

As Ethiopia prepares to implement Digital Ethiopia 2030, the successes and shortcomings of the past five years reveal a country that has laid critical foundations but still faces enduring bottlenecks, energy, affordability, digital literacy, and inclusive access.