Rick Steves’ Travel Blog

Traveling this week through Ethiopia, my favorite moments were far from the cities and far from the main roads. (If you simply assess things from what you experience on the paved main roads, your judgment is skewed by “road bias.”) We’d drive in rugged SUVs almost cross-country to reach communities of people who aspire to earn $2 a day. Of course, with little language in common and economic realities that are so vastly different, there is a big gap between them and me. But the big smiles, the lack of any angry edge, and the adorable children have left me tuned in to our common humanity. These memories are the Ethiopian souvenirs I’ll be taking home.

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Here in Ethiopia, I’ve seen the value of foreign aid in the faces of its recipients — and you can see it too, in this little clip that shows the United Nations World Food Program (WFP) in action.

Foreign aid dollars are some of the best dollars America can spend on stability — and in an ever-smaller world, stability makes America more secure. Rather than old-fashioned charity, this is an investment in people. It’s smart development in action, funded by rich countries…and making a difference. I believe that if every American could stand where I’ve stood in Ethiopia, the vast majority would see that funding this work is simply a good investment. And they’d be proud — because the USA is a big funder of the WFP.

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Visiting an orphanage in southern Ethiopia, I enjoyed a tangible look at grassroots development. I saw how caring people in the high-income world empower caring people in the low-income world to invest smartly, within parameters set by the national government, in “human capital” — one of the catchphrases that I’ve picked up as I learn about development issues. In this case, orphans are rescued from the street and nurtured. And at a simple vocational school, young people with an 8th-grade education then learn job skills (metalworking, solar tech, and so on). Upon graduation, they are employed at the nearby Hawassa Industrial Park or are given a microloan by the government to start their own business.

Please join me for a minute to experience a joyful example of smart development.

I’m in Ethiopia, scouting locations for an upcoming public television special about hunger. And traveling here, I feel like I’m witnessing a country that has been famously poor evolving into a developed nation.

In order to develop, Ethiopia wants investment, not charity. Ethiopia earns little from exports — its biggest export, coffee, only generates about $700 million a year. But it has a huge untapped natural resource of young people who are ready to work for wages that are much lower than those in the developed world. With more labor than physical resources, big corporations use a poor country like Ethiopia as a base to “re-export”— a place to import a product (like cloth), process it affordably, and re-export it (as clothing).

Globally, development seems to come in waves: China…India…and now, perhaps, sub-Saharan Africa. Ethiopia’s leaders wouldn’t mind following “the China model” of development, which depends on cheap labor, as a way to compete with countries like China and India, where wages have risen.

Here’s a quick peek at Ethiopia’s massive Hawassa Industrial Park — and what could be the future of an Africa that is more profitably integrated into the global economy.

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A big theme across the developing world is education, with a special focus on making sure that girls are not disadvantaged. And here in Ethiopia, you can see examples of that everywhere. At a high school in the remote Tigray region, teachers proudly explained to us that more kids get an education when they don’t have to travel to a school in the next town. And they were particularly proud to show us a small, but important, freestanding building called the “Girls’ Club.”

The Girls’ Club provides a safe place for girls, where they can enter young adulthood with the help of a support group and counseling. In the past, many girls who couldn’t afford sanitary pads would just stay home when they had their period, missing up to a week of school each month. This put girls at a disadvantage and caused many to drop out of school altogether. But with the arrival of the Girls’ Club, this is no longer an issue.

Here in Ethiopia, where the average person is happy to earn $80 a month, I’m reminded that a good way to learn about our own country is to leave it and observe it from afar. Investing in “human capital” results in great dividends, whether an economy is still developing or already in high gear. The Girls’ Club is an excellent example of that…and so was the GI Bill, which gave education benefits to American WWII veterans when I was a child and provided the basis for decades of widely shared prosperity in the United States.

I’m also impressed by how serious Ethiopia is about putting women in positions of power. Several people here have told me with pride that the new Ethiopian president is a woman, and that half the prime minister’s cabinet is made up of women.

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