Professor Jennifer Gordon wrote an op-ed in NewsDeeply about the Ethiopia Jobs Compact.
THE Ethiopia Jobs Compact is about to come into its own. Funded by the U.K., the European Investment Bank and the World Bank, it initially promised to put 30,000 of the country’s Eritrean, Somali, Sudanese and South Sudanese refugees in new jobs in export manufacturing zones, while creating another 70,000 such positions for Ethiopians. Announced in 2016, it was overshadowed at the time by the much larger Jordan Compact, through which the World Bank, the European Union and various European governments agreed with the Jordanian government to create jobs for hundreds of thousands of Syrians, principally in Jordanian garment export factories.
The Ethiopia agreement’s implementation was delayed until the Ethiopian Parliament passed an amendment to its refugee law last month. The time lag, a source of frustration while it lasted, now seems like an advantage. It gives the Ethiopian government and its international partners the chance to learn from what happened in Jordan.…
Ethiopia now has the chance to teach the world how to build decent work into the core of a refugee livelihoods program.