Making a Middle Class: Can Engineering Education Lift Ethiopia?
By Brad Whitehouse & Marcin Szczepanski
Netsanet Hailu, a young woman in her 20s, shuts her laptop where she is working on differential equations. As a master’s student in biomedical engineering at one of Ethiopia’s oldest and best universities, Netsanet hopes to one day design and engineer medical devices that save human lives.
“You have a brain that works. If you cannot use it to do better, to do something for the society, for yourself, then why do you have it?” she asks.
Netsanet says she thinks of her family as rather poor – which reflects the good fortune of her upbringing. Her father, Hailu Gurmu, sees it differently.
“I consider myself middle class,” he says.
Hailu did not grow up in this house, with its indoor plumbing and four-wheel drive Toyota pickup in the courtyard. He was born on the other side of this vast city of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. And he was not so close to his family then. Like his wife, he was given up for adoption.
The family’s rise has mirrored the rise of the city and nation. The country is still transforming, and Netsanet the engineering student is a product of its economic and academic explosion.
Today, Ethiopia, located in East Africa and just above the equator, has an expanding middle class and the fastest growing millionaire class in Africa. According to a 2013 report by the consulting firm New World Wealth, the nation had the most rapidly surging GDP in Africa – with 93 percent growth from 2004 to 2009. And its projected expansion for the 2014-15 fiscal year is another 11.4 percent. That said, it’s still in the early stages of a turnaround. It ranks 174th out of 187 countries on the United Nation’s human development index.
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Related:
How Real is the Ethiopia Rising Narrative (The Huffington Post)