Commercial Bank of Ethiopia (CBE), the giant state owned financial institution, says in six months’ time it has received $1.7 billion remittance from Ethiopians living abroad who send money to their relatives.
This is indicated by the President of CBE, Bacha Gina who presented report of the first six month of current Ethiopian calendar started July 8, 2019. It is estimated that at least an additional one billion remittance is transferred to Ethiopia by the remaining private banks in the country over the past six months.
Remittance income of Ethiopia has been growing over the past few years now exceeding the earnings of the country from export of goods, which now staggers around $2.7 billion per annum. |Last year same period of the first six months Ethiopia has only secured $1.21 billion from export of goods.
As export income of the country continue to decline while the import bill reached $16 to $17 billion per year, Ethiopia has been in a vicious circle of hard currency shortage, which makes infrastructure projects stuck and made import of basics such as medicine difficult.
As Ethiopia has a huge diaspora community across the world, which is estimated to reach two to three million, Experts has been advising the government to harness remittance in order to address the hard currency shortage.
Official reports show that Remittances to developing countries are estimated at $404 billion in 2013, up 3.5 percent compared with 2012. Growth in remittance flows to developing countries is expected to accelerate to an annual average of 8.4 percent over the next three years, raising flows to $436 billion in 2014 and $516 billion in 2016.