The Role of African Growth and Opportunities Act (AGOA) To strengthen cooperation between Ethiopia and America

The introduction of AGOA has also created an opportunity for the export of additional products like textile and apparel as well as leather products.

Ethiopia’s utilization of the opportunity is still too low to claim the realization of AGOA’s objective of bringing economic growth and development as well as integration to the regional and global economy satisfactorily. In terms of utilization of the AGOA’s opportunity, there is a lack of diversity across sectors: the textile and leather sectors represent the largest share of the total export performance to the U.S under this Act.

Despite that Ethiopia had not benefited from The AGOA as expected, recently there is an encouraging progress which can be considered as blooming 62% increase from 2017 to 2018. This one-year tremendous increase is not by its desired objective to be achieved or the only opportunity that America gave but instead it is encouraging because Ethiopia realized and started using the big opportunity.

The main problems that are raised are Ethiopia does not have enough volume and Diversity of AGOA products that can benefit to its full potential in addition to that the country is considered to be less comfortable for doing business in world due to the Bureaucracy and difficulty in accessing Financial support credit facility and also the financial system is not Modern enough.

Ethiopian the government in addition to diversifying and inviting foreign investors to invest in exportable products, it launched an initiative plan called the growth and transformation plane 1 and 2(GTP1 and GTP 2) which aimed at transforming the countries agrarian economy to  Manufacturing and service sectors which will increase the number of products for export and AGOA.