Addis Ababa (AFP)

Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed announced on Monday the upcoming dispatch of 50,000 workers to the United Arab Emirates, as part of a program to modernize the Ethiopian workforce and reveal the diplomatic role that the UAE intends to play in the United Arab Emirates. Horn of Africa.

"Ethiopia is planning short-term measures to reduce unemployment in Ethiopia," the prime minister said in a speech to parliament. "One of these short-term measures is to send a skilled workforce to foreign countries."

The Prime Minister said that an agreement had been reached on the sending of 50,000 workers to the UAE during the staggered fiscal year 2019-20, and that discussions are under way for the total shipment of 200,000 workers out of three years.

The Ethiopians thus sent will earn better wages and will be able to perfect their skills, assured the Prime Minister, according to which this program concerns trades such as the nurses or the drivers. Similar talks are underway with unspecified European countries and Japan, Abiy said.

"When the Ethiopian economy has changed, it will be backed by young skilled foreign-trained workers," said Abiy, a progressive prime minister who has begun to partially open the Ethiopian economy to foreign capital.

The UAE, eager to get closer to the countries of the Horn of Africa, have played a mediating role with Saudi Arabia in the peace agreement reached in mid-2018 between Ethiopia and its neighbor Eritrea .

The UAE and Saudi Arabia are trying to pacify the Horn of Africa, a sign of the increasing importance of the Gulf countries to Eastern Africa, located on the other side of the Red Sea, one of the most important maritime routes. most heavily borrowed from the world as they fight in Yemen the Houthi rebels backed by Iran.

The United Arab Emirates has a military base in the strategic Assab port in Eritrea used for their military operations in Yemen.

In June 2018, Ethiopia announced that the UAE had committed to inject $ 3 billion into the Ethiopian economy, including investment.

In March 2018, the UAE giant of the port industry DP World signed an agreement with the self-proclaimed Republic of Somaliland and Ethiopia, deprived of access to the sea, on the modernization of the Somaliland port of Berbera.

? 2019 AFP