Ethiopia has inked a deal worth $29.17 million with two Chinese companies to modernise the country’s transport sector, with a view of maintaining its economic growth trajectory.
The first agreement valued at $15 million will enable the country to purchase 110 buses from China’s leading bus maker, Yutong, within eight months.
As per the second agreement, the country’s capital city, Addis Ababa, will also integrate digital systems in its public bus transport system among other upgrades at a cost of $14.17 million.
In a 10-year transport sector development plan for the construction of road and rail projects, the country hopes to build up to 1,600 kilometres of roads up from the current 301 kilometres.
Some of the expressways so far built in Ethiopia include the Addis Ababa – Adama, Modjo – Hawassa, and Dere Dawa -Dewele.
Meanwhile, Safaricom has signed a five-year lease agreement with Ethiopia’s state-owned power utility, Ethiopian Electric Power enterprise (EEP), to share dark fiber-optic infrastructure. The shared infrastructure will be part of Safaricom’s network to provide telecommunications services in forms of voice, data, video, text, messages, and conferencing.
Safaricom says it has finalised preparations to launch commercial operations to provide telecom service in Ethiopia, becoming the first private and foreign entity to offer these services in the country.
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