When it comes to country ownership of development programs, Ethiopia is definitely a trailblazer.
Through its strong resolve and frank discussions with donors, the East African country has been shaking up the traditional donor-recipient aid dynamic — pushing it to evolve toward a more equal partnership.
“I can give you many examples in Ethiopia where we refused to accept even [donor] money because whatever we were asked by the partners to do was not actually something we wanted to do,” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Ethiopia’s foreign affairs minister, told Devex President and Editor-in-Chief Raj Kumar in a video interview on the sidelines of the Devex Partnerships & Career Forum in Addis Ababa.