Profiles – Women in Business & Rising Stars · Editorial

By Moakanyi Magazine · China-in-Africa · June 2026

Export manufacturing is supposed to be a ladder out of subsistence, and for the young women who staff Ethiopia's industrial parks it is the rung they reach for. The contradiction is in the pay slip. The same parks that pull tens of thousands of women off rural land into formal, recorded work pay wages that sit close to, or below, a living wage in the towns they move to. The job is real, formal and female. So is the gap between what it pays and what it costs to live where it is.

Ethiopia's flagship is Hawassa Industrial Park, designed around textiles and garments and built as the centrepiece of a strategy to make the country a low-cost manufacturing hub. Reporting drawing on UNIDO and field research found over 17,000 young rural women had migrated to work there from 2017, with the park's female-dominated workforce a defining feature. By early 2020, close to 28,000 workers across some 20 firms were employed at the site, the great majority of them women.

A workforce that is young, female and newly arrived

Across Ethiopia's parks the pattern holds: female workers reported at roughly 84 per cent in one park, and as high as 95 per cent in the wider garment and textile sector employing about 62,000 people. The typical worker is young, low-skilled, a recent rural-to-urban migrant with little prior wage experience. For many, it is the first income they control themselves – and for some, field research notes, the move carries an unstated draw beyond pay: distance from family structures and a measure of independence the village did not offer.

That gendered concentration is by design. Governments and investors target textiles and garments precisely because the work is labour-intensive and the labour is cheap, and the model assumes a young female workforce willing to accept entry-level wages. The export base is built on that assumption, which means the model's economics and these women's livelihoods are the same question asked twice.

The export line is, in practice, a first formal job for a generation of rural women.

The wage that undercuts the promise

The figures that test the promise are the monthly ones: pay reported between 800 and 2,000 birr a month, around US$27 to US$68, against urban living costs that the same research describes as outpacing earnings. Add long shifts, thin and expensive housing, water and sanitation gaps, and difficulty transferring rural identity papers that limits access to urban services, and the ladder looks more like a holding pattern. High turnover follows – workers cycle in and out, which itself undercuts the skills accumulation a manufacturing base is supposed to build.

This is the cost side of competing on cheap labour. An export model whose advantage is low wages passes much of its cost to the women on the line, and the wage floor that makes the country attractive to buyers is the same floor that keeps those workers near poverty. The contradiction is not incidental to the strategy; it is the strategy's engine. That is what makes it a contestation worth naming rather than a detail to manage.

A job that does not cover the cost of the town it requires is a fragile rung.

Counting the jobs, weighing the deal

For Africa's export narrative, Hawassa is both proof and warning. It shows industrial parks can create formal female employment at scale and at speed – close to 28,000 jobs at one site, a genuine structural shift from subsistence to wage work, and for many women a first foothold in an economy that previously had no place for them. That is not nothing, and it should not be waved away by critics who would leave those women in the village.

It also shows that scale alone does not settle the wage question, and that a strategy built on cheap labour has a ceiling it imposes on its own workers. The continental lesson is that the choice is not jobs-or-no-jobs but what kind of jobs – whether the export base climbs toward higher-value work and better pay, or locks in at the entry wage that first attracted the buyers. Hawassa has cleared the first hurdle and not yet the second.

Counting the jobs is the easy part; making them pay enough to keep is the test.

The women of Hawassa are the export story made concrete – young, rural, formally employed, and underpaid. Whether that story is a ladder or a treadmill depends on a number the brochures rarely lead with – the wage – and on whether the model that hired them ever intends to pay more than it must.

Sources: UNIDO Working Paper (industrial parks, gender), LSE / Migrant women factory workers, Hawassa