The number of federally registered business licenses in Ethiopia plummeted by more than 80 percent last year, reversing a decade of exponential growth and leaving the country with a little more than 100,000 licensed businesses.
The fifth edition of the Labor Market Intelligence report compiled by experts at the Ministry of Labor and Skills indicates that more than 470,000 licenses across all sectors and size categories fell out of the official register in 2024.
“The uniformity of the 2025 decline across all size categories suggests a systemic cause such as regulatory changes in licensing, macroeconomic constraints, tightened access to credit, or an administrative cleanup of inactive licenses rather than a sector-specific slowdown,” reads the document.
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