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Ethiopia Vies for China's Vanishing Factory Jobs - Businessweek
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Ethiopian workers walking through the parking lot of Huajian Shoes’ factory outside Addis Ababa in June chose the wrong day to leave their shirts untucked. The company’s president, just arrived from China, spotted them through the window, sprang up, and ran outside. Zhang Huarong, a former People’s Liberation Army soldier, harangued them in Chinese, tugging at one man’s polo shirt and forcing another worker’s into his pants. Amazed, the workers stood silent until the eruption subsided.
Zhang’s factory is part of the next wave of China’s investment in Africa. It started with infrastructure, especially the kind that helped the Chinese extract African oil, copper, and other raw materials to fuel China’s industrial complex. Now China is getting too expensive to do the low-tech work it’s known for. African nations such as Ethiopia, Kenya, Lesotho, Rwanda, Senegal, and Tanzania want their share of the 80 million manufacturing jobs that China is expected to export, according to Justin Lin Yifu, a former World Bank chief economist who teaches economics at Peking University. Weaker consumer spending in the U.S. and Europe has prompted global retailers to speed up their search for lower-cost producers.
Shaping up employees is one part of Zhang’s quest to squeeze more profit out of Huajian’s factory, where wages of about $40 a month are less than 10 percent of what comparable Chinese workers may make. Just as companies discovered with China when they began manufacturing there in the 1980s, Ethiopia’s workforce is untrained, its power supply is intermittent, and its roads are so bad that trips can take six times as long as they should. “Ethiopia is exactly like China 30 years ago,” says Zhang, 55, who quit the military in 1982 to make shoes from his home in Jiangxi province with three sewing machines. He now supplies such well-known brands as Nine West and Guess (GES).
Almost three years after Zhang began his Ethiopian adventure at the invitation of the late Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, he says he’s unhappy with profits at the plant, frustrated by “widespread inefficiency” in the local bureaucracy, and struggling to raise productivity from a level that he says is about a third of China’s. Transportation and logistics that cost as much as four times what they do in China are prompting Huajian to set up its own trucking company, according to Zhang. That will free Huajian from using the inefficient local haulers, but it can’t fix the roads. It takes two hours to drive 30 kilometers (18 miles) to the Huajian factory from the capital along the main artery. Oil tankers and trucks stream along the bumpy, potholed, and at times unpaved road. Goats, donkeys, and cows wander along, occasionally straying into bumper-to-bumper traffic. Minibuses and dented taxis, mostly blue Ladas from Ethiopia’s past as a Soviet ally, weave through oncoming traffic, coughing exhaust.
Photograph by William Davidson/BloombergIn a country where 80 percent of the labor force is in agriculture, manufacturers don’t have to worry about finding new workers. The population of about 96 million is Africa’s second-largest after Nigeria’s. Cheap labor and electricity and a government striving to draw foreign investment make Ethiopia more attractive than many other African nations, says Deborah Brautigam, author of The Dragon’s Gift: The Real Story of China in Africa and a professor of international development and comparative politics at Johns Hopkins University. “They are trying to establish conditions for a transformation,” Brautigam says. “It could become the China of Africa.” Foreign direct investment in Ethiopia jumped 3.4 times to $953 million last year from the year before, according to estimates by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development.
Huajian’s 3,500 Ethiopian workers produced 2 million pairs of shoes last year. Located in one of the country’s first industrial zones—which offer better infrastructure and tax exemptions—the factory began operating in January 2012. It became profitable its first year and now makes $100,000 to $200,000 a month, Zhang says—an insufficient return that he claims will rise as workers become better trained. Beneath bright fluorescent lights and amid the drone of machines, workers cut, glue, stitch, and sew Marc Fisher leather boots destined for the U.S. market. Supervisors monitor quotas on whiteboards, giving small cash rewards to winning teams and criticizing those who fall short.Zhang spends about half his time in Ethiopia, he says. During his June visit to the Huajian plant he spoke to about 200 uniformed supervisors, a mixture of Ethiopians and Chinese, assembled in the parking lot. He berated supervisors for their inefficiency, then praised them for their loyalty, his words translated into Amharic, Ethiopia’s national language, and Oromo, the local language. He ordered staff to march on the spot as they all chanted together in Chinese. Then they recited slogans: “Unite as one.” “Improvement together.” “Civilized and efficient.” They sang the Song of Huajian, which urged “we Huajian people” to move forward, hold the banner of Huajian high, and “keep our business forever.” Chinese supervisors led the song, while their Ethiopian colleagues stumbled over some words.
Later, Zhang explained why he can’t be as tough as he’d like. “Here the management cannot be too strong as there will be a problem with the culture,” he said through a translator. “On one hand we have to have strict requirements, on the other hand we have to take care of them. They may be poor, but we have to respect their dignity.”
Five workers interviewed at the factory describe strict standards, with rewards for good work and pay docked for ruined shoes. Taddelech Teshome, 24, says her day starts at 7:20 a.m. after her Chinese employers provide workers with a breakfast of bread and tea. When her morning shift ferrying shoes from the factory floor to the warehouse is over, she gets fed the national staple sour bread for lunch, then resumes work until 5:15. After that a Huajian bus takes her to nearby Debre Zeit, where she rents a room with her sister for $18 a month. Taddelech came to work at Huajian just over a year ago from her home 165 kilometers away in the Arsi region after her sister started work at the factory. “The work is good because I pay my rent and I can look after myself,” she says. “It’s transformed my life.”
Huajian’s Zhang wants to increase its workforce in Ethiopia to as many as 50,000 within eight years. A model of a planned new plant at the edge of Addis Ababa is displayed at the factory. It shows a 341-acre complex, partly financed by more than $300 million from Huajian, that will include apartments for workers, a wooded area, and a technical university.
In the parking lot, after supervisors had sung the company song, Zhang dismissed the Ethiopians but continued to rail against the Chinese managers. To make his points he thrust a broomstick toward them repeatedly. He finally left the stage, laughing and raising his fist in triumph.
Thursday, July 24, 2014
Ethiopia's child brides see marriage as key to jobs abroad, says thinktank | World news | The Guardian
On eve of Girl Summit, ODI reveals trend of girls entering early marriages followed by swift divorces to migrate for family's sake
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Lubaba Abdella and the family she supported with her earnings in Saudi Arabia. Her marriage lasted only three months and her husband hit her. Photograph: Clare Price/ODI
Up a bumpy, winding dirt track in the mountains of northern Ethiopia, past two bulls chewing pasture and a rondavel built from sticks and cow dung, is the modest home of Lubaba Abdella, its mudbrick walls reinforced by eucalyptus bark and topped by a corrugated roof.
Abdella has lived a lifetime, yet she is still in her teens. She dropped out of school, married, divorced three months later and emigrated illegally so she could cook and clean for a family in Saudi Arabia, earning money to support her parents and eight siblings. Now she is home and back to square one.
Three-quarters of girls in the Ethiopian region of Amhara become child brides like Abdella, according to the London-based Overseas Development Institute . Many also join the so-called "maid trade": up to 1,500 girls and women leave the east African country each day to become domestic workers in the Middle East. A study has shown for the first time how these pernicious trends feed off each other.
In Ethiopia's Muslim communities it is often deeply shameful or "sinful" for girls to remain unmarried after they begin menstruating, notes the ODI. But once girls are married and sexually initiated, parents consider their social and religious obligations complete.
The thinktank's researchers in Amhara found it was therefore becoming common for parents to insist on marriage followed by a swift divorce so that their daughter was free to migrate and send her earnings home to her parents, rather than her husband. The fact a girl had already been "deflowered" meant she was seen as less likely to be disgraced by foreign men. "It's a question of virtue and virginity," one local researcher said. "Better to lose it in a dignified way."
The findings are being released before the first Girl Summit , hosted by the British government and Unicef on Tuesday with the aim of ending female genital mutilation and child marriage within a generation. The ODI will warn that parents who see their daughters as commodities are pushing record numbers of girls into abusive early marriages. Some 39,000 child brides marry every day – 14 million a year – often against their will. Amhara has Ethiopia's lowest average marriage age – 14.7 years – and one of its highest illiteracy rates.
Abdella, now 19, illustrates the constrained choices and warped pragmatism that many here face. She was 16 when she dropped out of school for an arranged marriage to a 22-year-old. It lasted only three months. "He used to hit her," said Abdella's mother, Zeyneba Seid. "They didn't like each other so divorce was inevitable."
It was hastened when Abdella's husband wanted to seek work abroad. Speaking Amharic through an interpreter, she recalled: "If a man migrates alone to the Middle East, he will cheat on you. But it's difficult to migrate with your husband and still support your family. That's why I wanted a divorce."
New wealth v old in Hara, Ethiopia, funded by wages from the Middle East. Photograph: Clare Price/ODINevertheless, Abdella believed even her short-lived marriage would be an advantage overseas. "I was told I'm young and it's better if I know what marriage is before migrating. People in the Middle East might force us to sleep with them. If a girl has been married and goes to Saudi and is raped, it's not as bad as for one who's single. If she's single and bears a child, it's really difficult to come back here. But if she's been married, it's OK."
The ODI found that some girls also choose to migrate, against their parents' wishes, out of a sense of filial piety that tends to be weaker in boys. Abdella says it was her own decision because her family was in poverty, farming just one hectare of land. Notably she has an elder brother who is still at school. "He was asked to migrate but he wanted to continue his education, so I had to go and earn. I wanted my family to be better off."
For the residents of Hara, a remote mountain village where the air fills with birdsong, cocks crowing and the Muslim call to prayer, and the streets with Bajajs (motorised three-wheeled rickshaws), camels and boys herding goats, Saudi Arabia offers an alluring promise of riches just as America once did to Europe's huddled masses. The results can be seen in a series of neat concrete houses with colourful paintwork, barred windows and a sprinkling of satellite dishes that have sprung up in the past five years, funded by wages from the east. Owning a corrugated roof is a status symbol here. For those still living in older houses made from mud and thatch there is the perpetual struggle of keeping up with the Joneses.
"Seeing the houses that were built makes you wish you'd migrated," said Abdella, who sleeps with her family on the floor of two cramped rooms. "We have a lot of needs: clothes, shoes. Most of the time we cannot afford them, whereas people in Saudi had money."
It is now illegal under Ethiopian law for anyone under 18 to migrate to work but Abdella, like thousands of others, got a passport by using a fake ID and telling the authorities she was 27. The entire process cost 15,000 birr (£445). She cooked, cleaned and washed clothes for a Saudi couple and their three children and was paid 800 riyals (£125) a month, paying off the debt and earning enough for her family to be connected to electricity and water and cover food bills.
The job came to an end after 20 months when Saudi Arabia carried out a mass deportation of illegal foreign workers. "I'm doing nothing at the moment," sighed Abdella as two chickens scampered across the house's dirt floor. "Seeing my family suffering here, I don't want to remarry, I just want to support my family. I want to go back to the Middle East. There's no other option because the wage is really low here.
"My younger sister, who's 15, is planning to go. I advise her to because she can earn more and do whatever she wants. But she would have to marry first – it's our custom."
The pattern of marriage and divorce is becoming increasingly common. Aesha Mohammed, 16, recently married a man six years her senior, only to divorce after two months because she refused to quit school. Her elder sister also married and divorced, then migrated to work in Saudi Arabia. Mohammed, who wants to become a doctor, said: "Sometimes when I joke with her, 'I want to drop out of school and come to Saudi', she says no, stay in school because it's hard there. There is a lot of work and it's a burden."
The journey to get there can also be treacherous. For some it involves more than a week on foot to Djibouti, then a six-hour boat ride to Yemen after dark, followed by 15 to 20 days travelling by road to Saudi Arabia. Habtam Yiman, 24, who married aged 12 and has married twice since, said she was detained in Yemen because officials did not believe she had a sponsor. "They check your blood type and take some of it for the hospital," she said. "I saw a man whose blood was completely drained out of him and he was left to die."
Yet still thousands are pouring in for the sake of their families. The ODI, which hosted a field visit by the Guardian last week, reports that some girls go because they "feel inferiority" and have been "seduced by the glamorous stories" told by illegal brokers. The fate that awaits them can include overwork, non-payment, social isolation and abuse.
When Zemzem Damene set off to work in Kuwait, she was a normal girl who wanted to earn money and be like her friends. Today she is confused, withdrawn and virtually mute, a stranger to her own family. Something happened to Damene in Kuwait and no one knows exactly what.
As the 20-year-old peered nervously from under her veil and picked at her hand, her mother, Engocha Sete, recalled: "She wanted to go and I couldn't stop her. She said her friends went to the Middle East and brought home shiny objects. She wanted that and she had to have what she wished for."
Her father, Damene Alemu, added: "I was sad she wanted to go. I asked her to marry here but she said: 'You don't have a lot of money to marry me off, it's not logical.' Marriage is an expensive thing for the father, with buying clothes, organising a party, paying two months of utilities. She said it's best that she go off to the Middle East."
But the plan backfired and Damene lost more money than she made, forcing the family to sell cattle. According to Alemu, his daughter's first employer took all the money she had and even the clothes she brought from home, and that was the start of her decline. "She went to a hospital in Addis Ababa but they didn't tell us what the problem was, only that it's a mental illness."
Damene's mother added pensively: "She doesn't do anything now. She doesn't speak much. Most of the time she sleeps. Now she's sick, there's nobody wants to marry her. If she gets better, we'd like her to get married. But because she's lost so much, the only thing she talks about is money."
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