Ethiopia and Russia plan to sign a number of cooperation agreements on trade, tourism and nuclear cooperation at an intergovernmental commission meeting in Addis Ababa in April.
Mehreteab Mulugeta, the director general for European affairs at the Ethiopian Foreign Ministry, held talks with Andrei Kemarsky, the director of the Russian Foreign Ministry’s Department of Africa, in Moscow on Tuesday.
In an interview with Sputnik, Mehreteab said the sides “discussed pending agreements to follow up on their preparedness for the next intergovernmental commission to be signed.”
“There are different agreements. There are agreements on the promotion of trade and investment between our two countries, on trade and industry, there is an agreement on customs cooperation between our two countries, there is an agreement on the peaceful use of nuclear energy, on the promotion of the tourism sector,” he said, adding that the work to make these deals ready for the April meeting was still underway.
The Ethiopian diplomat went on to note that the current state of bilateral trade and investment cooperation did not adequately reflect the countries’ more than 100-year-old relationship.
In particular, he invited Russian businesses to invest more actively in Ethiopia as it implemented its five-year economic development plan.
“We want to see a lot of Russian companies be part of this process into agro-processing, manufacturing, infrastructure building. We want them to be more and more involved, to invest in Ethiopia. We want to enhance this cooperation,” he said.
Mehreteab added that the sides were taking efforts to “make it easy for both sides to trade” and create conditions for Russian companies to come and invest in Ethiopia.
