Indian PM Modi to visit Ethiopia next week; focus on development partnership, stronger Africa ties

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is expected to visit Ethiopia next week, marking the first trip by an Indian leader to the Horn of Africa nation in more than a decade and underscoring New Delhi’s renewed push to deepen ties with the continent. The Indian leader is likely to arrive in Addis Ababa on 16 December and stay until the 17th, as part of a three-nation tour that also takes in Jordan (15-16 December) and Oman (17-18 December). The last Indian prime minister to visit Ethiopia was Manmohan Singh in 2011.

In the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa, he will hold talks with Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize laureate who played a key role in ending border conflict with neighbouring Eritrea. The two leaders last met on the sidelines of the BRICS summit in Johannesburg in 2023, when they discussed expanding cooperation in trade, investment, defence, information technology, agriculture, youth skilling and people-to-people contacts.

Mr Abiy has also participated in various editions of India’s Voice of the Global South Summit, the inaugural leaders’ session in November 2023 and the third summit in August 2024, reflecting warming political ties. Both countries are now members of the expanded BRICS grouping, and the upcoming visit could help revive momentum for the long-delayed fourth India-Africa Forum Summit. The last such summit took place in Delhi in 2015, and before that in Ethiopia itself (2011). The AU's secretariat, the African Union Commission, is based in Addis Ababa.

India and Ethiopia have a robust development partnership rooted in South-South cooperation. Addis Ababa is one of the largest recipients of Indian concessional lines of credit on the continent, with projects spanning railways, sugar factories and power transmission. Capacity-building programmes under the Indian Technical and Economic Cooperation (ITEC) scheme have trained thousands of Ethiopian officials and professionals.

Along with Ethiopia, PM Modi will travel to Oman, his second visit after 2018, and Jordan, where he will undertake his first full bilateral trip, having only made a brief transit stop in Amman in 2018 en route to Palestine. The whirlwind West Asia leg highlights India’s growing strategic and energy interests in the Gulf and Levant at a time of heightened regional tensions.