The country officially exported modest quantities of gold, earning a few hundred million dollars annually. Yet everyone in the sector — traders, miners, officials and foreign-exchange dealers — understood that much of the real trade was happening elsewhere. Gold crossed borders informally. Smuggling networks flourished. Exporters avoided official channels. The state lost both foreign currency and credibility.
Now Ethiopia appears to have pulled much of that trade back into the formal economy.
Gold exports surged from just $408.6m in 2023/24 to $3.46bn in 2024/25 — an astonishing increase of 747%. The scale of the jump is so large that it transformed the country’s entire external position in less than a year.
In effect, gold has become the engine of Ethiopia’s macroeconomic stabilisation.
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