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COVID-19 affected all global activities. The print media industry was one of the affected fields. This research investigates the challenges and opportunities that COVID-19 brought to the Ethiopian newspapers. Political Economy of Media theory is used to analyse data obtained from documents and in-depth interviews with managers of two leading media houses; the government-owned Ethiopian Press Agency (EPA) and the private Capital newspaper. The findings show that print media faced two key challenges. First, their circulation decreased due to the COVID-19 as a result of the economic recession. This was compounded by the second challenge, based on the fact that not only don’t these newspapers own printers, they also lack a established formal distribution infrastructure. As a result, they still had to pay highly for printing while selling copies at a reduced price. However, media hybridisation, innovative projects, and sponsored pages helped the newspapers stay on the market. This study recommends that newspaper publishers run their printing machines, expand the media technology, change the attitude of print journalists, and capacitate them to utilise media hybridisation as important solutions.

The Cultural and Creative Industries (CCIs) built on a country's centuries-old know-how in handicraft production, the images, stories, symbols, music, dances and the likes have the potential to contribute significantly to the country's GDP and socio-economic development. Particularly in developing countries where there is high rate of unemployment among the youth. We used a case study research to explore the experiences, challenges and opportunities of businesses in the cultural and creative sector. To do so, we selected a start-up in Ethiopia that specialises in designing and producing culturally inspired quality and sustainable lifestyle products. Specifically, the chapter highlights the potential of indigenous knowledge and skill coupled with innovation in designing contemporary products and the process of producing them for the individual entrepreneurs, as well as the promotion and preservation of the country's cultural heritage. It also indicates the need to utilise abundant but underutilised resources to produce value-added and sustainable products in the region.

This chapter reviews the role of industrial parks (IP) as drivers of export-led industrialisation in Ethiopia. For several decades, IPs or special economic zones have been promoted as policy instruments to attract investment, create jobs and promote exports of manufactured goods. However, their popularity as policy instruments has been mainly associated with the successful export-led industrialisation of emerging economies in East Asia where IPs have played a critical role not only in attracting investment and promoting export-led growth but also transferring technology, promoting technological learning and industrial development and jump-starting the process of economic diversification and structural transformation. Ethiopia, along with other African countries, is among the latest to introduce IPs as major drivers of economic diversification and export-led industrialisation. As a newcomer, Ethiopia can learn many valuable lessons from more successful cases. This chapter explores some of the lessons that Ethiopia can draw from other countries’ experience as it continues to build additional parks to attract investment and push its industrialisation agenda.

This chapter starts from the issue of debt in the context of a national economy by contrasting two opposed views: policy prescriptions based on the Washington Consensus prioritize low public debt and a limited role of the government in the development process whereas a more heterodox view considers debt as logical, necessary, and helpful in order to allow the government to pursue an ambitious growth and development strategy. However, things change when the economy is considered in its international context: foreign debt is different from domestic debt and while the same heterodox analysis still rejects the Washington Consensus' demand for trade and financial liberalization, its own ambitious development strategies for the domestic economy get constrained by trade deficits, the threat of capital flight, and exchange rate instability. The question arises how the government can still significantly contribute to economic development beyond the limits of a purely private sector–driven approach. This is why this chapter reviews proposals to relax or overcome the balance-of-payments constraint. Finally, it considers a reform of international payments, which can be implemented by a single country unilaterally, and which enables it to stabilize its current account, avoid foreign debt accumulation, and support domestic development strategies.

This chapter addresses the impact of gendered social capital in developing countries to understand the barriers and opportunities to women's entrepreneurship with social capital development and also to examine factors influencing the development of social capital for women and how the identified factors benefit the creation of their entrepreneurial activities. This study follows a systemic literature review to achieve the purpose of the research by examining the selected articles in both English and Turkish, followed by factor comparison between developing, developed countries, and world datasets obtained from Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) database. The finding shows that social capital strongly impacts the entrepreneurial activities among women entrepreneurs in developing countries, especially in Turkey. Although the academic and practical studies on this field were started about two decades ago in Turkey, it has faced a radical increase in last 5 years and many practitioners and scholars working on these concepts. The clusters in English and Turkish resources are almost the same; however, the density and number of key terms are much lower in Turkish literature which shows a gap for Turkish researchers to publish more in this field to examine variables for better view about women entrepreneurship and social capital related to it.

As Africa’s internet penetration rates increase, and a significant portion of the continent’s population turns to social media as a source of news, platforms like Facebook are increasingly becoming crucial for political, public health, and risk communication. Thus, it is useful to gain insights into how state authorities are using these platforms to communicate with citizens especially in times of crisis. This study sought to examine how state authorities in Ethiopia, Ghana, Sierra Leone, and Zimbabwe framed public crisis communication on Facebook during the COVID-19 lockdowns in the respective countries. Qualitative content analysis of Facebook posts by the state authorities in the four countries over a six-week period before and after the COVID-19 lockdowns yielded several frames or strategies employed by authorities in the case countries. These included; education, caution, cooperation, government measures, hope, nationalism, and scaremongering. Other frames included impact, militarisation, politicisation, and religion. The analysis establishes, as in several other countries, Facebook as a current and strategic choice in state-spearheaded crisis communication. Whereas the main frames were globally and regionally driven, other frames encapsulated national contexts drawing on national histories, patriotism, hopes and fears that sometimes seemed contradictory and capricious.

This chapter explores how the dynamics of cross-border conflicts relate to the characteristics of the states involved. The underlying idea is that cross-border conflicts will develop in different ways and involve different sets of actors depending on the relative strengths and other characteristics of the states separated by the border. This proposition is investigated through a comparison of the conflict dynamics across three of Ethiopia's borders. These borders differ in terms of the relative strength of the two states they separate in each case, as well as on the kind of state presence found in the borderlands. Thus, the border between Eritrea and Ethiopia can be said to have a strong state presence on both sides; between Somalia and Ethiopia the state is considerably stronger on the Ethiopian side; while the border between Ethiopia and Sudan has a weak state presence on both sides. The conflict dynamics across the border with Eritrea have tended to be of a ‘classic’ bipolar and interstate kind, while the border with Sudan has seen a much more complex and ‘anarchic’ conflict pattern, involving a complex array of both non-state and state actors. The Somalia border falls somewhere in between, with a complex set of actors and conflicts, yet subject to an overall structuring along one dimension. These differences are argued to be congruent with the relative strength of state presence in these borderlands. The main value of the chapter may lie in its approach to the theme of African borders, and in the relativistic way in which it conceptualizes state strength.