Ethiopia’s aspiring developmental regime takes the availability of cheap and predominantly young labour as one of the key factors in its plan of rapid industrialisation. The government is also determined to keep production cost low by refraining from setting a legally binding minimum wage. Abundant and cheap labour is one of the many incentives the government is providing to lure global capital whose profit is remotely threatened by rising wages in East Asia. Whilst rapid industrialisation is geared towards achieving structural transformation, how does it affect young peoples’ aspiration of transitioning into a socially acceptable and economically independent status of adulthood?
Some scholars argue that East Asian developmental states succeeded in achieving structural transformation by effectively ‘reaping the demographic dividend’ of a predominantly young labour force. At the center of this ‘reaping’ lies the extraction of surplus through an exploitative and repressive labour regime that favours capital. The developmentalist discourse of the Ethiopian government also resonates with this strategy by stating that the current generation has to pay the sacrifice to reach the promised land of an industrialised and developed Ethiopia. This paper aims to explore the implications of this developmentalist orientation of the government in shaping the aspirations of young people working in the recently established industrial parks. As the current trend of population dynamics shows, most of the young people joining the industrial parks are migrants from the rural areas hoping for a better life. The paper takes a human perspective on the transformational agenda of the government by examining its implications on the social, economic and political future of these young people.