In its effort to implement a cost effective diplomacy, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MoFA) disclosed that it has finalized a study to restructure the headquarters, embassies and consular offices of Ethiopia.
This was revealed during the regular weekly briefing by the spokesperson of the Ministry, Dina Mufti, which was held on Thursday, August 19, 2021. He said that the Ministry has finalized a study that will help make its diplomatic operations effective.
It can be recalled that Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed (PhD) spoke of reconsidering the relevance of existing embassies and consular offices across the world in a parliamentary address a few months ago. “We don’t need such a huge diplomatic mission across the world. We have to reduce the number of our embassies to 30,” the PM had said.
In this regard, Dina stated that some of the embassies are equipped with a large number of manpower and not a proper diplomatic activity. Therefore, by decreasing that human resource, it would be easy to reduce the Ministry’s expenses.
“The existing COVID-19 pandemic has impacted the world economy, which has also forced institutions to perform with limited human resources,” Dina said. He added “Some of the embassies have been opened without proper research and are worshiped like a church or mosque, but do not deliver the proper diplomatic activity.”
To this end, Dina said while closing different consular offices located in different cities of China, we will keep the Beijing embassy and also by closing the consular offices located in different cities in the US, we will keep only the Washington embassy and the New York mission to the UN.
