High time for exploring opportunities in Ethiopia, says Henock Assefa

Addis Ababa, Ethiopia – Precise Consult International PLC (PCI), a premier consulting firm operating in Addis Ababa and New York City, is to link 200 foreign CEOs with 200 local CEO next Wednesday before the upcoming World Economic Forum is in full swing the following days. Henok Assefa, PCI managing partner spoke to The Reporter’s Hayal Alemayehu about the significance of the event and the role of the diaspora in Ethiopia’s economy.

Your company is to organize Ethiopia Investment Forum next Wednesday before the World Economic Forum is in full swing. What is the significance of convening the event in the first place? 

The World Economic Forum on Africa actually gathers the most important people in terms of leaders (including those in civil society, businesses, government and so on) within the Africa context in one location every year. Because of its prominence and successfulness, what happens is that the Forum gathers a really good number of people who look forward to the next meeting every time. As part of that, whenever you have an interesting group like that, you want to divert them for your own purposes. In our case, the benefit of hosting the World Economic Forum is not much if we cannot get some of them to look at our country in a different way and see if we can get them to invest in our country. So our objective is to divert a group from the total list of attendees of the Forum, the business-oriented ones, those that are curious about Ethiopia and looking for opportunities to invest in the country. In addition to that, our objective is to provide these prospective investors with a platform to better understand the economic dynamics here and meet with Ethiopian entrepreneurs, business leaders and government authorities and policymakers. Read full interview on Ethiopian Reporter.