Free Leather Training in Akaki Kality Meets an Export Line That Has Halved

A training programme in Akaki Kality sub-city is offering young people free entry into leather and leather-goods production — not only the training, but workspace, licences and working machines. It is open to residents aged 18 to 35 and is run by the Duka Youth Led Organization and Redeem the Generation with the Emmanuel Development Organization, supported by the Mastercard Foundation.

The sector those trainees are being pointed at is shrinking.

What the leather numbers say

Addis Fortune this week set out the arithmetic of Ethiopian leather:

• 70.2 million cattle, 52.5 million goats, 42.9 million sheep and 8.1 million camels — one of the largest livestock bases in the world.
• Roughly 70 percent of slaughtered hides and skins never reach a formal manufacturing facility.
• Annual leather and leather-product export earnings fell from 33.2 million dollars in 2020/21 to 16 million dollars in 2024/25.
• The most recent quarter produced 3.7 million dollars.

A country with 70 million cattle earning 16 million dollars a year from leather is not short of raw material. It is short of the collection network that turns a slaughtered animal into a gradeable hide before the hide spoils.

The mismatch worth naming

Training programmes are built at the finishing end of the chain — cutting, stitching, small-batch goods. The documented failure is at the aggregation end, in the weeks between an abattoir and a tannery.

That does not make the programme worthless. Workspace, a licence and a machine are the three things that stop most Ethiopian micro-manufacturers from starting at all, and a trainee who leaves with all three is further along than most. But graduates will be buying inputs in the same market that is failing the tanneries, and a business plan that assumes cheap, well-graded local hides is assuming away the sector's actual problem.

Open

Neither the number of places, an application deadline, nor the programme's total budget has been published. Nor has any of the organisations said what happens to the workspace and machines once the first cohort's businesses are established. The leather export figures come from Addis Fortune's reporting and have not been checked against Customs Commission data.

The Amharic announcement reaches fact.et through machine translation; the programme details above are reported as announced and have not been independently confirmed.

Sources: Tikvah Economy & Jobs, 24 September 2026, Addis Fortune, 24 September 2026