Contractors Renew the Call for Enforceable Standards and Point at the Money

The Ethiopian Construction Contractors Association has renewed its call for enforceable national standards in the construction sector — and has framed the standards question as a financial one rather than a technical one.

The association points to an imbalance between contractors and their clients, compounded by disputes over valuation and by constrained access to capital, which industry figures say is undermining the delivery of projects. Engineer Girma Habtemariam, the association's president, is among those making the argument.

Standards as a credit problem

The sequence the association describes is familiar to anyone who has financed a build. A contractor prices work, executes it, and then submits a valuation. If the client disputes that valuation — or simply takes its time — the contractor carries the cost. With capital hard to come by and expensive, that gap is not a cash-flow inconvenience. It is the difference between finishing and stopping.

Standards enter here not as a quality regime but as an arbiter. A national standard that can be enforced gives a valuation dispute a reference point outside the relationship between the two parties. Without one, the stronger balance sheet wins, and in Ethiopian construction that is almost never the contractor.

That matters beyond the sector. Construction is one of the larger employers of Ethiopian labour and one of the larger consumers of Ethiopian bank credit. A contracting base that cannot get paid on time is a contracting base that borrows more, bids higher, or leaves.

Open

The association has not published the standards it wants, nor said which body it expects to enforce them. There has been no response from the regulator, and no indication of whether the call has been made to a ministry or to parliament.

Sources: Birr Metrics, 25 September 2026