Addis Abeba Wants Medical Tourists Within Five Years While Its Own Patients Fly Out

Addis Abeba's mayor, Adanech Abiebie, has set out a plan to turn the capital into a major medical-tourism destination within five years, Addis Fortune reported. She made the case in a New Year interview with the state broadcaster and while inaugurating a health facility in Lafto.

Addis Fortune set that ambition against the traffic already moving in the opposite direction. Every week, flights out of Bole International Airport to New Delhi, Mumbai and Dubai carry middle-class Ethiopians going abroad for medical care, with their files in one hand and hard-won foreign currency in the other.

The currency argument is the real one

Medical tourism is usually sold as an export industry, and it is — but for Ethiopia the more immediate arithmetic is on the import side. Outbound medical travel is a foreign-currency outflow that does not appear in the trade statistics as a health cost. It is paid for in dollars the patient has had to source, often at a rate well above the official one, on top of flights and accommodation for a companion.

Substituting even a fraction of that traffic with care delivered in Addis would retain currency without earning a single dollar from a foreign patient. That is the achievable version of the mayor's goal, and it is a smaller claim than the one she made.

The harder version — attracting paying patients from the region — requires the capital to be demonstrably better at specialised care than the alternatives those patients already use. Addis Fortune's assessment is that the ambition is worth pursuing but runs into the reality that the country struggles to provide specialised care reliably for its own citizens. A hospital cannot market a specialty abroad that it rations at home.

Open

The city has not published the plan, a budget, a list of target specialties, or the regulatory and accreditation changes that foreign patients and their insurers would require. Nor has it said what role private hospitals and diaspora investors are expected to play, or how the plan relates to federal health policy.

Sources: Addis Fortune, 26 September 2026