There's a phrase you hear in every compound, every church courtyard, every wedding in Addis right now, said half as a joke and half as a prayer: "Bel indey wediya kalegn" — just get me a visa. Not a job. Not a title. A visa. That's the whole ambition. And if you think that's dramatic, sit with this number for a second: in the first half of 2025 alone, outward movement along the Eastern Route out of the Horn of Africa jumped by a third, to 238,000 people, according to the IOM's own tracking — reported, notably, by Addis Standard itself. That is not a trickle. That is a generation voting with its feet.
We are not lazy. We are liquid. We are the water finding the only crack in the wall.
The Math That Makes Leaving Rational
Let's do the arithmetic your economics teacher never wanted to do out loud.
In 2019, one US dollar bought roughly 30 birr. By this month, it's buying north of 160 birr on the market — and that's the official number, after the government floated the currency in 2024 to satisfy an IMF loan. A litre of petrol that cost 78 birr in May 2024 was over 129 birr by the end of 2025. Rent in Addis Ababa climbed roughly 18 percent in a single year, even as the government's own inflation figures claimed price growth was cooling — a gap so wide that economic analysts openly question whether the official numbers reflect what a household actually feels at the market stall. Meanwhile, urban youth unemployment sits near 27 percent — and for young women, it's roughly double the rate of young men.
Put plainly: the price of everything is rising faster than the chance of earning it. You cannot save your way into a future when the ground under your savings is sinking.
So when your uncle in the diaspora WhatsApp group calls this generation "lazy" for not staying to "build the country," ask him one question: how do you build a house when the landlord charges you rent just to breathe? How do you plant something permanent in soil that devalues 400 percent in five years? Leaving isn't a betrayal of Ethiopia. It is often the only financially rational decision available to a 24-year-old with a diploma and no connections.
The Price of the Exit Is Written in the Sand and the Sea
Here is the part nobody wants printed on a visa pamphlet: the exit has a body count, and it is overwhelmingly ours.
Almost all of the more than 900 deaths recorded on the Eastern Route to Yemen and the Gulf in 2025 were Ethiopian, according to the IOM's global count of migrant deaths — a route that saw fatalities nearly double compared with the year before. In August 2025, a boat carrying 154 Ethiopian migrants capsized off the coast of Yemen; at least 68 people drowned and 74 more were never found, according to the Mixed Migration Centre's tracking of the route. Those crossing the Obock desert in Djibouti on the way to that same coastline have died from heat exposure and forced disembarkations at sea; women and girls making that crossing have more than doubled in number in a single year, a fact humanitarian workers flag as its own warning sign. On the other side of the continent, the Central Mediterranean to Europe remains, in the IOM's own words, the deadliest migration route on Earth.
This is the "prosperity party" we've been sold: a desert crossing, a smuggler's price tag, a coast guard cell in Libya where torture and extortion are documented, routine practice, and — if you're one of the lucky ones — a rubber boat with too many people and not enough fuel. And still, hundreds of thousands go. That is not recklessness. That is what happens when staying and leaving are both a gamble, and only one of them has a ceiling.
The Honest Complication
It would be dishonest to leave out the other half of this story. Ethiopia's GDP is projected to grow above 7 percent in 2026, among the fastest rates in the world, and inflation has genuinely fallen from over 30 percent in 2022 to single digits by the end of 2025 — a real, if fragile, achievement of the currency float and IMF program. Economists call this a "jobless growth" problem: the money is showing up in infrastructure and construction, capital-intensive sectors that don't hire at the scale the exiting generation needs. And leaving is not automatically salvation — tens of thousands of Ethiopians are also being forcibly returned from Saudi Arabia every year, 55,700 in just the first half of 2025 alone, sent back to the very regions, Amhara, Tigray, and Oromia, that they fled. The exit is not a clean door. For many, it's a revolving one.
That complication doesn't cancel the argument. It sharpens it. Growth on a spreadsheet and a country a 24-year-old can actually build a life in are, right now, two different places.
Build the Parallel Structure Anyway
So here's the pivot, and it's the part I actually want you to remember, quote, and act on tonight — not tomorrow, tonight.
If we must stay, we will not wait for permission to live.
Every study circle you start with three friends around a stack of secondhand books is infrastructure. Every iqub or idir you organize with neighbors — pooling money the formal banking system was too slow, too expensive, or too far away to offer — is infrastructure. Every skill-share, every informal apprenticeship, every group chat that turns into a small collective business, every rotating fund that pays a friend's rent this month so they can pay yours next month — that is not a hobby. That is a parallel economy, built by people the official one wrote off.
You don't need the state's permission to teach your neighbor's kid to code. You don't need a landlord's mercy to split a flat five ways and call it a commune instead of a crisis. You don't need a visa to build something that outlives you. The government spent five years teaching this generation that the only ladder out is a boat or a border. Prove them wrong by building a floor to stand on instead.
We are not asking you to fall back in love with a system that starved you into a smuggler's queue. We're asking you to stop waiting for that system to fix itself before you start building something of your own, here, with the people standing next to you right now.
Bel indey wediya kalegn got us onto boats that didn't survive the crossing. Let the next phrase we make famous be one that keeps us here, together, and alive.
Sidoc Haytu writes on political economy and conflict in the Horn of Africa.
