Early 2020 was a hopeful time for Ethiopia’s startups. Venture capitalists were increasingly eyeing Ethiopian startups, and the country improved its rank on the World Bank’s 2019 Ease of Doing Business report. Just before the start of the war, over a year back, Ethiopia was seeing a fast-growing pool of companies launching various digital services that dared to change the traditional ways of doing business.
But now, as Ethiopia is deep in a bloody one-year civil war, shifting winds have brought a completely different scene in the Ethiopian public discourse. People are making statements about where they stand in the war with simple hashtags, while no public opinion goes unnoticed. Even Ethiopia’s business moguls, entrepreneurs, and innovators who in modern history have mostly kept quiet about politics, are now part of the public discourse.
The tech community finds itself taking sides too in a war that has deeply polarized Ethiopians locally and abroad. To highlight a few examples, one tech-founder has become a prominent pro-government voice on social media, another has found a way to provide humanitarian assistance while offering innovative solutions, while another finds herself a pariah of the state for a leaked video that allegedly “reveals a conspiracy to bring down the current Abiy regime.”
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Originally published on Quartz : Original article