> “Ethiopia, barely a country, torn by civil war, without a shred of functional infrastructure anywhere in sight”
Look up some pictures of Addis Ababa. It’s probably not what you expect.
The regional differences within Ethiopia are very large. One way to grasp the scale is to look at UN’s Human Development Index (HDI) rankings.
The poorest Ethiopian regions have an HDI score around 0.44 [1] while Addis Ababa reaches 0.74. That’s higher than many Mexican states.
For comparison, Mississippi has a HDI rating of 0.866. By this metric, life in the Ethiopian capital is much closer to living in the poorest American state than to living in other parts of Ethiopia. They have stable power, cars, highways, office towers, malls, and the rest of developed infrastructure.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Ethiopian_regions_by_H...