THE Ethiopian officials visiting Shenzhen saw how it was transformed from a fishing village into a metropolitan within 35 years, spawning China’s economic miracle. The message was clear: Ethiopia can do this, too.

Yet one minister on the 2013 trip didn’t believe that was enough and sought out his host, Helen Hai.

“What I need is somebody to show me how to take the first step,” Hai recalled him saying.

Hai, who at the time ran a pioneering shoe factory in Ethiopia, considered that a seminal conversation for her. Within months, she began setting up the Made in Africa Initiative. Backed by the United Nations Development Program and with a who’s who list of African leaders as advisers, its mission was to help the continent create manufacturing hubs.

Five years later, her quest has expanded significantly. Hai, 40, co-founded factories making children’s clothes in Rwanda, Senegal and Ethiopia, and she became the UN Industrial Development Organization’s goodwill ambassador in Africa. In July, she began exploring how blockchain technology might help create jobs for the nations there and now heads the US$100 million Binance Blockchain Charity Foundation.

“There’s a golden opportunity for Africa,” Hai said. “What it needs now is success stories. They have a snowballing effect.”

Hai is an unlikely champion for Africa’s development. She grew up in Changchun in Jilin Province in northeastern China.

In 2011, Hai established her own brand of shoes. That led to a meeting with Zhang Huarong, the chairman of Dongguan-based Huajian Shoes Industry Co., who asked her to help him set up a shoe factory near Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Ababa.

Hai was intrigued by the idea of building a factory in a developing nation, she said. Within three months, Huajian was exporting shoes to the United States, and within two years it had about 4,000 employees, Hai said. The factory has supplied such brands as Nine West, Guess and Marc Fisher.

In 2013, former Ethiopia Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn invited Hai to accompany him on his first official visit to China. Sitting together on a flight, Hailemariam thanked her for making Huajian successful and then asked her to expand to hundreds, even thousands of factories, Hai said.

So Hai left Huajian to become the first Chinese adviser to the Ethiopian Government while pressing forward with her Made in Africa Initiative. Her work in Africa predates China’s ongoing Belt and Road Initiative.

Hundreds of Chinese companies have flocked to Ethiopia, helping it become Africa’s fastest-growing economy for most of the past decade. Ethiopia absorbed almost half of the US$7.6 billion in foreign investment in East Africa last year, according to the UN Conference on Trade and Development’s World Investment Report.

(SD-Agencies)