Liberals blow $13.5M on Ethiopian women's startups, deliver just 5% of promised results
Taxpayers are left footing the bill again as Global Affairs Canada spends millions on gender equity projects in Africa, as investments in Ethiopian women's startups fail to deliver results.
The Carney government is spending millions of taxpayer dollars to “empower” women entrepreneurs in Ethiopia — but the foreign aid program is failing to deliver even a fraction of what was promised, and officials won’t say who’s actually benefitting.
As first reported by Le Journal de Montréal, Global Affairs Canada has already committed $6 million to the “Accelerating the Growth of Women’s Entrepreneurship” project since 2022 and plans to spend another $7.5 million over the next three years — bringing the total taxpayer cost to $13.5 million.
The goal was to use that public money to attract $81 million in private investment into Ethiopian small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) focused on gender equity. SMEs are businesses with modest employee counts and revenues that often drive job creation and innovation in developing economies.
But the numbers so far are bleak: the total private capital raised through the program is just $4.1 million — a meagre 5% of the original target. That’s a 66-cent return on every taxpayer dollar spent, when the goal was $6 per dollar invested.
“Despite the progress made to date, the investment climate and regulatory environment in Ethiopia continue to pose challenges that hinder capital flows to small and medium-sized enterprises,” said Global Affairs Canada spokesperson Louis-Carl Brissette-Lesage in an emailed statement.
While the department insists the program remains committed to its “long-term vision” of empowering women and growing Ethiopia’s economy, it refused to answer basic questions — including how many businesses have actually received funding.
Global Affairs claims the program has created 4,560 jobs in Ethiopia over the past two years, including 1,213 for women — but no independent verification has been provided, and no performance audits have been released.
Meanwhile, back at home, Global Affairs bureaucrats have been on a different kind of spending spree — outfitting foreign embassies with expensive artwork.
According to access-to-information documents obtained by the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, the department spent more than $527,000 on embassy art in 2023 and 2024 alone — including a $9,900 “mixed-media LEGO” piece purchased just days before the fiscal year-end deadline.
Here’s the breakdown:
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March 31, 2023: $160,000 spent on 32 art pieces
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February 9, 2024: $291,000 spent on 71 more
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March 26, 2024: Another $50,000 in last-minute purchases
“It’s supremely disrespectful to taxpayers to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on art they’ll never see in far-flung embassies,” said CTF federal director Franco Terrazzano.
“We shouldn’t be buying overpriced LEGO sets while Canadians are struggling to pay rent.”
This isn’t the first time the Liberal government’s foreign spending priorities have raised eyebrows.
Ottawa recently spent $6.2 million to ‘transform’ the economy of a region in Colombia, and Quebec taxpayers are now on the hook for $1 million a year to operate EV charging stations that many barely use.
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Sheila Gunn Reid
Chief Reporter
Sheila Gunn Reid is the Alberta Bureau Chief for Rebel News and host of the weekly The Gunn Show with Sheila Gunn Reid. She's a mother of three, conservative activist, and the author of best-selling books including Stop Notley.
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COMMENTS
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Bruce Atchison commented 2025-07-21 21:41:48 -0400Of course Ethiopian women need help but screw entrepreneurs in Canada. What butt backward idiots Liberals are. Let charities help Third World people to start their own businesses. The money will be much better spent than having government grants taken from us to pay who-knows-who in that country.
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Bernhard Jatzeck commented 2025-07-21 21:12:28 -0400As usual, there’s never enough money to properly do things in this country but lots of moolah for stuff like this. Then again, the Civil Service Party is never wrong.
