ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia — For most of the past five years, the trains on the Addis Ababa light rail arrived when they arrived. Passengers at the Meskel Square station learned to wait 40 minutes, then give up and climb into a minibus. By early 2024, only 13 of the system’s 41 trains were operating. Spare parts had run out, and the Chinese contractor that built and initially operated the line had gone home. On Monday morning, trains were leaving every eight minutes.
The city’s transport bureau announced last week that 30 trains are back in service after a two-year, $110 million overhaul financed by the Ethiopian government and a loan from the African Development Bank. Daily ridership, which had fallen to 60,000 in 2024, has climbed back to 125,000, and the bureau says it expects to reach the original design figure of 150,000 by next year.
The light rail, which opened in 2015 as the first in sub-Saharan Africa, was once a symbol of Ethiopia’s ambitions. Two lines, 34 kilometers in total, cut through the capital of 5.5 million people on elevated viaducts and street-level track, powered by the country’s hydroelectric grid. Within a few years, however, the system was faltering. Trains broke down and were cannibalized for parts; the overhead power supply failed during the city’s frequent outages; fares, fixed at 2 to 6 birr, about 2 to 5 United States cents, covered a fraction of costs.
“We built it like a monument and ran it like an afterthought,” said Dr. Tsegaye Bekele Alemu, a transport engineer at Addis Ababa University who advised on the overhaul. “The lesson of the last ten years is that a railway is mostly maintenance.”
The rehabilitation replaced traction motors and braking systems on 28 trains, rebuilt three substations, and, for the first time, established a local parts inventory and a training program for Ethiopian technicians. A separate contract with a Turkish firm will deliver 10 new trains in 2027. Fares rose in September to 5 to 15 birr, a tripling that drew complaints but is still cheaper than a minibus.
For riders, the change is measured in hours. Hiwot Girma, 27, a bank clerk who lives in Ayat, on the eastern end of the line, said her commute had fallen from 100 minutes by minibus to 45 by train. “Last year I stopped using it because you never knew,” she said. “Now I plan my morning around it again.”
The revival comes as Addis Ababa undergoes a wrenching reconstruction. A corridor development program has demolished thousands of homes and shops along major roads to widen them and add bicycle lanes and parks, displacing an estimated 50,000 people, according to housing advocates. The light rail is one of the few existing pieces of infrastructure the program has chosen to build around rather than remove.
Not everything is fixed. Power cuts still halt the trains several times a month, and the bureau has yet to secure a generator contract. The viaduct over Megenagna, one of the busiest junctions, needs structural repairs that will close a section for several weeks next year.
At Meskel Square on Monday, a train pulled in at 8:02 a.m., three minutes late. The passengers, most of whom had been waiting since 7:50, seemed not to mind.
A version of this article appears in print on Oct. 12, 2026, Section A, Page 17 of the European edition with the headline: Addis Ababa’s Light Rail, Africa’s First, Gets a Second Life After Years of Breakdowns.
