LONDON: Britain’s foreign secretary said she would use a visit to Ethiopia to focus on measures to ​stem the rising number of migrants from the Horn of Africa seeking to reach the UK.
Yvette Cooper said job creation partnerships would dissuade people from leaving Ethiopia, while stronger law enforcement cooperation was essential to counter smuggler gangs and speed up returns ‌of migrants ‌with no right to ‌stay in ​Britain.
“We ‌are working together to tackle the economic drivers of illegal migration and the criminal gangs who operate globally, profiting from trading in people,” Cooper said in a statement.
“That includes new partnerships to improve trade and create thousands of good jobs in Ethiopia so people can find a ‌better life back home instead ‍of making perilous ‍journeys.”
Successive British governments have sought to address illegal immigration, an issue that has helped propel the populist campaigner Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party into a commanding lead in opinion polls. 
Approximately 30 percent of people crossing the English Channel in small boats over the past two years were nationals from Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia, and Sudan, the British Foreign Ministry said.
To boost job creation in Ethiopia, Cooper is set to sign an agreement with the country to advance two energy transmission projects led by Gridworks, a UK investment organization.
She planned to announce £17 million worth of funding for tackling violence against women and girls, assistance for ‌68,000 children suffering malnutrition, and for projects working with displaced people.
Meanwhile, Tigrayans in northern Ethiopia fear a return to all-out war amid reports that clashes were continuing between local and federal forces on Monday, barely three years after the last devastating conflict in the region.
The civil war of 2020-2022 between the Ethiopian government and Tigray forces killed more than 600,000 people and a peace deal known as the Pretoria Agreement has never fully resolved the tensions.
Fighting broke out again last week in a disputed area of western Tigray called Tselemt and the Afar region to the east of Tigray.