From Chile to Ethiopia, A Pipeline for Electric Transit

Chile built the largest electric bus fleet outside China. Now Ethiopia wants to follow suit.

The woman on the bus in Antofagasta recognized Chile’s transport minister immediately.

Juan Carlos Muñoz was riding the new electric line through the northern coastal city. The bus was quiet and modern. It glided along without the black ribbon of diesel smoke that used to clog the air.

“Minister,” she told him, “this is my avioncito.” My little airplane.

Months later, Muñoz still thinks about the remark.

“I imagine she had never been on an airplane,” he said. “But the electric bus felt like one.”

For him, the moment captured something larger than climate policy. “There’s a sense of modernization and dignity that people feel when the government invests in making their daily lives better.”

Nine years ago, Chile’s capital Santiago had two electric buses. Today, over 4000 hum through the streets, with additional rollouts in eleven of Chile's sixteen regions. Santiago operates the largest urban electric bus fleet outside China – an outcome few expected a decade ago from a middle-income nation.

Now Ethiopia wants to follow suit.

Last month, Ethiopian officials endorsed a Chile-led declaration to cut transport energy demand by 25 percent by 2035, with at least one-third of that energy coming from renewable sources and sustainable biofuels. The country has already banned most fossil fuel vehicle imports and is building a bus rapid transit corridor to run entirely on electricity. Now, Ethiopia is studying Chile’s playbook: from infrastructure and financing to workforce training.

Chile’s electrification journey

In 2019, as Chile prepared to host the 25th UN Climate Change Conference (COP25), the government established long-term targets: carbon neutrality by 2050, zero-emission sales for all new vehicles by 2035, and a fully electric urban bus fleet by 2040.

When an opposition government took office in 2022, it could have dismantled the strategy. Instead, Muñoz said, it expanded it.

“We took the relay and kept working on what had already been committed and achieved,” he continued.

The result is visible far beyond Santiago. In cities like Antofagasta, passengers now board the same zero-emission buses used in the capital. Chile’s electric bus rollout has become a model – not just for the buses themselves, but because the system around them proved scalable and politically durable.

A different starting point

Ethiopia’s path toward electrification emerges from a different economic reality.

Vehicle ownership is among the world's lowest, at roughly 13 vehicles per 1,000 people. The country spends over USD 4.2 billion a year importing fuel, a heavy strain on scarce foreign currency reserves. Electricity offers a solution: more than 90 percent of Ethiopia's power comes from domestic hydropower, bolstered by the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam.

"This is really about energy security and macroeconomic stability," said Dr Bikila Teklu, an assistant professor at the College of Technology and Built Environment of Addis Ababa University.

Roughly 110 locally assembled electric buses operate in Addis Ababa today, with officials hoping to deploy 850 more by next year’s UN Climate Change Conference (COP32), which Ethiopia will host.

But Teklu is careful about simplistic comparisons with Chile. Outside major cities, electricity access remains inconsistent, and blackouts remain common. “The transition will be uneven geographically, but the focus should remain on public transport in urban areas,” he said.

There is also a practical reason to prioritize buses over electric cars. For the moment, Ethiopia’s clean electricity supply is finite. Moving millions of people efficiently through public transport requires far less energy than replacing every gasoline car with an electric one.

Even that, however, requires something Ethiopia still lacks at scale.

"Capacity at all levels – technicians, engineers, innovators – is a crucial component of the electric vehicle ecosystem," Teklu said. "And it's one of the biggest bottlenecks."

The Action Agenda’s push for bus and rail electrification

The challenge is not unique to Ethiopia. As cities race to electrify their bus fleets, many are discovering that the limiting factor is the people needed to deploy them.

That’s where the Global Climate Action Agenda comes in – a part of the UN climate process which brings together governments, cities, businesses, and civil society to deliver climate solutions.

Under the Action Agenda, partners are leading the push for bus and rail electrification worldwide. Among them are the International Association of Public Transport (UITP), a global network of 2,000 companies across more than 100 countries, and the SLOCAT Partnership, a coalition focused on sustainable low-carbon transport.

Top of the agenda is dismantling the bottlenecks that repeatedly slow deployment, such as financing, regulation, and – in the case of Chile and Ethiopia – skills. At COP30 last November, UITP pledged to double training levels for public transport professionals during the UN Decade for Sustainable Transport.

Already, UITP runs a training academy with regional centres on every continent, covering everything from electric bus procurement to depot design. It also facilitates peer-to-peer exchanges between transit systems. When Santiago was scaling its fleet, UITP connected Chilean operators with global transport companies to learn best practices. Now others are learning from Chile – including Ethiopia.

"When it comes to delivering public transport, electric buses are only part of the equation," said Philip Turner, who leads UITP's sustainability initiatives. "The challenge is building the technical skills. Organizations like UITP and its members have accumulated enormous expertise, but too often it remains siloed. The next phase of the transition is about sharing that knowledge more widely."

Setting a global goal on transport

While technical exchange is critical, Turner argues the sector needs political backing too. Transport, he points out, lacks a quantified global goal unlike energy. Although countries have agreed to triple renewable energy and double energy efficiency, there is no equivalent goal for moving people and goods. SLOCAT and others are pressing governments to set one. Ethiopia has signaled its support.

This is the same logic that took Chile from two electric buses to the largest fleet outside China: set the destination clearly, then build the system to reach it.

For countries at the beginning of the transition, that direction matters. A shared goal can align policy and investment around a common destination. Experience accumulated in one city can help another move faster and avoid mistakes.

Ideally that coordination transforms ordinary moments into the extraordinary: Like a woman boarding a bus in Antofagasta, feeling, for the first time, as though she were flying.