National lotteries are a very big business worldwide and countries are benefiting immensely from the proceeds from various state lotteries. What lotteries do is they entice punters to spend significant amounts of money as they chase the opportunity to win life-changing cash prizes. Lottery proceeds hugely to into public sectors, including education, park services, and funds for veterans and seniors.
For every lottery ticket sold, a certain percentage goes to the prizes, other goes to the state, whilst a smaller percentage goes to the retail outlet for sales commission, so if for example, a jackpot is 10,000,000 birr the state will also receive quite a similar amount, so you can see how profitable lottery is.
Ethiopia has its own national lottery and the National Lottery Administration of Ethiopia was established as the first autonomous & legal state lottery by Proclamation number 183 in 1961. According to an article which was published in 2019, the National Lottery Administration of Ethiopia earned 114 million birr from a period between July 2018 to December 2018, this proves how lottery is playing its part in helping this cash strapped country.
The reason why the National Lottery Administration of Ethiopia realise those huge numbers is because it has the sole lottery license and there are no domestically licensed online lotteries in Ethiopia so anyone who wishes to bet on lottery in Ethiopia has to make use of their services.
As earlier indicated, the National Lottery Administration of Ethiopia is the official land-based lotto operator in the country, and up to now, they are still offering a land-based lottery service and they are yet to launch an online lottery in Ethiopia.