are created to enhance minorities’ participation, it is important to ensure that these institutions are supported with necessary human and financial resources to enable them to properly discharge the mandates for which they are created. Secondly, economic empowerment of minorities can serve both as a preventive measure to conflict induced humanitarian crises and as mitigative factor during or after humanitarian crises. On the opposite, economic exclusion of minorities can cause or contribute to conflicts between minorities and states, minorities against corporations, minorities versus majorities or even minorities against other minorities. As one MRG reports details: Ill planned or intentionally discriminatory economic and development policies/programmes can deepen inequalities, entrench power and economic hierarchies, and stimulate or aggravate inter-ethnic tensions leading to conflict. Development that clashes with the priorities and needs of minorities and indigenous peoples, such as through the appropriation of lands, can lead to what is called ‘development induced conflict’. Development induced conflicts is a reality today for many minorities around the world. In Ethiopia, since 2007 the government has embarked on the promotion of large-scale agricultural investments as one of its major development programmes. As a matter of state policy, this programme was primarily promoted in minority regions because according to the officials there is ‘vast unused nobody’s lands’ in these regions. Around the same time, the government also introduced villagization program supposedly to facilitate the provision of social services to scattered communities. Although the government maintained that these are two separate programs, minorities believe villagization was only used as pretext to free up more land for investors. The impacts of these policies on the Anywa community were immense. In 2012 at the peak of these two programs, hundreds of Anywa migrated to neighbouring countries in search of safety and security. Community elders and officials who questioned this program are still languishing in central prison in Addis Ababa charged under the controversial anti-terrorism law. These types of economic development policies and programs do not help minorities. On the contrary, they worsen their situation by turning them into minorities even in their own regions. Governments need to put in place minority cantered economic empowerment programs that help minorities to be in charge of their economic wellbeing. Agricultural extension programs, small business schemes and connecting minority entrepreneurs to national and international market opportunities can be a win-win solution for minorities and majorities alike and encourage peaceful co-existence among communities.