India-Ethiopia Hold Second Joint Defence Meeting in Addis Ababa

India and Ethiopia held the second Joint Defence Cooperation (JDC) meeting in Addis Ababa on 28 September 2026, taking forward a defence relationship that the two countries have been building through a formal institutional channel.

What the two sides discussed

The agenda ranged across military training, joint exercises, medical cooperation, peacekeeping and the defence industry. Both delegations agreed to widen and deepen the work already under way, and settled on a set of practical routes for doing so: exchanging personnel between their training institutes, examining where joint ventures in defence production might be set up, arranging visits by delegations and holding sessions at which each side shares its own experience.

Who took part

The meeting was co-chaired by Shri Sanjay Kumar, Joint Secretary in the Ministry of Defence, and Major General Teshome Gemechu, Director General for Defence Foreign Relations and Military Cooperation of Ethiopia. Officers from the Department of Defence and Air Headquarters made up the Indian side. Shri Devesh Uttam, India's Ambassador to Ethiopia, also attended.

The mechanism behind the meeting

The JDC is not an ad hoc gathering. It flows from the Defence Cooperation Memorandum of Understanding that the defence ministers of the two countries signed in February 2025, which created a standing mechanism for such consultations. The first meeting under it was held in New Delhi in October 2025, so the Addis Ababa round completes the customary alternation of venues between the two capitals.

A partnership from 1958

Ethiopia is described as an important defence partner of India, and the association is an old one: it goes back to 1958. The relationship moved up a level during the visit of the Prime Minister of India to Ethiopia in December 2025, when the two countries raised their bilateral ties to the level of a Strategic Partnership. Read together, the MoU of 2025, the two JDC rounds and the elevation of ties show a steady thickening of India's defence engagement with the Horn of Africa.