Ethiopia Application Form for New Investment Permit

Candidate selection

GOV-4532 ("GovSchema Standard Research"). Ethiopia's Business Formation candidate — the Ethiopian Investment Commission's (EIC) "Application Form for New Investment Permit" — had been left as disclosed, ready-to-author backlog since GOV-4246's own Ethiopia scouting pass (CATALOG.md's Known Gaps §0c). Ethiopia's other three verticals were already published: Visa (et/ics/e-visa-application), Taxes (et/mor/individual-tin-registration, GOV-4246), and Passport (et/ics/passport-application, GOV-4264). This schema opens the fourth of Ethiopia's six verticals, Business Formation.

Reaching the live source

Fetched https://investethiopia.gov.et/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/InvestmentPermitApplicationForm.doc directly, independently re-verifying the byte-for-byte identity of the banked candidate rather than trusting its recorded numbers at face value:

• HTTP 200, Content-Type: application/msword, no login/CAPTCHA/WAF gate at any point in the retrieval.
• Content-Length / downloaded size: 88,576 bytes — exactly matching the banked figure.
• sha256 of the retrieved bytes: ebc7a1a680c137e07e5fa7fbd45a6df41c22a75b38f31f86e9a24a0977de2ec9 — exactly matching the banked hash.
• First 8 bytes: d0 cf 11 e0 a1 b1 1a e1 — the canonical OLE2/Compound File Binary (CFB) magic number, confirming this is a genuine legacy Word 97-2003 .doc (not a .docx zip archive, and not a scanned image), exactly as flagged by the delegating candidate note.
• Last-Modified: Sun, 19 Nov 2023 23:32:19 GMT — the file has not changed since well before this candidate was originally banked.

Extraction method

Used the vendored pure-JS OLE2/CFB-aware .doc text-run parser at /tmp/node_modules/word-extractor (the same tool this cycle's sibling na/bipa/close-corporation-founding-statement schema used for an identical legacy-.doc source), calling extract() against the downloaded file and then getBody(), getHeaders(), getFooters(), getFootnotes(), getEndnotes(), and getAnnotations() to recover every text run. Extraction succeeded cleanly (exit 0): the body text is a complete, readable transcript of the entire application form, including every section from the cover page through "FOR OFFICE USE ONLY." Headers/footers contain only page-number artifacts ("4 / 0 / 6"-style fragments); the sole footnote is the cover page's own "if the space provided is not sufficient... use supplementary sheet of paper" note (already covered by the cover page's own instructional text); annotations and endnotes are both empty. No fabrication or guessing was needed — every field below was read directly off this transcript.

Document structure

The document is a flat sequence of caption/blank rows and Word tables (no AcroForm widgets — this is a legacy Word template, not a fillable PDF):

• Cover page — "ETHIOPIAN INVESTMENT COMMMISSION" / "Application Form for New Investment Permit" letterhead, followed entirely by instructional prose (how to fill the form, the investor's blanket commitment to Ethiopian law, the Investment Commission's contact address). Contributes no applicant-supplied fields of its own; folded into this schema's own documents[] entry and field descriptions where relevant (see Scope below).
• Particulars of the Applicant/Investor — investor/company name; nationality/country of incorporation; a 3-row "Ethiopian partners from abroad (if any)" table (Name, Country of origin); a 3-row "Partner of Ethiopia origin (If any)" table (same shape); "(a) Residential or office address in Ethiopia" (Region, City, Sub-city, Zone, Wereda/Kebele, House No., Telephone No., Cell phone No., Fax, P.O.Box, Email); "(b) Home Address (including Telephone & e-mail)" (Country, Telephone, P.O.Box, E-mail); Tax Identification No.; Commercial Registration No.; "Address of authorized representative (if any)" (Region, City, Sub-city, Zone, Wereda/Kebele, House No., ID No., Tel., Cell Phone, Fax, P.O.Box, E-mail).
• legal form of the business — a single-select checkbox group: Sole proprietorship / Business Organization / Public Enterprise / Cooperative Society.
• Type of Ownership — a single-select checkbox group: Domestic Investor / Foreign Investor / Joint investment (Foreign & Local Investor) / Branch, followed by "If it is branch, address of the parent company:".
• Profile of Proposed Investment — project title/investment activity; project location (Region, Zone, Wereda); land requirement by project type (Industrial, Agricultural, Service, in Sq. M. or Ha.); utility requirements at full capacity (Electric Power in Kw, Water in m3/year, Others if any); a free-text project objective/major-activities description.
• Estimated investment cost (in million US$ and Birr) — a two-column (In US$ / In Birr) table over five categories (Land; Building and civil works; Machinery/equipment; Other fixed capital cost; Initial working capital) plus a Total row.
• Source of finance — Equity, Loan, Others (specify), Total — each printed with a single amount blank (see Scope §3 below on why no US$/Birr or foreign/domestic column split is asserted here, unlike the investment-cost table immediately above it).
• Estimated number of employees at full capacity — a 2-column (Permanent employees / Temporary employees) x 3-row (Local / Expatriate / Total) table, plus a free-text note asking whether the project creates employment for women, disabled, or other underprivileged groups.
• Estimated annual production/service rendering... and marketing plan, and Raw material requirements (applicable to manufacturing and agricultural projects only) — two open-ended, multi-row tables with no derivable bounded row count (see Scope §1 below — excluded).
• PROJECT IMPLEMENTATION PLAN — expected commencement/completion dates of the project; a fixed, pre-printed 10-row "Details of project activities and their date of completion" table (each row a numbered, named activity with its own completion-date blank; row 9 is itself "Any other (please indicate)"); a note about documents to be submitted within 3 months of permit issuance (post-approval, excluded — see Scope §2); a free-text environmental-impact/mitigation description; a single-select "where did you learn about the investment opportunity" checkbox group with three "(specify)" sub-options.
• Declaration and Signature of Applicant — Name of Applicant, Responsibility, Signature, Date.
• FOR OFFICE USE ONLY — Permitted/Rejected checkboxes, rejection reasons, and the reviewing/approving official's own name/signature/date — excluded in its entirety as EIC-internal, not applicant-supplied, content (Scope §4 below).

Scope: exclusions

1. The "Estimated annual production/service rendering... and marketing plan" table and the "Raw material requirements" table are excluded entirely. Both are genuine Word tables whose cells extracted as long runs of empty lines with no distinguishing row markers — unlike the two partner tables above them, which print an explicit, countable 3-row block of dotted blanks, these two tables give no signal (no statutory cap, no repeated-page structure, no numbered rows) from which to derive a bounded slot count. This is consistent with the cover page's own invitation to use a free-form "supplementary sheet of paper" if the printed space is insufficient. The Raw Material table is additionally explicitly conditional ("applicable to manufacturing and agricultural projects only") and uses a mark-to-select-cell format not modelled elsewhere in this schema. Neither table is part of this schema's own field inventory.
2. The Project Implementation Plan's own "3.2." note ("The following documents should be submitted in 3 (three) months time after getting the investment permit and the land..., List of capital goods: machinery, laboratory equipment") is excluded as a post-approval submission requirement, not a document attached to this application itself — mirroring this registry's established convention of excluding Registrar/office-post-approval content (e.g. na/bipa/close-corporation-founding-statement's own excluded Certificate of Incorporation).
3. The "FOR OFFICE USE ONLY" block is excluded in its entirety as EIC-internal reviewing/approving-official content, not applicant-supplied data — the same exclusion class as the note above.
4. The cover page's own instructional/procedural prose contributes no fields of its own but its one concrete, applicant-facing obligation — "The applicant is required to attach relevant documents about an investor's previous business background" — is modelled as this schema's sole documents[] entry (previousBusinessBackgroundDocuments). The cover page's other, more generic clause ("This application form should be submitted together with other legal required documents") names no specific document and is not modelled as a second documents[] entry, to avoid fabricating a specific attachment the source itself does not name.

Scope: bounded-repeating-group decisions

1. Both partner tables (Ethiopian partners from abroad; Partner of Ethiopian origin) are modelled as 3 bounded slots each (partnerAbroad1..3, partnerEthiopianOrigin1..3), matching the source form's own literal printed capacity — exactly 3 dotted-blank rows under each heading, with no "add more rows" instruction anywhere nearby. Both tables are captioned "(if any)"/"(If any)" with no compulsory marking, so every slot's Name/Country-of-origin pair is modelled bare-optional (no requiredWhen gate at all, and no synthetic count field), per this registry's convention for a genuinely optional repeating block with no printed count-driven gate of its own (contrast the gated numberOfMembers-driven slots in na/bipa/close-corporation-founding- statement, whose source instead prints a hard statutory member cap).
2. The Project Implementation Plan's 10-row activity table is modelled as 10 fixed fields (activity1CompletionDate...activity10Completion Date), not a repeating slot pattern — because, unlike the member/witness tables in this registry's other bounded-slot schemas, each row here has its own distinct, non-repeating printed label (e.g. "Land acquisition," "Testing of machinery and equipment"), so this is a fixed checklist, not an applicant-populated repeating group. Row 9 ("Any other (please indicate)") is the one row whose label the applicant supplies; modelled as an additional activity9Description field, left bare-optional alongside its own activity9CompletionDate (both optional, not gated on each other, per this registry's documented notEquals/requiredWhen- against-an-absent-optional-field bug class — see notequals-empty-string-absent-field-bug in this registry's own prior findings).
3. Row 4 ("Public utility acquisition") is modelled as a single activity4CompletionDate field, not split into four sub-dates for its own printed sub-items (Electricity, Water, Telecom, Others if any). The underlying Word table appears to use merged/irregular cells at this row (the sub-item lines extracted with no distinguishing per-item date blanks of their own, unlike, e.g., the clean two-column "Estimated investment cost" table's explicit "In US$ / In Birr" header row); rather than invent an unverified four-way split, this row is modelled the same as every other single-date activity row, with the sub-items folded into the field's own description.

Other disclosed findings

1. The "Source of Finance" table (Equity/Loan/Others/Total) is modelled with one amount field per category, not a US$/Birr (or foreign/domestic) column split. The linear word-extractor transcript shows an inconsistent, apparently merged-cell table at this specific section (the tab-count pattern differs row to row in a way the clean, unambiguous two-column "Estimated investment cost" table immediately above it does not), so no reliable second-column split could be reconstructed from this extraction. This is a disclosed, conservative judgment call: this schema's own delegating candidate description characterized this section as having a "foreign/domestic" breakdown, but that characterization does not reproduce in this cycle's own independent re-extraction of the raw document, so it is not asserted here.
2. legalFormOfBusiness and ownershipType are each modelled as a single-select enum, matching the source's own single checkbox-group presentation for each; ownershipType's own "Joint investment (Foreign & Local Investor)" option is retained as one printed literal value (not decomposed into two boolean flags), since the source presents it as one checkbox alongside the two single-party options.
3. branchParentCompanyAddress is requiredWhen ownershipType equals "BRANCH", directly gated on the immediately-adjacent printed conditional ("If it is branch, address of the parent company:").
4. infoSourceAboutInvestmentOpportunity and its three "(specify)" companion fields are modelled bare-optional/requiredWhen-gated on that enum's own value, since this is a supplementary market-research question ("Please indicate where you have got information...") with no compulsory marking and no bearing on permit approval.
5. homeAddressAbroadCountry/Telephone/PoBox/Email are modelled bare-optional, since this block (printed immediately after the Ethiopian residential/office address, with no "(if any)" qualifier but also no compulsory marking) is primarily applicable to a foreign investor or partner rather than a purely domestic one; no directly-adjacent checkbox conditions this block, so it is left ungated rather than speculatively tied to the later, structurally distant ownershipType field.
6. taxIdentificationNumber and commercialRegistrationNumber are modelled optional, since a first-time investment-permit applicant would not yet hold either — mirroring this registry's established treatment of a pre-registration identifier field (e.g. na/bipa/close-corporation-founding-statement's own registrationNumberOfCorporation).
7. totalInvestmentCostUsd/Birr, totalFinanceAmount, and totalPermanentEmployees/totalTemporaryEmployees are each modelled as ordinary required numeric fields, matching the source's own printed "Total" blank in each table, but this schema asserts no cross-field sum validation against the individual category fields above them — this registry's crossFieldValidation grammar only compares two named fields or checks presence, with no aggregate-sum-across-a-variable-length-set operator available (the same disclosed limitation na/bipa/close-corporation-founding-statement recorded for its own memberNPercentageOfInterest fields).
8. Signature fields (applicantSignature) are modelled as type: string "signature-name attestation" fields, per this registry's established convention for a printed signature line with no separate digital- signature mechanism disclosed by the source.
9. Email fields reuse this registry's own single-escaped email pattern (^[^@\\s]+@[^@\\s]+\\.[^@\\s]+$, one backslash per JSON string), per this registry's documented double-escaped-regex defect class (py/suace/business-formalization-individual, GOV-4437).

Conformance

3 valid mock scenarios — valid-domestic-sole-proprietorship (a domestic sole-proprietor investor with no partners, no home address abroad, no representative, and the "Any other" activity row left blank); valid-joint-investment-with-partners-and-representative (a joint foreign/local investment exercising both partner tables at full 3-row capacity, a home address abroad, an authorized representative, and the "Any other" activity row populated); and valid-branch-of-foreign-company (a branch of a foreign company, exercising branchParentCompanyAddress and the infoSourceAboutInvestmentOpportunity "Other Gov't institutions" branch) — plus 9 mutation-control fixtures (6 missing-static-required fixtures across investor/address/legal-form/project/ investment-cost/declaration fields, 2 missing-requiredWhen-gated fixtures exercising the branch-parent-company-address gate and the info-source "specify" gate, 1 invalid-enum fixture) and 1 unknown-field-rejected fixture — 13 fixtures total, committed under conformance/et/eic/investment-permit-application/1.0.0/.

An ephemeral, from-scratch conformance checker (deriving required/ requiredWhen rules directly from this schema's own fields[], discarded after use, not committed) ran all 13: all 3 valid scenarios at 0 errors, all 9 mutation controls each raising exactly 1 error, and the unknown-field mutation correctly rejected; confirmed every requiredWhen field reference resolves (0 dangling references). Validated clean with node tools/validate.mjs, individually and as part of the full registry run. registry-index.json regenerated via npm run build-index in tools/govschema-client/.