On the newly minted trading floor of a high-rise building in Addis Ababa’s financial district, a bell stands ready for the launch this month of the first securities market in Ethiopia since the last days of emperor Haile Selassie. “This isn’t just a milestone, it marks a new Ethiopia,” said Tilahun Kassahun, chief executive of the new Ethiopian Securities Exchange.
Outside is a 50-metre tall pillar with a red star on top, built during the Marxist Derg regime that toppled the emperor and ushered in decades of state-led economic policies that are only now being dismantled. The new stock market is part of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s efforts — interrupted by a ghastly two-year civil war that killed at least 600,000 people before ending in late 2022 — to open up the economy of Africa’s second-most populous nation. The most important reform, investors and lenders say, has been the liberalisation of the foreign exchange regime, a precondition of a $3.4bn IMF bailout — the Washington-based lender’s largest ever concessional programme — which was approved by its board in July. “Despite the noise, we persisted in implementing reforms,” said Eyob Tolina, the state minister for finance, adding that the government had achieved most of what it had set out to do. “It might just be easier to tell you what has not changed.” Over the next four years, economic officials have set themselves the goal of securing up to $27bn in financing and investment, equivalent to 16 per cent of Ethiopia’s GDP, from the IMF, World Bank, China, the United Arab Emirates and others. That would ease a foreign exchange crunch and help fund reconstruction and restructure debt after Ethiopia defaulted in December 2023. As part of efforts to catalyse a domestic equity market, in a modest start the government will float 10 per cent of the state-owned Ethio telecom, one of the largest mobile operators in Afric