Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed has appointed Dagmawit Shiferaw as Director General of the Ethiopian Capital Market Authority, replacing Hana Tehelku, who moves to lead the Ethiopian Investment Commission as part of a wider reshuffle of senior economic posts. Yirgalem Assefa (PhD) has been named Deputy Director General of ECMA.

The appointments place new leadership at both the capital market regulator and the country’s principal investment promotion agency at the same moment, and the timing is deliberate. ECMA and the EIC are the two institutions most directly responsible for translating Ethiopia’s economic liberalisation agenda into real capital flows, and the government is rotating experienced people through both.

Dagmawit brings more than 15 years of experience spanning investment management, innovative finance, telecommunications, consulting, and public sector leadership. Her career includes roles at UNDP, Renew Capital, STGT Trading, Candor Consultancy, and Ethio Telecom. Since 2023 she has served as Director of the Innovative Finance Lab at UNDP Ethiopia, where she led technical strategy, stakeholder coordination, resource mobilisation, and knowledge management. Her background in innovative finance is a reasonable fit for a regulator that is still building the market infrastructure for instruments such as green bonds, gender bonds, and eventually ETFs and REITs, whose enabling directive took effect last month.

Hana Tehelku leaves ECMA after leading it since August 2024, following the tenure of Brook Taye, the authority’s founding Director General. Under her watch the Ethiopian Securities Exchange launched in January 2025, the first foreign investment bank received its license by mid-2026, and the registration pipeline expanded to cover banks, insurance companies, and cooperative financial institutions across the country. ECMA now oversees 26 registered companies, seven of them active in the securities market.

At the EIC, Hana takes over from Zeleke Temesgen, who moves to Ethiopian Investment Holdings as Deputy CEO. Melekit Sahlu and Baysa Bedada (PhD) have been appointed Deputy Commissioners at the EIC. Jafar Bedru joins Zeleke as a second Deputy CEO at EIH, giving the state holding company two new senior executives as part of the same reshuffle.

The leadership change at ECMA comes at a moment of real momentum. The ESX mainboard currently lists five equities, the eurobond restructuring reached a preliminary agreement in July, and the IMF’s fifth ECF review confirmed continued progress on macroeconomic stabilisation. The regulatory calendar ahead includes deepening OTC market participation, expanding the investment bank roster, and building the supervisory framework for the collective investment scheme instruments that are now legally permitted.

Dagmawit inherits an authority that has done the harder early work of building from nothing. The next phase is consolidation, credibility, and depth.

Source: Prime Minister’s Office