Good morning.
Pour the buna.
This week the menu is heavy on the things that hit your wallet directly, a record budget, inflation creeping back up, new number plates, and a passport you can soon apply for without queuing. Banks are being told to brace for more competition, farmers are being handed a new way to borrow, and a 40-year-old habit at the ports is finally changing.
And out in the wider world, one man briefly became worth more than eight Ethiopias. We’ll get to him.
Let’s eat.
The Big Money: Budget, Debt & Inflation
Cabinet signs off on a record 2.34 trillion birr budget.
The Council of Ministers has approved a draft federal budget of about 2.34 trillion birr for the 2019 EC fiscal year (2026/27) and sent it on to Parliament. It’s one of the largest spending plans in the country’s history, built around recurrent spending, capital projects, and transfers to the regions. The government is pairing it with an optimistic growth target of 10.1%, a number worth holding onto for the next two stories. Read more
The single biggest line in that budget? Paying off debt.
Out of all that spending, 542.1 billion birr goes to servicing domestic and external debt, making it the largest single expenditure item. The kicker: that giant sum covers only 6.5% of the country’s total debt stock. In plain terms, Ethiopia’s biggest bill barely scratches what it owes. Read more
The World Bank is less optimistic than Addis.
The World Bank trimmed Ethiopia’s growth forecast by 0.8 percentage points to 6.9% for 2026/27, blaming a shakier global backdrop and Middle East tensions. That’s well below the government’s own 10.1% call, though the Bank did raise its estimate for the current year to 8.0%, and still ranks Ethiopia among Sub-Saharan Africa’s fastest growers. Read more
Inflation is back in the headlines and back in the kitchen.
Annual inflation rose to 13.4% in May, up from 11.7% in April and 9.4% in March. The driver is the most sensitive one of all: food, now running at about 15% year-on-year for a third straight month. After months of progress toward single digits, the disinflation story just hit a speed bump that households can feel.
Banking & Credit: The Walls Are Coming Down
The central bank governor tells lenders: get ready for a fairer fight.
The NBE governor has put banks on notice, deeper competition is coming, and they need to prepare for it now. With foreign players moving closer to the Ethiopian market, the comfortable years of a closed banking club are ending. Read it as a polite warning to sharpen up.
A new kind of collateral: your harvest.
Two stories rhyme this week. First, the Trade Ministry is rolling out a system that lets farmers borrow against crops they’ve stored, turning grain in a warehouse into working capital instead of dead weight.
…and SIKET Bank just plugged that idea into the Commodity Exchange. SIKET Bank and the Ethiopian Commodity Exchange (ECX) have signed a financial-and-tech partnership that wires the ECX data centre directly into SIKET’s Tier-3 systems and T24 core banking. The headline win: the bank will accept electronic warehouse receipts as collateral, so producers and traders can get operating loans without land or property as security. ECX says SIKET becomes its 27th payment partner bank, building on the 1.74 billion birr in warehouse-receipt loans already extended. For smallholders, this is the difference between selling in a panic and holding for a better price.
Deals & Business
MIDROC lands an $80 million IFC loan to rebuild a landmark.
MIDROC has secured an $80 million loan from the IFC to upgrade the Sheraton Addis and add a new luxury hotel, a sizeable bet on Ethiopia’s hospitality and tourism rebound, and a notable vote of confidence from the World Bank’s private-sector arm. Read more
KEFI posts a loss but the gold is getting closer.
London-listed KEFI Gold & Copper swung to a pretax loss of £9.7 million for 2025 (from a £1.2m profit in 2024), weighed down by investment write-downs and financing costs. The flip side: its flagship Tulu Kapi project has moved into the construction phase, with first gold still targeted for 2028. Spending money now to (hopefully) mine it later. Read more
After 40 years, ESL is importing fuel again.
Ethiopian Shipping & Logistics has resumed fuel imports for the first time in four decades, a meaningful shift in how the country sources and moves one of its most strategic (and inflation-sensitive) commodities. Read more
Everyday Ethiopia
Soon, a passport without the queue.
Ethiopia is introducing a digital ID-based passport service that cuts down the need to show up in person. Tie your Fayda digital ID to the process, and a famously painful errand gets a lot shorter.
New plates in the capital, starting at 11,000 birr.
Addis Ababa has begun issuing new vehicle number plates priced from 11,000 birr. If you drive in the city, this one’s a direct line item in your budget. Read more
The Global Lens
One man, worth 8.6 Ethiopias.
SpaceX went public on the Nasdaq, and the debut made Elon Musk the world’s first trillionaire, with an estimated net worth around $1.05 trillion after the rocket company’s valuation blew past $2 trillion. To put that in local terms: Musk is now worth roughly 8.6 times Ethiopia’s entire GDP, a single individual outweighing the annual output of a 130-million-person economy. A reminder of just how lopsided global wealth has become. Read more
The Deep Dive
The Rising Generation in Ethiopia’s Capital Market
Ethiopia’s capital market is still young. The institutions are new, the rules are being written in real time, and the whole ecosystem is being assembled almost as you watch. But while everyone’s eyes are on the infrastructure, the exchange, the regulator, the directives, a quieter story is unfolding that may matter just as much: who is going to run all of this?
Meet Kaleb Mekonnen.
He’s early in his career, but he’s already passed through some of the most important rooms in Ethiopian finance, the Ethiopian Capital Market Authority (ECMA), CBE Capital, the Development Bank of Ethiopia, and private-sector transaction advisory teams. Today he’s a Society Administrator for the CFA Institute in East Africa, helping raise the bar for professional standards in the industry.
His way into finance was almost accidental: a book in high school, then conversations with university lecturers, then real transaction-advisory work that turned curiosity into conviction. What hooked him, he says, was watching capital behave like water, flowing from where there’s too much to where it’s needed. For Kaleb, markets aren’t spreadsheets; they’re the plumbing that connects resources to opportunity.
What makes his generation unusual is timing. Professionals in mature markets inherit systems that already work. Ethiopia’s young finance people are building their careers while the system itself is still being built, which means the rules keep changing. His biggest lesson? The market “morphs” constantly: new regulations, new players, new ways of thinking. Survive it with flexibility, curiosity, and a refusal to stop learning.
The encouraging part is access. Across ECMA, the Ethiopian Securities Exchange (ESX), and the private sector, organisations are actively betting on young talent through internships and entry-level roles, knowing today’s trainees become tomorrow’s market leaders. (Full disclosure, and a point of pride: StockMarket.et has now trained more than 40 interns through its own programme.)
And Kaleb is optimistic, strikingly so. Part of it is demographics: Ethiopia is one of Africa’s youngest nations, with millions entering the workforce. Part of it is the reform agenda laying the groundwork. But mostly it’s the people. He believes the country has the raw talent to build one of Africa’s most significant capital markets, precisely because the field is so wide open. The opportunity, he argues, is almost limitless, because the market is still so untapped.
His advice to students sums up the whole mood: pair ambition with constant learning, communicate well, stay open, and don’t stand still.
Because the story of Ethiopia’s capital market is still being written and a generation isn’t waiting around for the next chapter. They’re writing it.
That’s your plate for the week.
Big budget, sticky inflation, banks on notice, and farmers with a new way to borrow. If one theme ties it together, it’s this: the scaffolding of a modern financial economy is going up and the people who’ll staff it are already showing up.
See you next Monday. Same table, fresh buna.
