Good morning!
Here is the week in one number. Ten companies paid 254.44 billion birr in tax last fiscal year. That is 48.71 percent of everything Ethiopia’s Large Taxpayers Branch Office collected, from ten names out of 746 on its books. Ethio Telecom alone paid more than every bank and insurance company in the country combined.
Now put that next to the rest of the table. Banks bid 470 million dollars for 125 million dollars of central bank foreign exchange, and only nine of twenty-eight walked away with any. Women take nearly three in ten bank loans by number and 17.3 percent of the money.
And in the deep dive this week, a young man scrolls through a feed of other people’s success at two in the morning, in a country where roughly one person in five is online at all.
Every one of those is the same shape. A very small number at the top, a very long tail below, and a widening distance in between.
The counterweight came from the plumbing. A microfinance institution registered shares with the regulator for the first time. Two banks got permanent chief executives. The exchange traded 46 million birr of equity and 28 billion birr of interbank money in five days without incident. Slowly, unglamorously, the pipes that let more people in are being laid.
Now grab your buna. There’s a lot on the table.
Foreign Exchange
Banks bid nearly four dollars for every one on offer
The National Bank of Ethiopia’s 25th foreign exchange auction, held on 12 August, drew USD 470.17 million in bids against an allocation of USD 125 million. Demand nearly tripled from the 24th auction on 24 June, when banks sought USD 160.50 million against USD 100 million offered. The NBE raised the allocation by 25 percent. Demand rose by more than USD 300 million.
The bid-to-allocation ratio moved from roughly 1.6 times in June to 3.8 times in August. Twenty-eight banks took part, double the fourteen in June, but the number of successful bidders stayed at nine in both rounds.
Prices moved with it. The marginal, or cut-off, rate rose from 157.00 to 161.0050 birr per dollar, about 2.5 percent. The weighted average of successful bids rose from 157.00 to 161.7994 birr, roughly 3.1 percent. Birrmetrics reported the highest bid at 163.9899 birr and the lowest at 159.9825.
Two weeks ago this newsletter noted that the NBE’s published quarterly auction calendar was giving the market something it had never had: predictability about timing. This auction is the other half of that trade. Predictable timing does not create dollars. Twice as many banks now show up knowing exactly when the window opens, and the window has barely widened. The rate is doing the rationing that the allocation cannot, which is precisely what a market-clearing mechanism is supposed to do and precisely why the birr keeps sliding. Sources: StockMarket.et, Birrmetrics
The Tax Base
Ten companies, half the take
Figures presented by the Ministry of Revenue’s Large Taxpayers Branch Office show it collected 522.67 billion birr in 2025/26 from 746 registered taxpayers. The ten largest paid 254.44 billion birr, 48.71 percent of the total. Eight of the ten are state-owned or government-linked.
The table, as reported by Ethiopian Business Review and Addis Insight:
| # | Taxpayer | Birr |
| 1 | Ethio Telecom | 65.84 bln |
| 2 | Commercial Bank of Ethiopia | 36.87 bln |
| 3 | Ethiopian Airlines Group | 30.87 bln |
| 4 | Heineken Ethiopia | 26.10 bln |
| 5 | Ethiopian Shipping & Logistics | 22.20 bln |
| 6 | Ethiopian Electric Power | 18.31 bln |
| 7 | Awash Bank | 15.77 bln |
| 8 | Ethiopian Electric Utility | 13.58 bln |
| 9 | BGI Ethiopia | 12.59 bln |
| 10 | Ethiopian Roads Administration | 12.33 bln |
The block breakdown is where it gets uncomfortable. Thirty-one state-owned enterprises, 4 percent of the taxpayer base, paid 217.87 billion birr, or 42 percent of the total. One hundred and twenty-seven FDI-linked firms paid 102.24 billion. Fifty banks and insurers paid 65.37 billion. The remaining 532 domestic private companies, 71 percent of the base, produced 104.60 billion birr, averaging roughly 197 million birr each.
Hold two of those numbers together. Ethio Telecom paid 65.84 billion birr. Every bank and insurance company in Ethiopia, all fifty of them, paid 65.37 billion. One state telecom out-taxes the entire regulated financial sector.
Heineken at number four is the highest-ranked private taxpayer in the country, and BGI at number nine means two brewers are in the top ten. That is a fiscal base leaning on a telecom monopoly, a state bank, a state airline and beer. Awash Bank, the leading domestic private payer at 15.77 billion birr, paid roughly eighty times the average private large taxpayer.
This is why the capital market matters more than it looks. A tax base this narrow is a tax base with almost no shock absorption. Broadening who owns and finances Ethiopian companies is, eventually, how you broaden who pays for the state.
Capital Market
A microfinance institution walks through the door
The Ethiopian Capital Market Authority registered 234,388 ordinary shares of Meba Microfinance Institute S.C. on 7 August, 34,388 existing shares plus 200,000 new shares approved for a rights offer to existing shareholders at 550 birr each, a 110 million birr raise. The approval was granted under Article 75 of Capital Market Proclamation No. 1248/2021 and Articles 4 and 29 of Directive No. 1030/2024.
Meba began operating on 24 August 2024 after licensing by the NBE, is headquartered at Arat Kilo and has expanded to Adama and Wolaytta Sodo. Registration is not a listing; any future ESX listing would need a separate application.
The week on the ESX
Trading statistics for 10–14 August 2026:
Interbank Money Market
| Maturity | Value traded | Trades | WA rate | Change |
| Overnight | 3.85 bln ETB | 6 | 13.000% | 0.0000% |
| 7 days | 24.20 bln ETB | 29 | 13.000% | 0.0000% |
Equity Market
| Listed securities | Volume | Trades | Value |
| 6 | 25,258 | 470 | 46,045,610 ETB |
Twenty-eight billion birr moved between banks in five days, against 46 million birr of equity. The ratio tells you exactly where Ethiopia’s capital market currently lives: it is a money market with a stock exchange attached, not the other way round. Note also that both maturities cleared at 13.000 percent with zero change, a completely flat price across 35 trades. Banks are not scrambling for short-term birr. Whatever is scarce in this economy right now, it is dollars, not domestic liquidity.
Gadaa unveils a headquarters, and keeps its offer open
Gadaa Bank has unveiled the architectural design for a new corporate headquarters on a 6,579-square-metre site in Addis Ababa, a project it has been running as an open design competition for a G+25 high-rise. The bank closed 2025/26 with pre-tax profit above 1 billion birr, up 113 percent, total assets of 16.5 billion birr, deposits of 12.6 billion (up 64 percent) and 110 branches.
Its public offering of one million ordinary shares at 1,050 birr each, arranged with Gadaa Securities Dealer, CBE Capital, Awash Capital and Wegagen Capital Investment Bank, remains open until 27 September 2026. Sources: Birrmetrics
Banking
Siinqee clears 10.7 billion birr and 855,000 borrowers
Siinqee Bank reported 10.7 billion birr in pre-tax profit for 2025/26. Total assets reached 216.2 billion birr, deposits 178.1 billion, the loan book 127.1 billion extended to more than 855,000 individuals and businesses, and total capital 23.1 billion birr. President Neway Megersa presented the results to a gathering of more than 800 branch managers and district directors.
Four years ago this was Oromia Credit and Saving Share Company, a microfinance institution. It is now a top-five Ethiopian bank by assets. The number worth sitting with is 855,000 borrowers against 127.1 billion birr, an average of roughly 149,000 birr per credit relationship. Set that against the NBE’s long-standing finding that a fraction of a percent of borrowers hold most of the banking system’s loans, and Siinqee is running a genuinely different book. The microfinance inheritance turns out to be a distribution asset. Sources: 2merkato
Shabelle gets a permanent chief executive
The National Bank of Ethiopia approved Abduljuhad Hassen as chief executive of Shabelle Bank, ending a wait for regulatory clearance that had left him acting since November 2025. He took the post on 7 August. He joined Shabelle’s senior management in July 2025 as Vice President for Banking and Microfinance Operations, and brings more than 17 years across Islamic and conventional banking, including ZamZam Bank, where he rose from branch manager to head of corporate banking. He replaces Khadar Ahmed Abdi, who resigned to move overseas.
The bank’s 2025/26 numbers: pre-tax profit of 231 million birr, more than ten times the previous year; deposits of 4.7 billion birr; total assets of 9.7 billion; financing of 3.5 billion; operating income of 941 million birr; and financing disbursements up more than fivefold to 2.5 billion birr. His stated priorities follow a two-year transition strategy centred on governance reform and digital transformation.
Amhara Bank turns to a Dashen veteran
Amhara Bank appointed Yihnalem Aknaw as chief executive, with NBE approval. He spent 25 years at Dashen Bank, moving from branch manager through credit department director, director of the Office of Strategy Management, Chief Transformation and Customer Experience Officer, and Chief Retail and SME Banking Officer. He holds BA degrees in Accounting (2001) and Information Systems (2005) from Addis Ababa University, an ACCA professional certification from London (2013), and an Executive MBA from AAU (2014).
He replaces an acting arrangement led by chief retail banking officer Samuel Tadesse, following the departure of Yohannes Ayalew (PhD). Amhara Bank has the largest shareholder base in the Ethiopian market and has spent the past year working on loan recovery and internal controls, having said that internal reviews uncovered alleged misconduct involving former management, with some cases referred to court.
Three banks in three weeks, Global Bank on an acting basis, Shabelle permanent, now Amhara. Add the ESX changing chief executives on 7 August. Ethiopian finance is in the middle of a leadership reshuffle broad enough to be a story in itself, and in Amhara’s case the board picked a career commercial banker over a policy background. That is a signal about what the job is now understood to require.
Credit and Who Gets It
Women take three loans in ten and 17 birr in a hundred
The NBE’s second Women’s Financial Inclusion Scorecard, covering all 32 banks with 2025 data, found that women accounted for 28.5 percent of traditional bank loans by number, close to the central bank’s 30 percent benchmark, but only 17.3 percent of the total value. The report’s executive summary puts the value share at 16.9 percent; the detailed analysis gives 17.3.
The scorecard’s own summary of the finding is that women are reached as borrowers but with smaller amounts than men, and it identifies credit depth as the major remaining barrier.
Elsewhere in the data: women took 47.6 percent of the value of “innovative” loans, well above the 30 percent benchmark, though banks reported value without reporting the number of recipients, so it is impossible to tell whether that reached many women or a few. Women make up 32.1 percent of banking sector employees but hold 14.8 percent of senior management positions, against a 25 percent target. They received 34 percent of promotions, against a 50 percent benchmark. Only 9.4 percent of banks reported parental-support policies. The sector’s average score rose to 62.65 out of 100 from 59.1, and Enat Bank remained the sole market leader. Sources: The Reporter Ethiopia
Leadership
Mesfin Tasew stays until August 2027
Ethiopian Airlines Group extended Group CEO Mesfin Tasew Bekele’s tenure to 7 August 2027, resolving months of uncertainty. He had been expected to leave on 6 August 2026. Appointed in March 2022 after more than a decade as chief operating officer, he has now had his tenure extended three times: two years, then one year in August 2025, and now another year. Under Ethiopian rules, civil-service employees retire at 60; he reached that in 2023.
Forbes Afrique reported that the board met on Tuesday 11 August and could not agree on a successor, choosing extension over a contested appointment. Sources: Birrmetrics
The IMF changes its face in Addis
The International Monetary Fund has replaced Tobias Rasmussen with Kyungsuk Lee as Resident Representative in Ethiopia.
Rasmussen leaves at a live moment. On the way out he described tax revenue as among the brighter outcomes of the programme, consistently beating projections and creating room for priority spending without inflationary central-bank funding, while noting the tax-to-GDP ratio still trails peer economies. He also flagged that the NBE’s gold-purchase premium had rebuilt reserves at the cost of significant liquidity injections. Total disbursements under the arrangement have reached USD 2.6 billion.
Trade and the Real Economy
The export target goes to USD 13.4 billion
Ethiopia set a USD 13.4 billion export revenue target for 2026/27, announced in Addis on 12 August at a consultation between government officials and exporters. Trade and Regional Integration Minister Kassahun Gofe said export earnings exceeded USD 11.2 billion in 2025/26, giving a base for the new figure.
The strategy, as described, leans on value addition, product quality and competitiveness rather than volume alone, alongside diversifying destinations, entering new markets and modernising export systems through digital and data-driven trade platforms. Exporters at the consultation raised production, logistics, market access and trade facilitation concerns. Source: 2merkato
AfroMessage puts a number on import substitution
Ethiopian messaging platform AfroMessage says it has delivered more than 407.8 million A2P SMS messages for Ethiopian businesses since April 2021, which it benchmarks at roughly USD 139.7 million in potential international SMS spend using Twilio’s published Ethiopia rate of USD 0.3425 per segment, an average annual foreign-exchange impact of about USD 26.2 million. The platform serves banks, fintechs and retailers.
Beyond the Border
A USD 250 million fund goes after Africa’s debt costs
A continental bond fund has launched with a USD 250 million commitment aimed at easing debt burdens on African sovereigns and deepening secondary markets. Managed by Legal & General, it tracks a benchmark developed by S&P Dow Jones Indices and the African Export-Import Bank, giving institutional investors diversified exposure to dollar-denominated African sovereign bonds. The UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office provided seed capital.
Vera Songwe, founder of the Liquidity and Sustainability Facility and former Executive Secretary of the UN Economic Commission for Africa, said the objective is developing Africa’s secondary debt market, and that the market needs to reach roughly USD 1 billion to achieve full commercial scale. Source: The Reporter Ethiopia
The risk premium versus the default record
A figure shows fewer than two in every hundred African infrastructure projects default, the lowest rate of any global region. The claim traces to Moody’s Analytics data on project-finance defaults, which the African Development Bank has used for years to argue that Africa’s perceived risk exceeds its measured risk. Source: Kana Television
And the ranking nobody wants
Business Insider Africa ran a list this week of the African countries with the lowest incomes, drawn from World Bank per-capita income data. Ethiopia features on it, alongside Nigeria and Rwanda. The World Bank puts Ethiopian gross national income per capita at roughly USD 1,020–1,120, against a low-income threshold of USD 1,135.
Listicles are listicles. But the placement is the honest counterweight to every record in this newsletter. Ethiopia is simultaneously one of the world’s faster-growing economies and one of its poorest. Both facts are load-bearing, and the second one is the subject of this week’s deep dive. Source: Business Insider Africa
📌 Deep Dive
For Whom Are We Building This?
This week’s deep dive is the hardest piece Stockmarket.et has published. It begins with a family mourning a young man, and then turns outward to ask what kind of economy produces that grief at scale.
The argument is economic, and it is careful. Two facts sit at its centre: more than a quarter of young people in Ethiopia’s cities are looking for work and not finding it, and the country has roughly one psychiatrist for every two million citizens. A machine that manufactures pressure, and almost nowhere to send the people it breaks.
The piece then makes the point this newsletter spends every week circling from the other side. A floated currency and a jobless growth pattern are policy outcomes. A twenty-three-year-old does not experience them as policy. He experiences them as a verdict on himself, reads the gap between what he earns and what things cost as personal failure, and tells no one, because the story he has been handed has no version of a man who does everything right and still cannot arrive. Researchers find financial stress raises suicide risk by roughly the same amount in rich countries and poor ones. Hardship does not have to be extreme to be dangerous. It has to feel inescapable, and personal.
Then the phone. Only about one in five Ethiopians is online at all, and far fewer are on social media. So the feed is not a picture of the country, it is a small, city-weighted, monetised sliver of it, a few thousand people who arrived, or who are paid to look like they arrived, on loop. A young man scrolling at two in the morning is not comparing himself to his neighbours, who are struggling as he is. He is comparing himself to a highlight reel of his own nation that almost nobody in his nation lives.
And the exit. Hundreds of thousands leaving each year, paying smugglers for boats everyone has heard the stories about, because a wage seven times larger on the other side justifies a risk a person with options would never take. Not adventure. An exit calculation.
The piece is not fatalistic, and this is the part worth carrying into the week. Countries that put money into jobs and wages and the ordinary business of making it possible to live see fewer of these deaths. Countries that train the health workers they already have, at the health posts that already exist, close the gap. Slow, unglamorous, achievable work, which means the current situation is a choice, and choices can be made differently.
Read it: For Whom Are We Building This?
If any of this is close to home for you, please tell someone today, a brother, a mother, a friend, a teacher, a priest, a sheikh, or a doctor at the nearest health centre. Saying it badly still counts. The one thing that reliably breaks this is another person knowing.
🎧 On the Podcast
Episode 10 is live.
Thematic Bonds: Financing a Better Future 🌱💰
What are thematic bonds, how do they work, and what could they mean for Ethiopia’s emerging capital market?
In Episode 10, we explore green, social, sustainability, gender and blue bonds and the opportunities and risks they bring.
▶️ የዶ/ር ጥለሁን እስማኤል ከስልጣን መልቀቅ እና ሌሎችም!! YouTube
Read the week from the top down and it holds together as one argument.
Ten companies pay half the large-taxpayer bill. Nine banks out of twenty-eight take home the foreign currency. Women get 28.5 percent of the loans and 17.3 percent of the money. Ethio Telecom out-taxes fifty banks and insurers put together. The economy is producing real numbers, Siinqee’s 10.7 billion birr, an 11.2 billion dollar export year, a 13.4 billion dollar target, and those numbers keep arriving in a very small number of accounts.
Read it from the bottom up and you get the deep dive. A quarter of urban youth unemployed. One psychiatrist per two million people. A young man measuring himself against a feed that eighty percent of his countrymen cannot even see, and losing that comparison every night.
The connective tissue is thinner than it should be. But it is not absent, and it is not nothing. A microfinance institution registered its shares this week and can now raise 110 million birr from its own shareholders. Siinqee is lending to 855,000 people at an average of 149,000 birr. Enat is working on a gender bond. Gadaa is selling shares at 1,050 birr apiece to whoever wants them.
None of that is a headline number. All of it is the same project: widening the top so the tail has somewhere to climb. The question the deep dive asks, for whom are we building this, is not rhetorical. It is a design specification, and this week the market gave a few small, real answers.
Keep your coffee strong. See you next Monday. ☕