Ethiopia’s markets, in one place.
ESX and OTC prices, commodities, banks, power, real estate and fintech, and the news moving them. Every number sourced and dated.
The market, in motion
Ethiopia's stock exchange opened in January 2025. These are the equities admitted to the ESX Main Market (banks and Ethio Telecom), priced at the latest published ESX levels. The ESX streams nothing, but its ticker carries the last traded price while the book is open and we record it every five minutes, so these move through the session and each is stamped with its source.
Equity prices are the latest published ESX levels, sourced from capitalmarketethiopia.com / ESX (stamped with the source date); the ESX streams nothing, so a price holds at the last level we recorded, which is never more than five minutes behind the ticker while the book is open. The cash-market row (IBMM) is not a price and is excluded from the counts and averages above: the ESX ticker carries it in the same unit-less field as the equity prices, and it tracks the weighted-average overnight interbank rate the exchange publishes weekly, so it is shown as a percentage, a reading inferred from the match, not confirmed by the ESX. Sources: esx.et, capitalmarketethiopia.com, africancapitalmarketsnews.com, birrmetrics.com, exchange-rates.org. How we source this →
The board that exists, but isn't trading yet
Ethiopia's OTC market is legally live under ECMA Directive 1009/2024, and it is the exchange's highest-commission venue, yet no securities are admitted to it. Here's what it is, how big the addressable market is, and how fast comparable frontier boards actually trade. Every figure is stamped with its source.
What the country sells to the world
Commodities are Ethiopia's real link to global markets: gold is now its single largest export, having overtaken coffee, with sesame behind them. This board leads with those, then sets them against the global benchmarks that move them. Rows tagged live stream real market data: metals, energy and global agri from world exchanges, and Ethiopian sesame, white pea beans & green mung beans from the ECX domestic auction (shown alongside their FOB export reference). Where no current Ethiopian price exists, the row says so and shows a dated world reference or its last recorded price instead.
Rows tagged LIVE stream real market prices: metals via api.gold-api.com, energy & global agri (including Ethiopian coffee and soya, priced off the ICE and CBOT benchmarks) via Yahoo Finance / EIA, and Ethiopian sesame, white pea beans & green mung beans via the ECX domestic auction (ecx.com.et), each refreshed automatically. HELD marks a feed that is not answering: the last real price, held unchanged for as long as the source is down (on an ECX row the tag reads OFFLINE, with the date of the last auction we recorded), and REF marks a real last-reported price held at its sourced value. ECX prices are domestic auction levels (shown alongside the FOB export reference); global benchmarks reflect live futures. WORLD REF marks an Ethiopian row with no current Ethiopian price, shown instead at the dated USDA weekly US grower bid for the same bean: a world reference, not an Ethiopian price. Sources: ecx.com.et, api.gold-api.com, Yahoo Finance, eia.gov, nbe.gov.et, USDA AMS Market News, thereporterethiopia.com.
What the continent actually holds
An interactive register of Africa's mineral and energy endowment, what each resource is, what it is used for, who extracts it, and how much, built only from figures the geological surveys actually publish. Tap a country to zoom in. Sourced country profiles and named-deposit pins are being curated now.
What these figures are, and aren't
Every number on this page is a real published figure, transcribed as printed; no conversions, no gap-filling. Production and reserves come from the USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries, February 2026 (2025 values are USGS estimates); gold production comes from the BGS World Mineral Production 2020–24, which reports every African producer and includes artisanal estimates where available; uranium comes from the World Nuclear Association (January 2026). A grey country on the map means no individually published figure in these sources, never "no resources". Coming next: oil & gas (EIA), the full-coverage BGS treatment for more commodities, named-deposit pins from USGS MRDS, and the Ethiopia deep pass from the Ministry of Mines and EITI. Until a figure clears the source bar, it simply doesn't show; nothing here is ever estimated by us.
What the world pays
The register above says what comes out of the ground. This says what it sells for: each resource at the finest grain its source actually publishes, and nothing finer. Pick a resource on the right to chart its price history. Watch the gap between an ore and the metal it becomes: that gap is the value added outside Africa.
Grain: Live = a real daily benchmark, streaming · Monthly = a monthly published average · Annual = a yearly average, the finest grain published · No price = no free source publishes one
Why some of these have no chart, and none of them is a valuation
A monthly or annual average is one settled figure for a whole period, not a trading session: it has no high and no low. That is why those rows plot as steps or as discrete points, never as a smooth daily curve, and why they have no Pro workspace, which charts the sessions of a market. Where this page multiplies a country's published tonnage by a published price, it says so on the figure itself: that arithmetic is ours, and it is not export earnings. Ore sells on long contracts at discounts to a benchmark, grades vary, and most African ore leaves the continent unprocessed, so treat those figures as the gross value of what was dug, not as money anyone received.
Every gigawatt the country makes, and where it goes
Generation jumped 43% in the fiscal year to July 2025, the largest one-year rise on record, as the last GERD units came online. Almost none of it went abroad. Data-mining customers took 26.67% of everything EEP sold, against 6.92% crossing the border to Djibouti, Sudan and Kenya put together. Power earned Ethiopia US$388m of foreign currency, up from $140m. Here is where every gigawatt-hour went, plant by plant.
Why nothing on this page is live
Ethiopia publishes no real-time generation data. EEP reports once a year, in a PDF, about three months after the fiscal year closes; Ethiopia does not appear in Ember’s monthly dataset at all. Grid maps that appear to show Ethiopia hour by hour are running a weather model over an annual total, their own API labels the result synthetic. Annual is the real granularity, so annual is what we show, stamped with the year it belongs to.
Where Ethiopia’s power actually goes
EEP sells in bulk, and this is its customer list. The national distributor buys most of it, but the fastest-moving line by far is data mining, which went from nothing in 2022/23 to more than a quarter of all sales in two years. Tap any bar for what that customer is. Shares are computed over the rows shown, and where EEP’s own column doesn’t add up we say so under the chart rather than quietly reconciling it.
Five years of generation, and a grid straining to keep up
Two separate charts, deliberately, gigawatt-hours and megawatts are different measures, and stacking them onto one pair of axes is the fastest way to mislead. Each column is a figure EEP published; nothing is drawn between them.
Every plant on the national grid
All 22 plants EEP operates, with what each is rated at and what each actually produced. Utilisation is ours, not EEP’s, generation divided by what the plant could make running flat out all year. It is the column that shows Ashegoda wind farm sitting almost idle, and it is also where two of EEP’s published pairs turn out to be impossible; those cells are marked.
| Plant ↕ | Source ↕ | Capacity (MW) ↕ | Generated (GWh) ↕ | Utilisation ↕ | In service ↕ |
|---|
Checked against an independent source
EEP is the spine of this page, so it is worth knowing whether anyone else lands in the same place. Ember’s figure is close but not identical, and the reason is instructive rather than alarming.
Who's winning the banking boom
Ethiopia's 31 commercial banks posted their highest-ever combined earnings in the fiscal year to June 2025: net profit up 61% to ETB 93.4 billion. Pick a fiscal year below, sort by any column, and click any bank for a full profile. Figures are the latest disclosed per bank for each year; blanks mean not yet publicly reported. Ethiopian fiscal years end 7 July.
| Bank ↕ | Assets (Br) ↕ | Deposits (Br) ↕ | Net profit (Br) ↕ | Paid-up cap. (Br) ↕ | NPL ↕ | ESX status ↕ |
|---|
Sources: NBE Financial Stability Report (Nov 2024); NBE 3rd Financial Stability Report (Mar 2026); banks’ audited FY2024/25 annual reports and the audited figures restated in their ECMA-registered prospectuses; AGM results via Addis Fortune, Birr Metrics, Capital Ethiopia, The Reporter & 2merkato; banks’ provisional FY2025/26 filings to the ESX and their own results releases; Awash / Addis Bank disclosures via African Capital Markets News & Ethiopian Monitor; ECMA registration notices and ESX listing announcements (2025–26). Per-bank figures re-checked September 2026. Profit columns are net after tax (press headlines usually quote pre-tax, and some FY2025/26 releases quote profit before provisions); capital is paid-up (not total capital incl. reserves). Where a bank reported only a pre-tax or pre-provision profit (most FY2025/26 releases) or withheld a metric (e.g. Lion’s NPL), the cell is left blank rather than filled with a proxy. Sector NPL fell to 3.1% at June 2025 (lowest in 5 yrs); a few individual banks exceed the 5% ceiling and are under NBE remediation. The NBE’s ETB 5bn paid-up capital minimum fell due on 30 June 2026 for banks licensed before April 2021; banks licensed later under the directive’s transitional terms have seven years from opening (Directive SBB/78/2021). The NBE has not published a list of which banks met it.
Who leads on what
The leading banks on each measure for the fiscal year selected above. Each board ranks only the banks that actually disclosed that figure: “of 18 reporting” means eighteen banks published it, so no bank is penalised for a number nobody has, and a measure too thinly reported to rank fairly is left out entirely. Profit growth is the year-on-year change in net profit; NPL is ranked lowest-first, because a lower bad-loan ratio is better; branches are each bank’s latest disclosed count, not a fiscal-year figure. The small percentage is the bank’s share of the reporting banks’ combined total. Click any bank for its full profile.
Foreign banks entering Ethiopia
Ethiopia opened its ~50-year-closed banking sector to foreign investors in 2024. But as of September 2026 the National Bank of Ethiopia has licensed no foreign bank to actually operate: every move so far is a representative office (a liaison post that can’t bank), one capital-markets licence from a different regulator, acquisition talks, or stated intent. These are informative profiles, not balance sheets: no assets or profit figures until a bank officially joins and reports. Click any card for the full status. Grouped by how far along they are.
Legal basis: Banking Business Proclamation No. 1360/2024 (gazetted 12 Mar 2025) & NBE Directive SBB/94/2025 (effective 25 Jun 2025). Foreign entrants face an ETB 5bn (~US$36–40m) paid-up-capital minimum for a subsidiary or branch, remitted in foreign currency; a rep office needs only a US$100,000 inward deposit and cannot conduct banking. Ownership caps: 49% aggregate foreign, 40% single strategic investor, with an NBE “exceptional-circumstances” clause for larger acquisitions. NBE says “several” applications have been received but has published no roster; zero full commercial-banking licences had been granted as of September 2026, and the NBE’s register lists only domestic banks. Compiled Jul 2026, re-checked Sep 2026, from NBE & ECMA notices, the banks’ own releases, Reuters, Addis Fortune, Addis Standard, Ethiopian Monitor, Capital Ethiopia, The Reporter Ethiopia, Birr Metrics, Fana & 2merkato. Statuses change. Verify current licensing with the NBE.
Anyone can hold dollars in an Ethiopian bank now. Not one bank will tell you what it pays.
Since July 2024 any resident, any Ethiopian abroad and any foreign national of Ethiopian origin may open a foreign-currency account at any bank, in any of three currencies, and since 12 February 2026 there is no minimum to open one. The rate is whatever the bank and the depositor agree, the National Bank sets no floor and no ceiling. So we read all 31 commercial banks' own pages: none publishes a current interest rate on a foreign-currency deposit, and the three that publish a formula peg it to LIBOR, a benchmark that stopped existing in September 2024. Nor does any bank publish its foreign-currency deposit balance, foreign currency is not split out of the deposit line in any published accounts. Six announce something different: how much foreign currency passed through them in a year, which is throughput, not what is held. A dash below means the bank does not publish that term, not that we could not find it.
| Bank | Accounts published | Currencies | Min. to open | Min. fixed deposit | Min. term | Published rate | FCY handled (year) |
|---|
Regime: National Bank of Ethiopia Foreign Exchange Directive No. FXD/01/2024 (29 July 2024), articles 6, 13, 14, 15 and 16.4, as amended by Directive No. FXD/04/2026 (issued 11 February 2026, in force the following day) and the NBE public notice accompanying it. Bank terms: each bank's own website or published product sheet, read on 13 August 2026; a blank cell means the bank does not publish that term, and terms change without notice. “Outdated terms” marks something a bank still advertises that the directive has superseded, a stale web page, not a breach: banks are free to set their own foreign-currency terms, and several of these products may well be priced differently in the branch. Interest-free banks pay a share of profit rather than interest, so they have no rate to publish; none publishes a historic profit rate either. Development Bank of Ethiopia is excluded as a policy lender that does not take retail deposits. “FCY handled” is a flow, not a balance: the foreign currency a bank says moved through it across one fiscal year, from AGM statements and annual reports (CBE via Capital Ethiopia; Awash from its 30th AGM and 2024-25 annual report; Dashen and Addis Bank via Addis Fortune; Bank of Abyssinia via The Reporter; Global Bank from its own annual report). Most of it is sold on or spent within days: under art. 6.4 an exporter's retained half must be sold back to the bank inside 30 days, so it is emphatically not money the bank is holding, and Dashen's own split (USD 1.12bn generated, USD 914.5m deployed) shows the difference. The fiscal years differ between banks, so these figures are not comparable with one another, which is why the column is neither sorted nor ranked. For scale, NBE's third Financial Stability Report put the whole sector's foreign-currency holdings at about USD 2.8bn at June 2025, banks' own holdings, again not customer deposits. Verify anything you plan to act on with the bank.
What it costs a bank to borrow from another bank
Since 31 October 2024 Ethiopian banks have lent each other cash on an electronic platform the ESX runs for the National Bank of Ethiopia. Two tenors trade, overnight and 7 days, and the exchange publishes one line per tenor per week: how much moved, in how many trades, at what weighted-average rate. Those rates cannot wander: the central bank lends to any bank at the policy rate +3 and takes deposits at −3, so the market trades inside a corridor, and in nearly half the published weeks it has traded exactly on one of its edges. Hover the chart for any week; the table below carries every published row.
Every week the exchange has published
One row per tenor per week, exactly as the ESX publishes it, the rate is a percentage per year, the volume is birr, and the two are never mixed. Rows tagged floor or ceiling printed exactly at one of the NBE's standing-facility rates for that week. Sort any column; filter by tenor, or to just the weeks that hit an edge.
| Week ↕ | Tenor ↕ | Rate (% p.a.) ↕ | Volume (Br) ↕ | Trades ↕ |
|---|
What the central bank says about it
The NBE's own quarterly readings. These are a different measurement from the exchange's weeks, a named month's rate and a cumulative volume as at that month, so they are shown separately rather than merged into the series above.
How the market got here
Ethiopia deregulated every mortgage rate, and most banks stopped saying what theirs is
Since 9 January 2026 no ceiling has applied to any lending rate in Ethiopia: each bank's board sets its own. Of the housing-credit products we could identify, half publish no price at all, including the country's largest private bank. Meanwhile building and construction absorbed 13.7% of all bank credit, the property law was rewritten three times in eighteen months, and foreigners may now own a home for US$150,000, one home, despite what you may have read. Mortgages remain 1.87% of GDP.
What this page will and will not tell you
Ethiopia has no house price index, no transaction register and no institutional broker coverage of Addis Ababa; no CBRE, JLL or Knight Frank series exists to cite. What it does have is first-rate primary law and first-rate central-bank data. So the law, the rates, the sector credit and the land auction results here are drawn from source documents; every price, yield and vacancy figure is a third party's estimate over asking prices and is confined to a single clearly marked block. Where a number genuinely does not exist (Grade A office occupancy, mall occupancy, current hotel occupancy), this page says so instead of borrowing one.
The rules that set every rate on this page
One directive, effective January 2026, ended rate regulation in Ethiopian banking. It is the reason a mortgage rate is now a question about disclosure rather than a question about policy, and the reason the central bank holds a per-sector lending-rate series that nobody outside it can see.
What it actually costs to borrow against a home
Every published housing-credit product we could identify, with the terms the lender itself states. A blank rate is a finding, not a missing entry; those banks publish no price. Rows expand with the full conditions and the source for each.
| Lender & product | Rate | Own funds | Term | Grace period |
|---|
CBE's rate card, for context
CBE's rates by loan type, from its official rate-revision announcement. It shows where housing sits relative to everything else the state giant lends for.
What those terms mean for a real purchase
Runs only on published terms: the lender list below is built from the banks that disclose a rate, so nothing here is derived from a rate we guessed.
How much of Ethiopian bank credit is property
The strongest number on this page, and it comes from the central bank's own table rather than any market estimate: the share of all outstanding commercial bank loans and advances taken by each sector, at two fiscal year-ends.
And how little of it reaches a household
Three proclamations, and the directive that finally switched one on
Ethiopian property law was rewritten between December 2024 and October 2025: who may develop, what everyone pays, and, for the first time in modern law, whether a foreigner may own. The foreign-ownership law then sat unusable for ten months until August 2026, when the implementing directive set the price of entry. Each provision below is a single checkable claim against the enacted text, cited to its own article.
What a foreign buyer must bring, by region
Property tax, worked through
The most misunderstood thing about Proclamation 1365/2025 is the base: the rate applies to a quarter of the property's value, not to all of it. The working is shown line by line for that reason.
The schemes, the target, and the price of ground
Ethiopia has run down-payment-and-loan housing schemes for two decades, named for their deposit split. Here they are against the backlog they were built to clear, and against what land itself now fetches at auction.
What land sells for at auction
Awarded prices in birr per square metre: the closest thing Ethiopia has to a published transaction record.
Occupancy: one real figure, and three honest gaps
Exactly one occupancy series for Addis Ababa is measured rather than asked, and it covers short-term rentals. The rest of this section is the empty states, named. We would rather show you a labelled gap than a number we cannot stand behind.
Prices and yields: estimates, fenced off
Everything from here to the end of this section is a third party's estimate over listing data. It is useful for orientation and it is not a measurement, so it lives inside its own boundary and appears nowhere else on the page.
Gross rental yield by area
| Area | 1-bed | 2-bed | 3-bed |
|---|
Prices, growth and time on market
The route to the exchange
Property is the largest asset class in Ethiopia with no listed instrument behind it. That is being worked on, and if it lands, it is how this sector reaches the market the rest of this site tracks.
What the boom is built on
Three things a property page owes its reader: who is being moved to make room for the new city, what the city says back, and what still happens when buyers hand money to a developer, because the escrow account the law is famous for has not been switched on yet.
The fastest-moving money in Ethiopia
The national switch cleared Br 1.26 trillion last year, and for the first time, phone-to-phone transfers moved more money than ATMs. The NBE has licensed 27 payment companies, 14 of them in 2025 alone. Here is the whole register, who the companies actually are, the equb apps operating with no licence at all, the card terminals nobody is using, and where the money really moves.
One number you will see quoted, and should not repeat
Ethiopia is widely reported to have 136 million mobile-money accounts, a figure larger than its entire population. It is real, and it counts accounts, not people: one person routinely holds a telebirr wallet, an M-PESA wallet and a bank wallet. Cited as “users”, it is wrong. We report it as accounts, and we say so.
The sector, in real numbers
Each column is a figure a named source actually printed, an annual result or a licence date. There is no daily price feed for any of this, so there is no line to draw between the bars, and we don't draw one.
How the money actually moves
The rails under every wallet, every QR code and every uncollateralised loan in the country.
The licence register: all 27
The National Bank licenses two different things, and the difference is the whole market. A Payment Instrument Issuer may hold your money, it runs a wallet. A Payment System Operator may only move money it never holds. Six firms hold the first licence. Twenty-one hold the second. One licence has been revoked.
What each licence costs to hold
The split is not a matter of appetite. A gateway licence needs Br 3M of paid-up capital; a wallet licence needs Br 100M, in cash. That 33× step is why twenty-one of the twenty-seven licensees move money they may never hold.
| Licence | What it may do | Minimum paid-up capital | In the directive |
|---|
The last column is the uncomfortable one. Six of these 27 companies have no public record at all, no website, no press, no named founder, nothing beyond the register row itself. Another four have only their own website. That is not a gap in our research; it is a finding. The NBE has licensed companies that have not publicly launched, and the register is the only evidence they exist.
| Company ↕ | Licence class ↕ | Licence no. ↕ | Licensed ↕ | Status ↕ | Public record ↕ |
|---|
Transcribed in full from the NBE's public register of Payment Instrument Issuers & Payment System Operators (nbe.gov.et), including the revoked entry, and kept in step with it by a daily check: these rows were last brought into line with the register on 14 Oct 2026. Licence status changes: confirm at the NBE before relying on any row. Two 2025 gateway operators are printed by the register with an NPS-PII/… number while listed in the operator table; we reproduce the register's own string rather than correcting it.
Who these companies actually are
Profiles for the firms with a real public record, the two wallets that matter, the switch underneath them, the gateways, the credit engine, and the one licence the NBE took away. Tap any card. Instrument issuer System operator Revoked
Digital equb: savings without a licence
An equb (እቁብ) is Ethiopia's oldest financial technology: a group pays in on a cycle, and each cycle one member takes the whole pot. Six startups have digitised it. Not one of them holds an NBE licence, and pooling other people's savings is precisely the activity a Payment Instrument Issuer licence exists to govern.
They operate instead by riding licensed rails (telebirr, M-PESA, CBE, Chapa, ArifPay, EthSwitch), and one of them ships inside telebirr as a mini-app. This is the one category on this page where a reader most needs protecting from the companies' own marketing, so each card prints what the company claims and what the public record actually supports.
No equb operator appears on the NBE register of Payment Instrument Issuers or Payment System Operators, re-checked against both lists on 14 Oct 2026 (nbe.gov.et). Regulatory analysis: Shega DFS Ethiopia Hub, 18 Jan 2025. A PII licence requires a share company with Br 100M of paid-up capital under directive ONPS/10/2025; these companies are PLCs. Each card's figures were re-read at source on 17 Aug 2026 and carry their own date.
POS: the terminals nobody is using
Ethiopia installed 40% more card terminals last year. Transactions through them fell 14%. Both figures come from the National Bank's own Financial Stability Report, and together they say something the press release never will: the acceptance network is being built far faster than the habit of using it. Ethiopian cards remain overwhelmingly an instrument of the cash machine, not the till, Br 730bn moved through ATMs; Br 26bn was spent at merchants. (The NBE reports its ATM channel undifferentiated, so we say moved through, not withdrawn; it does not publish the split.)
Ethiopia has no published price for accepting money
There is no merchant discount rate and no interchange framework in Ethiopia; nothing sets what a shop pays to accept a card or a wallet. The NBE's draft strategy lists building one as a twelve-month action item. Until it exists, the economics of merchant acquiring here are simply unpublished.
Who actually owns the terminals
Not the fintechs. Three banks hold roughly half the national fleet between them.
| Institution | POS terminals | Detail | Source |
|---|
Terminal counts from each institution's own audited annual report or prospectus (BoA Rights Offer Prospectus, Jan 2026; Awash 30th Annual Report 2024/25; Dashen 29th Annual Report). National totals from the NBE Financial Stability Report, March 2026. The Bank of Abyssinia's prospectus states two different POS transaction values in two places (Br 8,737M in its KPI table and business narrative, Br 6,227M in its executive summary); we carry neither as a headline figure and note the discrepancy.
What is about to change
What the terminal actually is
The licence register tells you who is allowed to acquire a payment. It tells you nothing about the box on the counter. So we went looking, and the answer is not the names you would expect. There is no public evidence that PAX, Ingenico, Verifone, Newland or Telpo have any Ethiopian distributor, reseller or tender award at all. That absence is real rather than a failed search: the identical search surfaces Nigeria's approved-terminal registry listing exactly those brands. Ethiopia's terminals come from SUNMI, imported, and from two local assembly lines.
The till software, and the certificate nobody can check
Behind the terminal sits the cash-register software, and this is where the market gets genuinely murky. HillMark says it is one of very few vendors certified by ERCA. Zoorya says it is Ethiopia's first ERP+POS with an ERCA-certified register. Both cannot be true, and nobody can adjudicate, because ERCA was dissolved in 2018, its website refuses connections, and no successor register has ever been published.
So every “certified” badge in this market is an unauditable self-assertion. The last enumerable list of accredited suppliers dates from March 2012. None of these companies holds an NBE licence: they are software vendors, not payment companies.
…and the ones that only look Ethiopian
Search “restaurant POS Addis Ababa” and the first page is almost entirely foreign SEO, the real Ethiopian vendors rank below them. The tell is not the copy, it is the hosting: Zoorya and CNET resolve to Ethiopian IP space; these do not.
Hardware and vendor findings verified July 2026 against company sites, DNS/hosting checks, Ethiopian press (Shega, Birr Metrics, 2merkato, Addis Fortune) and NBE's register. A caution on the switch figures: EthSwitch's POS and ETHQR numbers count interoperable (cross-institution) transactions only. They exclude on-us POS and closed-loop QR (including telebirr's own ~60,000-merchant estate), so they are not national totals and must not be read as such.
ERP & business software, the unregulated edge
Not one company in this section holds a National Bank licence. They are enterprise-software vendors, not payment companies, and they are labelled as such on every card. They belong on this page for one reason: this is where Ethiopian business software is colliding with regulated money.
Two forces are driving that collision: ZOORYA, which bundles ERP, POS and a cash register onto telebirr's and Dashen's rails, and the Ministry of Revenues' mandatory e-invoicing regime, which now accredits invoicing software before it may legally be used. That accreditation is a tax accreditation. It is not a financial licence, and nothing below should be read as one.
The dollar deposit at the door: what running an e-invoicing system costs
To operate an electronic-invoicing system legally, a provider posts a US-dollar performance bond, set first by what it is, from a taxpayer running its own build to a company selling invoicing as a service. The bond is a guarantee held against compliance, not a fee, and it is priced in dollars in a birr economy, which is itself a statement about who the Ministry expects to show up.
Then it scales: the ten levels every category climbs
The figure on each card is what you post on day one. From there the directive puts all four categories on a single ten-level ladder, indexed to the number of taxpayers a provider carries or to their combined annual sales. Grow, and you must tell the Ministry and top the bond up yourself. This is where $250,000 lives, and it is a level, not a licence: any of the four can reach it.
| Level | User taxpayers | Aggregate annual sales (Br bn) | Professionals | Guarantee |
|---|
Credit without collateral
Ethiopian banking is built on collateral: which is why most Ethiopians have never been able to borrow. Digital lending is the first real crack in that, and it is the part of this sector that changes who gets to build a business.
AI & credit: who decides, and who checks
The two biggest digital lenders on this page say an algorithm, not a loan officer and not collateral, decides who can borrow and how much. In ethio telecom's words, telebirr credit is set by an "AI enabled credit scoring system"; Coop Bank calls Michu's engine "AI-driven". Between them they report lending tens of billions of birr.
What neither publishes is how those loans perform: we found no default rate for either. And the rules are thin. A 2024 law gives people a right against decisions made solely by machine, but with an exception for contracts, which a loan is. The National Bank says, in its own draft strategy, that digital lending has no directive yet. Each card quotes the lender's own words and says what is, and is not, on the record.
The word is cheap to print. Some of these are specific and testable; some say nothing a reader can check. We quote each one and say which.
Every quotation in this section was read at its source on 14 Oct 2026: the lenders' and companies' own releases and sites; Personal Data Protection Proclamation No. 1321/2024 (Federal Negarit Gazette No. 35, 24 Jul 2024); the NBE's draft National Digital Payments Strategy 2026-2030; Digital Ethiopia 2030 as hosted by the NBE, and ENA's report of its approval; and the Oxford Insights Government AI Readiness Index 2025. "AI" here is always the company's word or the instrument's, never our finding: how these models work and how well they predict is not public. Not carried: the IMF's AI Preparedness Index (we could not re-read it at source) and a sponsored-content accuracy figure for Kifiya's Qena.
Startups & what they've raised
Ethiopia has roughly 49 fintech startups. Almost none of them publish a funding number, so most of this column honestly reads Undisclosed, and we would rather print that than a guess.
How old is everything on this page?
A research page that quietly ages is indistinguishable, to a reader, from one that makes things up; you cannot tell which number you are looking at. An audit of this page found 12 stale figures within days of it shipping, because a two-year-old number and a two-month-old number rendered identically.
| Figure | Value | As at | Age | Next one due |
|---|
Ethiopian fiscal years end 30 June and annual reports land in late July, so “is this stale?” is arithmetic, not a guess. Safaricom is the exception: its year ends 31 March. The NBE's Financial Stability Report runs about nine months in arrears (the March 2026 edition reported the year to June 2025), so its figures are not late; they are not due yet. Nothing here is auto-updated: a human confirms every number. This tells us where to look, it does not fill anything in.
Fintech news
Stories from the live newsroom feed that mention payments, wallets, digital credit or the companies above.
Sources: NBE payment instrument issuer / system operator register and directives ONPS/01/2020, ONPS/02/2020, ONPS/10/2025; NBE Financial Stability Report, March 2026 (Tables 14–16; all national POS, ATM and mobile-money figures are read from this document directly, not from press summaries); NBE draft National Digital Payments Strategy 2026–2030; National Payment System (Amendment) Proclamation 1282/2023; EthSwitch S.C. FY2024/25 & FY2025/26 results; ethio telecom FY2023/24, FY2024/25 & FY2025/26 annual reports; Safaricom PLC FY2026 results; Bank of Abyssinia Rights Offer Prospectus (Jan 2026), Awash 30th and Dashen 29th Annual Reports; Shega / DFS Ethiopia Hub; Birr Metrics; Capital Ethiopia; 2merkato; FinTech Futures; Odoo partner directory; Ministry of Finance (IFMIS); Mastercard Foundation (SAFEE); Kifiya; Cooperative Bank of Oromia (Michu, 8 Jul 2026); Safaricom Ethiopia (3 Sep 2026). Compiled Jul 2026. Re-checked on 14 Oct 2026: the register, the headline figures, the lending board, the POS deals, the ERP tenders and the NBE warnings.
On what is deliberately absent. Several companies here publish figures we do not carry, StarPay's “50K+ merchants”, AdmasPay's “500K transactions”, Digital Equb's “500K equbtegnas”. Each is a self-reported marketing claim with no independent source, and several are implausible against the company's own licence date. Where a company's only evidence is its own website, this page says so rather than laundering the claim into a fact. Educational research only: not investment advice, and not an endorsement of any licensee.
How the capital market actually works
Start with what a share is and how one is actually bought, then go all the way down to the licence ladder a firm needs to sell you one; each figure tied to the enacted text it comes from.
Start here: the basics
No jargon, no assumed knowledge. Ten questions that cover what a capital market is, what you own when you own a share, where a price comes from and what it costs you; each answered generally, then answered again for this market. Open the ones you need.
Go deeper: take the ESX's own course
This page explains the market. The exchange itself teaches it: twelve modules, online, with certificates at the end of the beginner and intermediate tracks.
Sign up from your phone: the ESX's Neway app
The exchange publishes its own app for opening an account and placing orders. It does not cut out the broker: you choose one inside the app, and every rule in the next section still applies.
How you actually buy a share
The one thing to internalise
The figures below are the enacted ones: Schedule One of ECMA Directive No. 980/2024 (Capital Market Service Providers Licensing & Supervision), the directive signed by the Authority’s Director-General in January 2024 and registered with the Ministry of Justice (Art. 183). We checked each against that primary text. It closed one real gap the widely-circulated draft left open: the 2023 consultation draft put a Securities Dealer at ETB 4M beside a separate “Securities Broker Dealer” line at ETB 10M; the enacted schedule drops the combined line and raises the Dealer to ETB 10M, and a Dealer licence covers client trading too (Art. 40(2)). Fees are a separate instrument, Fee Directive No. 996/2024.
Minimum capital by licence category
Schedule One of the enacted Directive 980/2024: the net-shareholders’ fund / net-worth each licence must hold (Art. 135). Fully paid in cash, deposited in a licensed Ethiopian commercial bank (Art. 132). Tap any card for its exact Schedule One line.
The application, step by step
ECMA steps per ecma.gov.et/licensing and Directive 980/2024, Part Two (application, fees at Art. 8, pre-certification inspection). The ESX-membership step, an Approval-in-Principle valid 6 months → Certification Inspection → Membership Certificate, follows the ESX Interpretative Guidance Notes (June 2025) (Membership Admission Process) and Rulebook Vol. B, r.2.2(3)–(5).
Underwriting? You need an investment bank licence
Under ECMA Directive 980/2024, Art. 47–48, only an Investment Bank may underwrite a public issue of securities, a plain broker or dealer licence carries no underwriting authority. The offer side is governed by the Public Offer & Trading of Securities Directive No. 1030/2024; where an issuer chooses to have its offer underwritten, the underwriter must be an Investment Bank.
- Underwriting is optional for the issuer; every underwriting agreement needs prior ECMA approval.
- In a syndicate, the lead investment bank is lead underwriter, except for debt issues.
- Investment-bank minimum net-worth (Schedule One): ETB 25M standalone / ETB 100M within a banking group.
- Every issuer registering securities must retain a Transaction Advisor. Only a licensed investment bank or securities investment adviser qualifies.
Running a digital trading platform: the real path
This is the part that matters most for a “Robinhood of Ethiopia.” A digital sub-broker licence is not enough on its own. Tap any card for the rules behind it, clause by clause, each stamped with the document it comes from.
Sources: ESX Rulebook 2024, Vol. D, Ch. 8 (Online & Digital Trading Portals): a dedicated secure network + order-management system (r.8.1(1)); security & conformance testing at least twice a year (r.8.1(2)); KYC before an account activates and 10-year record retention (r.8.2); MFA · encryption · HTTPS · extended validation, with the Exchange’s written go-live approval (r.8.3). Client-fund segregation is r.3.1; the clients’/proprietary/operational bank-account split and CSD registration are membership requirements (Vol. B, r.2.4). That a digital sub-broker cannot be an ESX trading member is ESX Rulebook Vol. B, r.1.3(3); that it cannot hold client funds is ECMA Directive 980/2024, Art. 40(4) and 44(3), explained in the ESX Interpretative Guidance Notes (June 2025) (“Ineligibility of Digital Sub-Brokers for Admission as Trading Members”).
When the markets are actually open
Ethiopia runs two exchanges on two very different clocks. The ESX publishes its session times, so we print them and tell you, live, whether the book is open. The ECX does not publish a standing timetable at all, and the schedule you will find quoted everywhere else is from before 2016. Here is the difference.
ESX sessions and the 2026 market-holiday calendar: esx.et › Equity Market › Trading & Operations. Status is computed in EAT (UTC+3) from the published hours; it is not a live feed from the exchange, and it cannot know about an unscheduled halt. ECX rows: Revised Rules of the Ethiopia Commodity Exchange No. 549/2021, as amended by 554/2021 and 558/2021 (justice.gov.et). We deliberately omit the widely-copied ECX session table: the ECX page it comes from names Construction & Business Bank as a settlement bank, a bank taken over by CBE under Regulation 384/2016, so it was written before April 2016.
Where you actually open an account: the licensed ESX brokers
These are the Capital Market Service Providers a client picks in the ESX “Select your Broker” onboarding flow. Each is licensed by ECMA under Directive 980/2024 and admitted as an ESX trading member, the only firms cleared to route your order to the exchange. Note the split: six are Investment Banks, two are Securities Dealers, not one uniform “broker” category. And note what this list is not: ECMA has licensed 21 capital-market service providers, but only these eight are ESX trading members. A licence is not a seat on the exchange.
The seven with codes are the list in the ESX's ንዋይ / Neway app; Prime Capital was admitted as the 8th trading member on 2 Jul 2026 and has no published participant code yet. Participant codes are read from the app and appear nowhere on esx.et. The ESX numbers its members by admission: Wegagen Capital received the first membership certificate (14 May 2025) and CBE Capital the second; Awash and Gadaa (23 Jan 2026) and First Addis and Siinqee (8 May 2026) were admitted in pairs. Licence lanes, parent institutions and issue dates verified against ECMA’s licensee register; contacts and addresses checked against the ESX trading-members roster on 5 Oct 2026. ECMA licences carry ~1-year expiries. Confirm current status at ecma.gov.et before acting. Not an endorsement. Sources: ecma.gov.et (licensee register and licensing notices), esx.et (trading-members roster and admission notices).
Market context (verified 5 Oct 2026 · listings updated 28 Sep 2026)
ECMA has licensed 21 CMSPs across three lanes: 9 investment banks, 2 securities dealers and 10 securities investment advisers. United Capital Financial Services (a subsidiary of Nigeria’s United Capital Group) became the first foreign investment bank in Ethiopia on 5 Jun 2026, and on 10 Jul 2026 ECMA licensed PrizeWorth Investment Bank plus advisers BluFin Capital Advisory and Lumina Capital, reaching 21. Then on 28 Aug 2026 ECMA upgraded D and T Ethiopia (Deloitte), the first CMSP ever licensed, from adviser to investment bank, the ninth, without changing the total.
On the exchange itself, seven securities now trade: Wegagen, Gadaa, Awash, Abay (listed 25 Jun 2026), Bank of Abyssinia (listed 28 Jul 2026 under ticker BOAX) and Sidama Bank (listed 28 Sep 2026 under ticker SIDAX, a bank with roots in microfinance), joined by Ethio Telecom, the first non-bank listing and the only one that followed a public offering to the general public (listed 26 May 2026). The pipeline behind them is widening: on 30 Sep 2026 ECMA approved the registration of securities for Oromia Bank, Berhan Bank, Cooperative Bank of Oromia, Goh Betoch Bank, Rammis Bank, Oromia Insurance and Yetebaberut Beherawi Petroleum, after Enat Bank on 27 Aug 2026. Registration with ECMA is not a listing: each still needs the ESX to admit it. Eight firms are ESX trading members. Regulator: ECMA (Director-General Hana Tehelku). Exchange: ESX (CEO Yodit Kassa, appointed in Aug 2026 after founding CEO Tilahun E. Kassahun resigned). Sources: ECMA notices of registration of securities; esx.et listed-companies page and announcements.
The register
Every ESX listing, every ECMA-licensed capital-market service provider, and every dated securities registration and exchange approval, in one place, each row stamped with its source and date. This is the structured record no other market tracker keeps for Ethiopia; it grows as ECMA and the ESX publish. Search it, or filter by type.
| Entity ↕ | Type ↕ | Date ↕ | Source |
|---|
What ECMA has on file: par value and offer price
The register above tracks events. This is the regulator's own issuer file, and it carries the one figure the events never state: the offer price. Where it sits above the Br 1,000 par, it is the only public number saying what a share was actually sold for, so Dashen at Br 2,900 and Habesha at Br 3,300 are the rows worth reading twice. A dash means the issuer registered shares already held and offered nothing new, so there is no price to state.
| Issuer | Existing securities registered | Par value | New securities registered / to be offered | Offer price | Prospectus approved |
|---|
The IPO & licensing calendar
The register is what exists; this is when it happened and what's coming. A horizontal time ribbon of the market's real milestones (listings, securities registrations, CMSP licences and ESX approvals), plotted on a true date axis, above a forward-looking runway of the companies heading to the exchange next. Tap any point for the detail and its source.
What just happened
The stories moving Ethiopia's markets, and the corners of Africa that pull on them. Newest first, grouped by what's driving them, every one tied to a named source. Tap any card to read the full story.
Every card is a real, reported event we checked against its source (Apr–Jul 2026). We curate and summarise. This isn't a live wire.
Terara's own desk
Everything on this page is Terara's own: pieces from our writers, and the Newsroom's daily stories on the Ethiopian Securities Exchange.
From our writers
Original reporting and analysis from our writers, not aggregated from a wire, not a summary of someone else's story. Every piece is filed by a named journalist and edited before it runs.
The ESX, every trading day
The daily close each weekday and the weekly wrap on Fridays, written from Terara's own market records. Every figure is checked by code before it runs.
Original work by Terara. You're welcome to quote a short passage with a link back to us, see the Content & Takedown Policy.
Learn to trade, before the money is real
A simulated portfolio over the exchange's real published prices, real fees and real trading rules. Orders queue for the next synced price, pay what a real trade would pay, and obey the ±20% daily band, because practice only teaches if it behaves like the real thing.
Simulated portfolios: no real money, no real orders, nothing here is investment advice. Prices are the ESX's own published levels, stamped with their capture time. Fees per the ESX Fees Schedule (Dec 2024; commission is a stated assumption). Trading rules per the ESX Trading Manual v.II (endorsed Mar 2026).