The process of realizing a capital market in Ethiopia is well underway in order to ensure the existence of a functioning market soon, Ethiopian Capital Market Authority (ECMA) Director-General Brook Taye said.
In an exclusive interview with ENA, the director-general said what the authority has been doing is establishing the necessary legal parameters that allows to start the market and become operational.
The authority has finalized and issued three different directives, according to Brook. Those are “capital market service provider’s directive, exchange directive, and self regulatory directives which would allow us to start issuing the necessary licenses to market participants.”
Under the capital market service provider directive, for instance, the authority will be licensing brokers, dealers, investment banks and advisors as well as several types of market participants, he added
The director-general stated that ECMA has “received excellent feedbacks from a lot of people who are experts in this field and we are finalizing those directives and providing the final version for adoption.”
Stressing that significance of structuring the institution, he said that ECMA has been structuring the authority in different areas, including hiring qualified human resource, alongside its priority of designing a five-year strategy.
With regarding to its mandate, its priorities are supporting “the market, investors, and focusing energy getting investors ready to participate in the market.”
The overall “process is progressing well based on our time line that we shared with our Board. And we are going to deliver on commitment to make sure that Ethiopia would have functioning capital markets very soon,” Brook elaborated.
Obviously, as a new institution, there are a lot of challenges that need to be overcome; but we will deliver on our commitment and the responsibility that the authority has.
Recalling that one of the major commitments of the government is to make sure that there is macro-stability, the director-general underscored that when you envision macro stability that means you try to focus on having a market mechanism to mobilize resources.
The Ethiopian Capital Market Authority (ECMA) was established in June 2022 by the National Bank of Ethiopia.
Source: Ethiopian News Agency