The Road to the ESX

The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, a first century Greek merchant's handbook, names Zoskales as ruler of the coast around Adulis and describes him as careful with his possessions and literate in Greek.

Adulis was the outlet for the highland kingdom that would grow into Aksum, trading ivory, tortoiseshell, and obsidian for cloth, glass, and metalware carried across the Red Sea.

By the second century Adulis linked the Ethiopian highlands to a trade world that reached Roman Egypt, southern Arabia, and India. Caravans brought gold, ivory, and incense down to the port, and ships carried them onward.

Goods moved the other way in exchange, and the wealth of this trade helped the inland city of Aksum rise into a major power.

For centuries bars of salt cut in the Afar lowlands, called amole, served as money across Ethiopia, holding steady value from the highlands to the coast.

Alongside them circulated the Maria Theresa thaler, a large silver coin first minted in 1780 and so trusted that traders accepted it long after the empress had died.

In 1893 Emperor Menelik II issued a national silver coinage, the birr, also called the talari, struck with his portrait and the Lion of Judah.

Standardising the currency was part of a wider effort to modernise the state, giving Ethiopia a unit of account of its own instead of relying on foreign coin.

The Bank of Abyssinia opened in 1906 under an agreement with the National Bank of Egypt, becoming the first modern bank in the country.

It issued the first Ethiopian banknotes, took deposits, and financed trade. In 1931 it was reorganised as the Bank of Ethiopia, an early step toward a national banking system.

By the mid 1960s a small securities market took shape in Addis Ababa as the Addis Ababa Share Dealing Group, with brokers trading shares and government bonds among a handful of members.

It was informal by later standards, matching buyers and sellers by hand, but it showed a growing appetite for private investment in a modernising economy.

The 1974 revolution brought the Derg to power, and the following year the new government nationalised banks, insurers, and large companies.

Private shares lost their meaning under state ownership, organised trading ended, and for roughly half a century Ethiopia had no securities market.

The Capital Market Proclamation of 2021 created the legal foundation for a modern securities market and established the Ethiopian Capital Market Authority as its regulator.

The law set rules for listing, disclosure, and licensing, and cleared the way for a national exchange to be built.

The Ethiopian Securities Exchange opened in January 2025, and live secondary trading in listed securities began that July.

It was the first organised exchange in the country in about fifty years, reconnecting a thread that runs back through the 1965 dealing group to the ancient trade of Adulis and Aksum.