A panoramic view of Nairobi showing skyscrapers, roads, and urban development, highlighting Kenya’s economic growth.
The new stock market is part of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s efforts — interrupted by a ghastly two-year civil war that killed at least 600,000 people before ending in late 2022 — to open up the economy of Africa’s second-most populous nation. The most important reform, investors and lenders say, has been the liberalisation of the foreign exchange regime, a precondition of a $3.4bn IMF bailout — the Washington-based lender’s largest ever concessional programme — which was approved by its board in July. Over the next four years, economic officials have set themselves the goal of securing up to $27bn in financing and investment, equivalent to 16 per cent of Ethiopia’s GDP, from the IMF, World Bank, China, the United Arab Emirates and others.