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The multi-million dollar private equity firm, Actis,
appointed Teshome Kebede, deputy director of
agribusiness and trade expansion programme in
Ethiopia for USAID, as a member of its East African
Advisory Panel from Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda and
Tanzania.
The scope of Actis’ investment goals in Africa is to
expend one billion dollars, of which more than 20pc
in Eastern Africa.
Former President of the Ethiopian Manufacturing
Industries Association and former Vice President of
the Addis Abeba Chamber of Commerce, Teshome has
more than 30 years of experience in both the public
and private sectors in the country.
Teshome told Fortune that the private equity
investments that created the enlargement of
businesses through partnership mechanisms with
government and the private sector in the Eastern
African countries should be emulated in Ethiopia.
Actis provides an instrument by which businesses in
Ethiopia would build their financial capacities
through capital sources not available from the local
sources. The financial sector of the economy is one
area which Actis focuses to stimulate its equity
capital investments in Ethiopia, Teshome added.
According to Tesfaye Bekele, head of the business
support service department at the Addis Abeba
Chamber of Commerce and Sectoral Association, the
private sector in Ethiopia highly needs capital
inflows, the lack of which have slowed the overall
economic growth in the country.
The benefits that the private businesses in Ethiopia
would be gaining from such equity investors like
Actis and other foreign direct investors with a lot
of capital access at their disposal cannot be
contested, Tesfaye claims.
”However, the implementation process preferred by
the financiers does not take the private businesses
far enough,” Tesfaye said.
Big financiers such as the African Development Bank
(ADB) show the desire in equity investment, but
whenever implementation becomes an issue, things
begin to proceed slowly, as the financiers demand
guarantees from an established entity before they
release their capital, a procedure Tesfaye disagrees
with.
He stressed that the nature of agreement made
between the government of Ethiopia and this private
equity investor, would determine whether there are
opportunities in a real sense for the private sector
in Ethiopia to expand.
Actis is a private sector-oriented entity, which
sprung up from the Commonwealth Development
Corporation (CDC) some five years ago. 70pc of its
financial sources originated from CDC.
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