Ethiopia: ECX Alumni to Help Set Up Tanzanian Exchange

BY ELLENI ARAYA, 21 OCTOBER 2012

Stalwarts Management Consultancy Services, founded by former employees of the Ethiopian Commodity Exchange (ECX) recently signed a 200,000 dollar World Bank contract, to conduct a feasibility study that can set up a Commodity Exchange in Tanzania.

The World Bank had floated an international tender for the feasibility study and design of a Tanzanian Commodity Exchange in June 2012 of this year, under the Financial Sector Capacity Building facility for the Bank of Tanzania.

The company started up by Yohannes Assefa, former Senior Legal Adviser and Chief Compliance Office at ECX, and Bharat Kulkarni, (PhD), former trading operation manager, signed the contract on October 18, 2012, after finalizing negotiations which had started in August,2012, when the company was awarded the project.

Other ECX alumni have also collaborated with Stalwarts for the Tanzania project, including Aman Adinew, Former Chief Operating Officer and Kadri Alpha, former Chief Risk Officer of ECX.

Together they are expected to provide a business model, policy analysis, financial planning & debt structuring, and investment advice services for the setting up of the exchange in Tanzania.

The area is not new to the management team of Stalwarts as they had previously been involved in setting up exchanges both in Asia and Africa. In Ethiopia they had been part of the team that had done the feasibility study and the formation of ECX, the first exchange of its kind in East Africa, under the leadership of Eleni Gabre-madhin.

This team's mostly made up of Ethiopian professionals in the Diaspora that have come to lend their experiences in the first few year's of ECX’s operation.

Both Yohannes and Baharat were part of the first four of the nine foreign ECX management team to leave in. Since then all of the initial team has transferred management to local staff, including founder Eleni who has taken on an advisory role.

Yohaness was the first to leave in June 2010, and Bahrat had followed the year after in August. Stalwarts was established in September 2011, as a consulting firm registered and licensed in India and the United Arab Emirates. http://allafrica.com/stories/201210230026.html