(Bloomberg) -- Ethiopia’s central bank allowed the nation’s currency to trade freely, a key reform needed to secure more than $10 billion of funding and debt relief it’s been negotiating with the International Monetary Fund. The birr plunged.
The National Bank of Ethiopia permitted banks to buy and sell foreign currency at freely negotiated rates, according to a directive on its website. The central bank will make “only limited interventions to support the market in its early days and if justified by disorderly market conditions.”
The central bank’s strict control of the currency has caused a shortage of dollars in Africa’s most-populated nation after Nigeria, deterring investment needed for the economy to recover from a devastating two-year civil war that ended in 2022. The Ethiopian authorities have been in talks with the IMF since last year to unlock $10.5 billion of funding, which has been contingent on currency reforms.
Ethiopia’s biggest lender - the state-owned Commercial Bank of Ethiopia — quoted the birr at 74.74 against the dollar at 10:59 a.m. in the capital, Addis Ababa, on Monday morning. That’s 23% weaker than the closing rate of 57.7769 on July 26.
The step taken by the Ethiopian central bank echoes a similar move by Egypt in March, when it allowed its currency to weaken almost 40%, paving the way for an $8 billion bailout from the IMF. The devaluation of the birr had been a key sticking point in negotiations for a new IMF program that the nation needed before restructuring its loans.
Ethiopia defaulted on its debt in December by failing to pay a $33 million coupon on a $1 billion eurobond that matures at the end of this year as it sought to treat all creditors equally. The bonds traded 0.3% higher at 75.56 cents on the dollar on Monday.
Official bilateral creditors this month granted financing assurances to the Horn of Africa nation to help fast-track approval of the new loan by the IMF board. The guarantees mean that creditors, such as the Paris Club and China, have provided certainty that they will restructure their loans to Ethiopia in a way that’s consistent with the fund’s program.
The IMF’s board is expected to discuss Ethiopia’s request for a new financing program on Monday.
“Until we have rough idea of where the birr is, it will be impossible to know where things like external debt to GDP are,” said Thys Louw, a portfolio manager at Ninety One UK Ltd. That’s important to determine whether Ethiopia faces liquidity or solvency issues as it restructures, he said.
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Ethiopia has been slowly opening up its economy. It plans to start an exchange to help finance the government’s plans. Abiy’s administration and the private sector are projected to have long-term financing needs of about 20 trillion birr ($351.3 billion) each over the next decade, according to the nation’s stock exchange.
The closed economy meant that Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s government failed to attract favorable bids for a stake in the nation’s state-owned telecommunications operator. Some textile companies were forced to shut operations after the US suspended the nation’s duty- and quota free access under the African Growth and Opportunity Act, further undermining inflows of foreign exchange.
--With assistance from Colleen Goko and Matthew Hill.
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