Hey crew, here’s to another week of cutting through the noise and focusing on what actually moves financial minds forward.

No buzzwords, just the stuff affecting wallets, business & the economy:

🏋️‍♀️ Ethiopia’s Export Team Has Two Employees Doing Heavy Lifting

🪐 Women Are From Venus and They Are Underserved

🍋 Rewind: The 2 Second Insurance Claim Payout

Here’s to the 116th edition

Let’s dive in.

Ethiopia’s export sector has just submitted the best result in its history.

Unfortunately, nearly all of the work was completed by two usual suspects.

Gold earned about $5.5 billion. Coffee added $3.1 billion. Together, they generated 78.2% of Ethiopia’s record export revenue of nearly $11 billion.

It did not matter what the other products wore.

The record is still worth applauding. Ethiopia earned substantially more foreign currency, exported more coffee and brought far more gold into official channels.

But the deeper question is whether this reflects genuine export transformation…or at least a step in the right direction.

Global prices did plenty of the work.

The average international gold price rose from about $2,800 per ounce in 2024/25, hit a peak around ~$5200 in January/February before settling roughly at $4,250 today. That’s still an increase of around 40% from this time last year.

So, it would seem global prices deserve most of the applause.

Coffee prices were far less generous, increasing by only around 5% over the comparable period. That suggests coffee’s stronger earnings came more from higher export volumes than from prices alone.

Try explaining that to your average Ethiopian paying ~ETB 1,700 per kilo for coffee that was apparently not good enough to leave the country, but the export-quality prices stayed behind.

There is another important part of the story: formalization.

Official gold exports jumped from just over four tons in 2023/24 to nearly 39 tons in 2024/25.

Some gold that may previously have been smuggled, informally traded or held outside official channels began showing up in the numbers.

Indeed, 10 times more gold did not suddenly appear underground. It simply started using the front door.

That is more meaningful progress than the headline numbers. More formal exports mean more foreign currency enters the banking system instead of disappearing somewhere between the mine and the border.

Who runs the world?

Girls. 

Well at least that was according to Beyonce.

Yet, a recent study on women’s contribution to the financial sector presents a slightly different reality.

The ever present NBE took a break from handing out FX notes to banks like they were ደስታ ከረሜላ to unveil a report that, on the surface is not very shocking, but worth the 2 mins of your time to read a funny and insightful article from your buddies at ፍራንክ Digest 😉

According to the report, women are underserved.

And as Jay-Z said, numbers don’t lie:

Important to note here is that value is the monetary amount and number of loans is, well…number of loans.

The study mentioned that reports collected made it difficult to make realistic judgments on the situation since financial institutions did not quantify the number of borrowers rather the amount disbursed.

Other factors that the NBE doesn’t play around with are gender inclusive financial products like What’s low interest rate working capital loans for example.

Some banks were short on that metric, saying ‘my bad bro, been busy with other stuff like…survival!’.

The unofficial ‘Scorecard’ as labelled by the NBE, also looked at women’s participation in the sector:

These showed a bit of promise although there is still room for improvement according to benchmarks.

Note: The study is based on data collected between January and December 2025.

So, What’s Next?

Clearly, the gender divide is not just an Ethiopian thing, it’s everywhere.

The unfortunate reality is that women earn less and are less likely to advance in most roles.

The disparity continues in the lending world, the problem is not an easy one to fix.

In our own research in developing a credit scoring system for emerging markets, we’ve stumbled upon research indicating that business loans requested by women could actually be given a favorable score.

This might be due to their meticulousness around bookkeeping and their rather cautious approach to handling financial obligations.

Overall, initiatives like NBE’s ‘Scorecard’ have more to do with shining light on policy driven activities rather than law imposing ones.

Fundamentally, the biggest issue is human bias.

If you omitted the name and gender of the loan applicant, the results would show a stark difference.

While, if the country can find a few successful business women rubbing shoulders with some of the ከፍተኛ ግብር ከፋዮች, the narrative around women founded and led businesses would eventually change for the better.

Imagine getting paid by the insurance company before the ink on the claim settlement document dries.

Well, in 2016, an InsurTech company (That’s “Insurance” and “Technology” wed in holy matrimony) did just that.

Lemonade, quite the unusual name if you ask us, did the unthinkable and disbursed $979 to a gentlemen who has lost rain coat a few days back.

The process was done on his iPhone 7 (pretty hi-tech at the time ) trough the Lemonade app, assisted by an early ancestor version of ChatGPT, A.I Jim.

The time it took from tapping the “Submit Claim” to being approved was 2 seconds.

Yes, 2 seconds…with no actual ink to spare.

Now Lemonade hasn’t done any extraordinary breakthroughs since then but it showed the world how an automated system can seamlessly move financial value from one party to another.

A transaction always has two sides and it can only be made when goods or services are exchanged.

Insurance offers a complicated financial product, one that is built on trust and sophisticated algorithms.

And InsurTechs like Lemonade have been trying to disrupt the industry with the introduction of AI long before AI was close to our fingertips.

Closer to home, insurance is nothing else but an obligation.

A requirement that is put into the mix for compliance sake.

Ethiopia can relate to auto-insurance, bond insurance, warehouse insurance, shipping insurance and in some cases medical insurance…but that’s a bout it.

Technology is an obscure concept for insurance here, even some of the top firms like Hibret and EIC mostly run things on paper or use Excel as their database.

Obligatory insurance software is used but underutilized in most cases.

The industry is only going to grow but early signs suggest that it will go trough severe growing pains.

So What’s The Deal Here?

Lemonade reached the incredible feat 10 years ago.

While our insurance sector here is still denying claims because the authorized signer was called into an urgent meeting to discuss ‘how to speed up claims processing’.

Ironic.

But let’s pause for a second, technology itself cannot fix the archaic structure of the industry.

Systems are needed.

Policies are required to be changed.

And more actors need to be added to the mix.

Warren Buffet owns a bunch of insurance companies: their business model is great when run efficiently.

If Hibret lists tomorrow on the stock exchange (They should list soon FYI), we need to know how efficiently they’re making money.

When we’re not exposed to their products on a daily basis, it kind of difficult to put our money on the line and bet on the investment.

Maybe we’re wrong, maybe one of the insurance bros will develop an app, sell us personal insurance packages and save us the hassle when we forget our iPhone 17 in the back seat of the Ride from Bole…

Hopefully it doesn’t take loosing a ETB 150k phone to find out 😉