26th November 2024
Kutlo Motseta
On the 26th and 27th November African Exchange Linkages Project (AELP) held a conference. AELP is a brain child of ASEA and the African Development Bank. Similarly to ASEA, it strives to promote the flow of capital throughout Africa and to provide a safe regulatory environment for companies.
“[We want] to create an ecosystem that enables [or eases] cross border trading … enabling companies and government to raise their capital raising capabilities,” said CEO of AELP, Lina Tonui.
She said, “We need to make investments in local stocks just as easy in any other ALEP stock exchange.”
Tonui spoke about the need for technology entrepreneurs to consider continental collaboration of markets when designing software applications.
“Brokers have developed online applications on mobiles that enable trading unfortunately we are only doing this for our local stocks”, she said
“It’s a very good initiative started project in 2005 being enacted again in 2015 now unless we have seamless time border training not about fees but if I am broke, [I will have] access to more liquidity [in other exchanges]”, said Heba El Serafi who is vice chairperson of the Egyptian Stock Exchange.
The linkage project has nine member exchanges, which are collectively responsible for over 90% of the stock exchange value on the continent.
The ASEA conference was attended by leading cooperate entities for example, Nasdaq, Allan Gray, EFTSA portfolio management, Motswedi Securities, SATRIX, Chobe Holdings, Letshego Africa Group Grant Thornton Botswana, International Financial Cooperation, BBS Bank, Kgori Capital, BRVM, BITC, SCL Capital, Risk Insights, Ecoconsult, Botswana Public Pension Funds, CMA Small System AB, ARQA Technologies, local financial parastatals and Stock Exchanges cross the continent.
Botswana’s and Africa’s first Olympic track and field short sprint gold medalist Letsile Tebogo, was invited as a special guest. Letsile is sponsored by sports behemoth Nike, international luxury watch maker Tag Heur and Orange amongst others.
He is fast becoming one of the most recognizable brands on the continent and was named the track and male athlete of the year in Monaco by the World Athletics body on the 1st December 2024. However, he spoke of the limited interest local companies have in promoting their business interests through sport.
“When Nikey came on board, I thought one of the local companies were going to come one board so that I can promote one of the local companies … but they didn’t come on board so I took that opportunity [with Nike] and just kept on going”.
He hopes that government and private sector will use their entrepreneurial spirit to work together with athlete brands to promote local businesses, which is a global business marketing norm.
The conference ended on Friday 28th November and will be held again in Kigali, Rwanda next year November.
