Burundi names veteran financier Éric Ngendahayo to head stock exchange
Burundi is betting on experience. Dr Éric Ngendahayo has been appointed to lead the country's stock exchange as it looks to deepen its capital markets.
Burundi has appointed Dr Éric Ngendahayo as chief executive of the Burundi Stock Exchange, handing one of the country’s most experienced financial figures the task of developing a market that remains small, but increasingly important to the country’s economic ambitions.
The appointment comes as governments across East Africa look for new ways to finance growth. With public budgets under pressure and commercial banks unable to meet every financing need, policymakers have begun paying closer attention to capital markets. Burundi’s exchange is still in its infancy, but the hope is that it can gradually become a more meaningful source of long-term investment.
Ngendahayo is hardly a newcomer to that conversation.
A finance graduate with a PhD from the University of Lille 2 in France, he has spent much of the past two decades moving between international institutions, government and the private sector. Most recently, he led Orbit Investment Bank Burundi, part of the Tanzanian-based Orbit Securities group, which has operated in regional capital markets for more than thirty years.
Earlier in his career he worked with the World Bank Group and the International Finance Corporation (IFC), focusing on financial-sector development and private investment. He also contributed to Burundi’s National Financial Markets Development Plan, a document intended to lay the groundwork for a deeper domestic capital market.
His experience has not been confined to international organisations. Ngendahayo has served as a senior adviser to Burundi’s Presidency, overseeing programmes linked to economic governance, financial-sector reform and the business climate. Those roles gave him a front-row seat to many of the country’s efforts to modernise its economy, even if progress has often been uneven.
Alongside his executive career, he continues to sit on the boards of DigiCapital Bourse and DigiCapital Asset Management, both regulated under the CEMAC regional framework, and chairs the board of Banque de Crédit de Bujumbura, part of the Bank of Africa Group.
The stock exchange’s board said it believes his international experience and regional network will help steer the institution into its next stage of development. Like many frontier exchanges, Burundi’s market faces familiar challenges: few listed companies, limited trading activity and a relatively narrow investor base.
