What are the most significant cases or transactions that your legal team has recently been involved in? 

Recently, our legal team has been at the forefront of driving Ethio Telecom’s strategic evolution from a traditional telecom operator to a leading digital solutions provider. A primary highlight includes managing the complex regulatory, licensing, and compliance frameworks required to expand and secure our digital financial services, which are critical to national financial inclusion. 

Additionally, under the framework of the Communications Service Proclamation No. 1148/2019, the legal division has successfully navigated an increasingly competitive, liberalised market. We have actively handled high-stakes infrastructure protection strategies, resolving key regulatory disputes, and safeguarding our extensive network assets across all regions. By blending robust litigation defense with proactive dispute resolution, the team has successfully mitigated multi-million Birr exposures, ensuring operational continuity and protecting corporate revenue during a period of intense market transformation.

How is your legal function leveraging technology to enhance efficiency in areas such as contract management and compliance monitoring?

Managing a legal function for an organisation with tens of millions of subscribers requires a strategic shift toward tech-driven operations. Recognising the critical importance of automation, we are actively modernising our workflows. We have already finalised a comprehensive business requirements assessment to map out our operational needs. 

The implementation of our automated legal case management system is officially underway, and we are on track to fully finalise and launch this automated workflow by the mid-term of the next budget year. This system will streamline commercial agreements, dispute tracking, and vendor partnerships at company level. By replacing manual processes with structured digital tracking, this technological integration will significantly reduce oversight risks. It will enable our legal professionals to reduce administrative tasks, accelerate turnaround times, and focus heavily on high-value corporate governance and strategic risk mitigation.

In light of increasing regulatory scrutiny across sectors in East Africa, how are you adapting your compliance frameworks to stay ahead of change?

The regulatory landscape in East Africa, particularly in Ethiopia’s telecom and fintech spaces, is experiencing unprecedented tightening. To stay ahead, our legal department has pivoted itself from a traditional “advisory” model to an embedded, proactive compliance framework. We have structured specialised legal risk matrices that align our corporate operations directly with evolving national proclamations, digital finance directives, and data privacy standards. 

Our approach emphasises continuous capacity building; we regularly conduct targeted legal training for justice organs, regional enforcement bodies, and internal cross-functional teams to harmonise the understanding of digital financial laws and infrastructure security. By establishing open, transparent dialogue with regulators and systematically auditing our internal processes against international best practices, we ensure that Ethio telecom not only meets current statutory requirements but is inherently resilient against future regulatory shifts.