Tewodros Ashenafi is the man foreign companies use to get into Ethiopia

When Japan Tobacco International wanted to buy into Ethiopia's state tobacco monopoly in 2016, it needed an Ethiopian partner. It used Tewodros Ashenafi.

The transaction gave the Japanese group 40% of the National Tobacco Enterprise at an enterprise value of $1.4 billion. It remains the largest privatisation in Ethiopian history and one of the largest private transactions ever done in Africa, and Ashenafi joined the board afterwards.

Ethiopia is among the harder African markets for foreign capital to enter. The state held the commanding positions in telecoms, banking, energy and logistics for decades, land cannot be owned outright, and currency has been difficult to move. Getting in has generally required a local partner who understands both sides, and Ashenafi built a career being that person.

He came to it from Wall Street rather than from Addis Ababa. Born on Aug. 26, 1969, he took an economics degree at Columbia College in 1991 and started at Merrill Lynch in New York, then spent years as a political and economic consultant advising multinationals and pension funds on investment conditions in emerging markets, mostly in Latin America and the former Soviet republics. He later completed the owner and president management programme at Harvard Business School.

He came home to build in oil.

Ashenafi founded SouthWest Holdings in 2003 and SouthWest Energy in 2005, the first indigenous Ethiopian oil and gas exploration company, registered in Hong Kong and run from Addis Ababa. It holds the leading acreage position in the Jijiga Basin in eastern Ethiopia near the Somaliland border, the country's largest proven hydrocarbon-bearing sedimentary basin at roughly 350,000 square kilometres, and ranks among the ten largest acreage holders in East Africa.

The holding company grew around it, adding SouthWest Development, which services other oil and gas operators in Ethiopia, SouthWest Technologies and the SouthWest Foundation.

Water was the second business. Ashenafi is chairman and co-owner of Ambo Mineral Water, Ethiopia's oldest naturally carbonated bottled water brand and its most popular drink, which he holds alongside the brewing group that became part of Coca-Cola Beverages Africa.

That is the pattern across both. He supplies the Ethiopian half and a multinational supplies the capital.

His board positions follow the same logic. Ashenafi sits on the board of the EastWest Institute, on the international advisory board of the Atlantic Council, and on the advisory board of Cepheus Growth Capital Partners, the Ethiopian private equity firm, which puts him in rooms where investment decisions about the country get made.