Public cloud services have emerged in recent years as core contributors to the ICT sector’s growth. The market is expanding rapidly, with Africa expecting more than $15bn in data centre investment between 2020 and 2025, much of which will be concentrated in Egypt, Morocco, Nigeria, Kenya and South Africa. In a similar vein, revenue from public cloud services in the MENA region was expected…
Egypt has a large public workforce of roughly 5.6m people, and government operations are largely paper-based. However, ministries are working with the MCIT to digitise all services. To this end, in 2020 ITIDA launched the Our Opportunity is Digital platform, where national digital transformation projects are offered specifically to small and medium-sized enterprises either for direct implementation…
At the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, the initial shift to the digital sphere by most businesses caused a surge in demand for ICT services, and highlighted the need to expand both infrastructure and capacity further. “People went fully digital in most aspects of their lives,” Talaat told OBG in September 2020. “The pandemic caused an immediate surge in internet usage patterns, both in terms…
Egypt is home to a robust and innovative ICT sector, with growth outpacing broader economic expansion. In FY 2018/19 the industry grew by 16% to reach LE93bn – one of the fastest rates of expansion across all economic sectors – while overall GDP growth was 5.6%. This trend was expected to continue, with the government forecasting in December 2020 that the sector would grow by 15.2% in FY 2019/20…
The government moved quickly to implement containment and other health measures. The Ministry of Health (MoH) announced the first confirmed case of Covid-19 on February 14, 2020, and by March 19 all international flights were suspended and a curfew from 7.00pm to 6.00am was imposed. Places of worship were closed on March 22, and Ramadan gatherings were banned in April. A state of emergency was…
The government acted swiftly to implement financial measures to alleviate the economic effects of the pandemic. A LE100bn stimulus was announced in late March 2020, half of which went to the hard-hit tourism sector. The package laid out support for poor families and those affected financially by the crisis, including LE3bn in subsidies of LE500 per affected worker for three months; a six-month extension…
Stringency score of selected economies, mid-December 2020 (out of 100) The Oxford University Covid-19 Government Response Tracker is a composite measure based on nine response indicators including school closures, workplace closures and travel bans, rescaled to a value from 0 to 100 (100 = strictest). If policies vary at the sub-national level, the index is shown as the response level of the…
…
How has Egypt addressed the impacts of Covid-19, including the surge in demand for ICT services? A $1.9bn nationwide upgrade of the telecoms infrastructure, deployed over two years, was key to a well-performing internet, supported by resilient infrastructure, throughout the pandemic’s peak period. On the human development side, the government propagated a number of online capacity-building…
Several non-economic factors have supported growth and made Egypt more resilient to external shocks. First and foremost is the country’s growing population, which rose from 90.2m in FY 2015/16 to 101.5m in FY 2019/20. The population is expected to expand at a compound annual growth rate of 1.9% through to 2030, according to Fitch Solutions, reaching 120.8m by that year. As the largest in the…
