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 or in partnership with large local and multinational companies. Furthermore, in May of that year the MCIT and the General Health Care Authority announced they would create a framework to facilitate the digitalisation of the authority’s operations in order to streamline health services and make care more accessible.
The government has also required that certain transactions be conducted online – such as payment for services, Customs duties and taxes – which has encouraged the private sector to offer similar solutions to enable the transition.
Egypt is working with global leaders in this space. The Ministry of Public Enterprise Sector announced in November 2019 that Microsoft and software solutions provider SAP won a tender to implement the digital transformation of 60 state-owned firms and holding companies. The tender, which at the time was the largest of its kind in the Middle East, would facilitate the standardisation and automation of operations to improve efficiency. Human resources, sales, purchases, and enterprise resource planning related to finance, production and warehousing were covered under the agreement. The project was slated to be completed by June 2021.
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