The Egyptian Social Fund for Development (SFD) has spent about EGP 850 million supporting small enterprises in the country over the past six years. In Q1/2014, SFD's total finances for the small enterprises in Egypt reached EGP 350 million. In this respect, Nevine Gamea - Head of SFD's Central Sector for Small Enterprise Finance – told Amwal Al Ghad – that the fund targets pumping financing totalling EGP 1.630 billion in small enterprises in the country by the end of 2014. The Egyptian fund has recently signed with the country's biggest state-owned bank the National Bank of Egypt (NBE) an EGP 135 million contract to finance small enterprises. Therefore, NBE's total deals with SFD surged to EGP 7.5 billion. Over the last three years, SFD spent EGP 4 billion to support around 48.6 thousand small projects and EGP 1.970 billion to support 449 thousand micro-sized projects. Since inception in 1992 with a mandate to reduce poverty, the Egyptian Social Fund for Development has pumped more than EGP 20 billion to support national economy. Until 2013-end, SFD has provided 1.92 million small and micro-sized enterprises with over EGP 17 billion finances in addition to EGP 3.5 billion in favour of infrastructure and community development projects. .
