The Social Fund for Development (SFD) negotiates with the Central Bank of Egypt (CBE) and the Egyptian Banking Institute to have the database of 36,000 small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in Egypt. SFD plans to exchange the databases of customers with CBE as the former has also a large database. SFD has offered finances to 250, 000 customers, said Ghada Wali, secretary general of SFD. The CBE's database will benefit SFD indirectly as the later deals with banks which make credit-rating reports for their customers. Wali stressed that it is important to encourage the owners of SMES to license such enterprises through offering them tax and insurance incentives. SFD targets to increase its finances to women by 35% as unemployment rate for women is almost four times the unemployment rate for men, she noted.
