The Housing and Development Bank (HDB) conducted the second 2018 raffle for children and youth award saving accounts' prizes. This comes as part of the bank's role to activate the national saving project in cooperation with the ministries of education and housing, which started 19 years ago. Amany Badr won a housing unit worth EGP 200,000; Shady Adel won the second prize, which is a housing unit payment worth EGP 100,000, while Yossra Ahmed won a housing unit down payment woorth EGP 50,000. For his part, Fathy Sebaey, chairperson and managing director of the bank, praised the continuous and fruitful cooperation between the bank and the ministries of education and housing. He pointed out that this project is a development of the objectives of the bank, which was established to serve the community to achieve financial inclusion under the auspices of the Central Bank of Egypt. He stressed that the HDB has played a leading role in spreading the financial culture among children and youth being an active member of the Child and Youth Finance International (CYFI). Hisham Abdul Razeq, chairperson of the executive committee for prize winning savings accounts, said that the product was designed to save to buy for apartments. He added that this product aims to instil a savings values among students, and enable them to plan for their future by saving a sum of money to be able to join a housing project. For his part, Hisham Al-Sangary, the undersecretary of the ministry of education, recommended that all employees of the ministry coordinate with the bank's officials and branch managers to identify the advantages and importance of this project and the mechanisms to open a savings account. The HDB has been developing and updating this savings vessel over the past two years to change the interest calculation method in order to follow an upward yield according to the account balance. The number of participants in this vessel has so far reached 175,000 children and youth with a total balance of EGP 565m.
