Minister of Communications and Information Technology Amr Talaat held a virtual meeting on Tuesday with a number of heads and representatives of major French technology companies and business institutions that are members of the French Employers Council (MEDEF). The meeting highlighted the investment opportunities in the Egyptian ICT sector, the strategies launched to develop it, and the efforts made to provide facilities and incentives to foreign companies wishing to invest, with a focus on outsourcing services. The meeting was organised by the Egyptian Commercial and Economic Office in Paris in coordination with MEDEF and was moderated by Philippe Gautier — President of MEDEF. Amr Mahfouz, CEO of the Information Technology Industry Development Agency (ITIDA), also attended the meeting. During the meeting, Talaat said that the Egyptian state has a strategic plan to advance all sectors, prompting the country's ICT sector to have a vital role in Egypt's Digital Strategy. This strategy aims to build a digital society through which technology is adapted to improve government performance and provide digital services to citizens, in addition to refining youths' skills and enhancing their competitive capabilities to meet the requirements of the local and global labour market. He also noted that the sector has seen the highest growth among the state's sectors over the past four years, adding that President Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi had recently witnessed the opening of more than 20 projects within Egypt's digital projects. Furthermore, Talaat pointed out that his ministry is re-developing the Egyptian government's software through the Ahmose Project with a budget of more than EGP 2bn, expressing his hopes to foster Egyptian-French cooperation in the implementation of this project and explained that many French companies are working in the field of outsourcing and have had several success stories in Egypt by taking advantage of young Egyptian cadres that possess linguistic and digital skills. Talaat added that the ministry increased the training budget by 22-fold in three years and that during this fiscal year, it aims to train 225,000 young people with investments worth EGP 1.3bn. Additionally, he explained that the ministry established the Egypt University of Informatics in the City of Knowledge in the New Administrative Capital (NAC) and that it is the first university specialised in communications, IT, and related fields in all of Africa. He also shed light on the ministry's efforts to support the entrepreneurship system and start-up companies in Egypt and Africa, noting that 30 digital innovation centres have been established across the country. Furthermore, Talaat explained the efforts exerted to develop the communications infrastructure, pointing out that investments worth EGP 60bn were injected to implement the first phase of a project to raise the efficiency of the internet countrywide, while the second phase will witness a EGP 40bn injection. Moreover, work is currently underway to implement a project to connect more than 3.5m houses within the villages of Decent Life Presidential Initiative with a fibre-optic cable network to provide high-speed internet services with investments amounting to EGP 40bn. For his part, Mahfouz reviewed aspects of Egypt's 2022-2026 Digital Strategy for the Outsourcing Industry, which details a package of investment incentives for global and local companies to increase the competitiveness of the total cost of the outsourcing industry in Egypt. This will be done by studying the requirements of the global market. The strategy aims to triple the volume of exports of cross-border information technology products and services and provide a new incentive package to attract more investments, in addition to enhancing Egypt's competitiveness in the fields of R&D and providing value-added services, which contributes to accelerating the growth of the knowledge economy. Gauthier then explained that MEDEF has been working for 32 years in the market and has been cooperating with Egypt for years through the Egyptian Embassy in Paris. He also noted that MEDEF includes 15 companies working in the field of digital services, stressing that Egypt's Digital Strategy for the Outsourcing Industry provides great areas for cooperation.
