In a bid to institutionalise commercial mediation for business dispute resolution, the International Finance Corporation (IFC), the private-sector arm of the World Bank, launched in Cairo yesterday its Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) programme. The programme, which is organised in partnership with the State Secretariat for Economic Affairs of Switzerland (SECO), seeks to promote mediation culture in Egypt and then all over the region, in order to boost business and economic performance, especially with the Middle East and North Afria (MENA) region lagging behind in terms of private-sector development. Egypt, for instance, is ranked by the World Bank's Doing Business Report at number 148 out of 183 economies in terms of contract enforcement, which is one the country's worst indicators. The report has noted that it takes a minimum of three years (1,095 days) to enforce a contract here and that the enforcement cost is approximately 26 per cent of the value of the claim. "Those numbers speak for themselves," said Swiss Ambassador to Egypt Dominik Furgler, in the launching conference of the programme. "This is why there is a big floor for business mediation now, which will save money, energy and time, opening a wider space for business development." Egypt, the most populous Arab country, doesn't only score low on the international scale of the Doing Business Report, but it also comes late compared to the general MENA indicators, which stated that contract enforcement takes an average of 679.9 days, costing only 23.7 per cent of the value of the claim (compared to Egypt's above-mentioned 1,095 days and 26 per cent). The programme, organised in collaboration with the Cairo Regional Centre for International Commercial Arbitration, is said to support the establishment of efficient mediation mechanisms for resolving commercial disputes in Egypt and use Egypt's regional role to spread the ADR impacts through other Middle Eastern countries. "There are three areas investors look at when they're thinking of starting business," said Thomas Moullier, Senior Operations Manager of the Investment Climate in IFC. "The first is business entry costs, then taxes and then the ADR options. They must be sure …quot; before starting their business …quot; whether there is a fast, cost-effective access to justice or not." At the commencement of this programme, IFC and SECO have a packed plan of awareness-raising activities, mediator training and capacity building of mediation centres. It targets more engagement with the Government as well as the judicial arms and the private sector. This ADR programme, which has previously started in Morocco and Pakistan, is expected to be launched in Jordan and Lebanon, two other Middle Eastern countries. Since the start of the IFC's ADR programmes worldwide in 2004, they have been successful in solving 2,561 or 73 per cent of the commercial disputes they have tried to solve. While working in both Morocco and Pakistan, the IFC ADR team, according to Moullier, have learnt that there is no one model that works. "We're not in the business of replicating an already-there model," concluded Moullier. "What drives our work isn't a settled model, but the results and the factual impact on the ground."
