Egypt’s 1st Venture Capital Summit to provide enabling environment for innovative entrepreneurs: CBE

Egypt’s first Venture Capital Summit aims to provide an enabling environment for talented and innovative entrepreneurs and create new jobs for the future, said Ramy Abul Naga — Deputy Governor of the Central Bank of Egypt (CBE).

Abul Naga’s statements came during his speech at the summit on Sunday on behalf of CBE Governor Tarek Amer.

The summit will run for two days and is held under the theme of ‘Your Investment Gateway to Africa & the Middle East Venture Capital Programme’ in collaboration with GIZ Egypt, AfricaGrow, and organised by Changelabs.

This summit is also being held as per the directives of President Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi.

Abul Naga explained that the Egyptian Venture Capital Summit aims to adopt more innovative fintech and fintech-enabled solutions capable of delivering banking and financial services to all segments of society more easily and at an affordable cost.

“This summit is only a part of a sequence of endeavours that we have pursued to portray Egypt as a regionally recognised hub for venture capital (VC) investments,” he said.

He also indicated that it provides a glimpse of the CBE’s efforts and vision to position Egypt as a regional gateway for the fintech industry in the Arab World and Africa.

Moreover, Abul Naga stressed that the VC investment space in Egypt is on a successful trajectory. 

As for the financial inclusion strategy, the CBE has successfully achieved an inclusion rate of more than 56%, he added.

“Additionally, the CBE is very keen on supporting the expansion of technology, cybersecurity, e-payment, and digital transformation, as well as fostering the start-up and small businesses community in Egypt, which plays a key role in realising economic and social development along with catering to the needs of the local market.”

The start-up scene in Egypt has been noticeably growing over the last few years. To date, according to the Egyptian Start-up Ecosystem Report for 2021, Egypt is home to a total of 600 tech start-ups.

More specifically, according to Fintech Egypt’s latest report, the fintech ecosystem has grown in a rapid pace with Egypt playing host to about 150 innovative and young fintech and fintech-enabled start-ups, service providers, and enablers. 

Furthermore, Egypt has achieved rapid growth in VC investments in the fintech and fintech-enabled industry over the past years, reaching a new high of $167m only in the first half of this year — a 12-fold increase compared to 2017. 

Moreover, close to 110 fintech and fintech-enabled start-ups and payment service providers are looking forward to raising funds in the next 12 months with approximate amounts exceeding $0.5m.  

Additionally, Abul Naga indicated that this is evident with the recent launch of Nclude, a fintech and fintech-enabled focused fund that is run by Egypt’s three state-owned commercial banks — Banque Misr, the National Bank of Egypt, and Banque du Caire — along with E-finance Investment Group and the Egyptian Banks Company (EBC). 

This fintech-focused fund aims to be the largest across the Middle East and Africa with a target capital of $150m.