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Egypt Launches Innovation Bank
September 30, 2011
Business Today Egypt
By Rana Kamaly
The bank is the brain child of innovator Mahmud Emara. Because the country’s government is still in transition and struggling under funding pressures, there is less government funding for projects and initiatives. Private investors are also leery of spending big bucks, due in part to the market instability. Seeing an opportunity to promote homegrown talent, Emara helped form the innovation cabinet under the bank’s auspices.
“These coming months are almost dead and no one will invest in Egypt, so the bank team is collecting all the good ideas with all their studies and will make them ready for implementation so when the next government comes we will be ready and start automatically or even start what we can now with investors’ help,” says Emara.
Its role is to evaluate ideas submitted by Egyptians on the innovate.cabinet.gov.eg/IBS website. Before being accepted, proposed projects must meet several requirements, including readiness for testing and implementation as well as proven benefits to the country. Afterward, Bank El-Afkar will conduct further studies, if necessary, to help obtain governmental approval and, most importantly, find investors to finance the projects as well as broker deals. So far, the idea has been an unfettered success: The bank began receiving ideas in April 2011 and now has 2,000 submissions.
Getting approval
The concept of innovation banks was first discussed in 1987 at a conference in Paris at the behest of Ahmed Lotfy, Egypt’s prime minister at the time.
“Many people have tried to push this idea through, but under the previous regime no one listened. Many youth and Egyptians in general have lots of ideas to develop Egypt but yet nothing happened,” he says.
Emara, who also works for the cabinet, has a Master’s in political science from l’Université Paris-Sorbonne and spent 25 years in France where he built companies. Upon his return to Egypt, he began looking for ways to give back to his home country.
Last February, Emara contacted Prime Minister Essam Sharaf and discussed the idea of the bank. He says the prime minister immediately approved of his program and has been one of the bank’s greatest supporters since. More than a year later, the government is supervising and coordinating efforts with Bank El-Afkar to take the best and brightest ideas to fruition.
Several of the ideas are in final discussions, including Fawzy Hammad’s proposed project to further develop the marina in Suez. An engineer with 18 years of experience working at the Suez Canal, Hammad took his plan to commercialize the marina with repair shops, food outlets and other value-added ship services to the bank because he needed help managing such an undertaking. His hope is that by mimicking other international ports, he can help Suez generate more income and improve the canal’s shipping services.
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