Day two of the IMF’s inaugural MENA Research Conference in Cairo continued its deep dive into the region’s most pressing challenges, with discussions exploring the green transition, artificial intelligence and their profound implications for labor markets, strategies for sustainable growth and stability, and more (watch, runtime: 3:25:24). Here are our top ten takeaways from the day’s panels:

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#1- MENA’s triple threat: The region, including Egypt, is at a critical juncture, facing simultaneous green, digital and AI, and demographic transitions. AUC’s Dina Abdel Fattah warned these overlapping shifts risk widening inequality and job displacement, particularly for youth, women, and informal workers, if not managed with inclusive policies that recognize the “old narrative” of existing vulnerabilities.

#2- MENA’s female participation gap: Despite high and increasing female enrollment in tertiary education, women’s labor force participation across MENA remains strikingly low (around 20% on average, and below 15% in Egypt). Geneva Graduate Institute’s Ugo Panizza and other panellists underscored this as a significant loss of potential GDP and a critical area for policy focus to unlock economic growth.

#3- Egypt’s green job paradox: While the green transition could create up to 1 mn jobs in Egypt in sectors like solar and sustainable farming, currently only about 7.8% of jobs qualify as green, according to Abdel Fattah. Another issue is that these roles are predominantly held by men (86%), with significant underrepresentation of women, often due to skills bottlenecks, gender stereotypes, and lack of accessible training in green competencies. “Evidence from Egypt and much of the MENA region suggests that without deliberate interventions, green jobs will remain narrow in access, gendered, and highly exclusive,” she said.

#4- Growth is what can enable broader reforms: Former Finance Minister Youssef Boutros-Ghali argued that for countries like Egypt, generating economic “motion” or growth should be the initial priority, even amidst existing imbalances. He suggested that growth creates the necessary space and capacity to then implement tougher fiscal consolidation and structural reforms effectively.

#5- AI risks increasing inequality in the region: The MENA region’s relatively low current exposure to AI is “not good news” if education and training systems don’t adapt to equip the workforce for collaboration with AI, Abdel Fattah and Bocconi University’s Tito Boeri noted. Particularly in Egypt, AI readiness is concentrated in a small elite, creating a major risk of job polarization where middle-skill jobs vanish, potentially “automating inequality.”

#6- Egypt’s post-IMF assistance game plan: Planning and International Cooperation Minister Rania Al Mashat outlined Egypt’s forward-looking economic model that involves a structural shift from a reliance on non-tradable sectors (like construction) towards tradable sectors, focusing on exports, industrial production, and vigorously pursuing the green transition, while leveraging international partnerships to de-risk and channel concessional finance to the private sector.

#7- Building buffers during good times will be crucial: Expanding on credibility, Armenian central bank head Martin Galstyan highlighted the importance of “building the buffers during the good times which can be used during the bad times.”

#8- The world economy is changing and we need to be prepared: Boutros-Ghali explained that “the previous system that used to rule the global economy, namely globalization, did not benefit everybody.” He argued that we now “have to prepare ourselves to rebuild the rule-based system along the lines that is slightly fairer, slightly more transparent, slightly more effective.”

#9- Volatility calls for policy policy diversification: UC Berkeley’s Barry Eichengreen advised that in a more volatile world, policymakers “need to think about policy diversification along a number of different dimensions in terms of trade, in terms of finance, in terms of the composition of the export support basket.”

#10- Fiscal prudence will come through better revenue mobilization: Addressing fiscal consolidation, Eichengreen stated for Egypt, “the problem really appears to be revenue shortfall…it has to do a lot of the work on the revenue side by broadening the tax base and improving the efficiency of tax administration.”

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