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Fifty years is a long time to stay invested in one idea: private sector-led growth is built one business, one market, and one job at a time. IFC’s partnership with Egypt began with a USD 5 mn stake in a ceramics factory outside Cairo and has grown into more than USD 10 bn across nearly 300 projects. That work sits within a broader World Bank Group commitment of more than USD 40 bn to Egypt, where World Bank policy and project support, IFC private-sector financing, and MIGA guarantees have worked together to attract investors and help markets grow.
The numbers set the scale. The people explain why it matters. In Beni Suef, Azza Ibrahim saw a busy government street and turned a small printer into a stationery business, with financing through ZAAT, Banque Misr’s women-focused program designed with IFC support. Further east, in Ras Ghareb, electrical engineer Kholoud Moustafa Bakry found her place in a different kind of energy economy at the West Bakr Wind Farm, in a city long defined by oil.
Some outcomes need decades to show their full meaning. Essam arrived at El Gouna as its first security guard when the Red Sea destination was still a construction site. Thirty years later, the desert had become a city with more than 25k residents and workers, its own utilities, schools, and hospitals — and his children now work there too. IFC first backed Orascom’s vision for El Gouna in 1997, then returned in 2025 with Egypt’s first sustainability-linked loan by a tourism company.
Other foundations of opportunity are less visible, but no less important. IFC advisory helped establish I-Score, Egypt’s first private credit bureau, giving lenders a way to assess borrowers’ credit history and helping scale the formal credit market. It later backed Fawry, then a startup testing whether Egyptians would trust payment terminals in neighborhood stores. Today, Fawry processes 2.5 mn transactions a day, serves more than 35 mn Egyptians, and became the first Egyptian fintech to list on the national stock exchange.
That is how job creation becomes more than a headline metric. It shows up when a shop opens, a technician is trained, a delivery route expands, a tourism city takes root, and businesses gain access to the systems they need to grow. Across these examples, the point is what lasts: businesses, careers, sectors, and the infrastructure that keeps opportunity moving.
