Coffee With Leslie Maasdorp on de-risking Egypt and pushing into manufacturing

British International Investment (BII) is rewriting its Egypt playbook as part of a broader restructuring of development finance. The UK’s development finance institution (DFI) is moving away from the donor-recipient model and toward a market-making approach: taking construction risk, regulatory uncertainty, and PPA exposure off the table on early-stage infrastructure, then pricing projects so pension funds and sovereign wealth funds can follow. The institution has a portfolio valued at USD 850 mn in 64 Egyptian companies and is now deploying GBP 15 bn globally over five years, with Egypt being one of its largest single-country exposures.

BII’s CEO Leslie Maasdorp came up through post-Apartheid South Africa’s economic reconstruction, spent 15 years across Goldman Sachs, Barclays Capital, and Bank of America Merrill Lynch, and served as CFO of the New Development Bank in Shanghai before taking the BII top job in late 2024.

We sat down with Maasdorp and the institution’s North Africa regional director Sherine Shohdy to talk about where the Egyptian market fits into BII’s new five-year strategy, why the institution is shifting from writing checks to building markets, and whether our capital markets are ready for what comes next.

EnterpriseAM: Where does BII’s Egypt portfolio stand today, and what’s the deployment target over the next five years?

Leslie Maasdorp: The portfolio is now roughly USD 850 mn, up from USD 708 mn in 2023, spread across 64 companies that collectively employ over 130k people. Egypt is our largest single-country exposure in Africa, and that is not an accident. Under our new 2026-2031 strategy, we will deploy GBP 15 bn globally — GBP 8 bn of our own capital and another GBP 7 bn from private and commercial institutions. The African continent makes up roughly 60% of that, and Egypt gets a meaningful share.

EnterpriseAM: What is your honest read of where Egypt sits in BII’s priority hierarchy right now?

LM: High, genuinely high, not diplomatically high. The size of the economy and its growth potential are the starting point. But let’s be direct: some of what is weighing on Egypt right now has nothing to do with Egypt. Suez Canal disruption, the energy price shock, fertilizer shortages pushing food inflation — these are external variables, and they are compressing the trajectory.

What we are investing against is the direction of travel, not the current turbulence. Foreign exchange liberalization, fiscal consolidation, and the IMF program — these are difficult decisions that do not pay off overnight. The IMF’s February read was cautiously optimistic, and we share that read. The intent to level the playing field for the private sector is real, and this is what matters to us.

EnterpriseAM: Your Egypt portfolio is heavily weighted toward renewable energy. Why is that?

LM:Energy is first among equals within our infrastructure mandate globally, not just here. I visited the Gulf of Suez wind farm this morning. It is a 1.1 GW project, the largest wind farm on the continent. Egypt’s ambition to hit 42% renewables in its energy mix by 2030 is bold — they may not get there on schedule, but the direction is right, and we want to be part of building it.

That said, renewable energy has a structural limitation that matters enormously in a country with Egypt’s demographic profile: it creates jobs during the construction phase, and almost none once it’s operational. A project the size of the Suez wind farm employs around 1.5k people during the build and closer to 100-150 once it is running. For an economy adding this many young people to the labor market every year, that math does not work on its own. So we are deliberately pushing into more job-intensive sectors.

Sherine Shohdy: Our Egypt portfolio is actually more balanced than the renewables headlines suggest. It is nearly a 50-50 split between debt and equity. Infrastructure and climate account for around 45% of total exposure, with renewable energy specifically at roughly 30%. Financial services and sustainable industries (manufacturing, decarbonization, the broader greening of the economy) make up the rest.

Manufacturing is where we are leaning hardest. It creates employment at scale, helps localize supply chains, and builds the export capacity that diversifies Egypt’s FX revenue base. The logic is not just about headcount — it is about how manufacturing plugs into the broader economic architecture the government is trying to construct.

EnterpriseAM: Who are you working alongside to deploy capital here?

LM:One of the central wagers in our new strategy is moving away from standalone transactions toward investment platforms that aggregate capital. On the DFI side, International Finance Corporation (IFC) and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) each deploy roughly USD 1 bn a year in Egypt. We are now working far more intentionally in partnership with both: we’re pooling origination, sharing due diligence, and going to market jointly. You cannot mobilize pension funds and sovereign wealth funds into a market like Egypt if every DFI is running its own separate process. We have to do this together.

SS: On the ground, our financial services portfolio tells you who we work with. We have investments with Commercial International Bank (CIB) and Banque du Caire, we completed a sustainability bond with the Arab African International Bank (AAIB) last year, and we have backed a number of non-banking financial institutions on the microfinance side, including Tanmeyah, alongside EBRD and other private equity funds. On infrastructure, our platform investment with DP World, a USD 1.7 bn commitment to develop ports across the continent, with Sokhna as the cornerstone asset, is one of the larger structures we have built here.

EnterpriseAM: Are you finding more commercial co-investors willing to come in now post-stabilization?

SS: Look at the track record. Egypt has not had a quiet year in over a decade. Think of the pandemic, the FX crisis, geopolitical shocks, and inflation. In every one of those periods, investors who were already here stayed. That is not sentiment — that is a signal about the underlying conviction in this market. Our role has always been counter-cyclical: we come in when conditions are hard, absorb risk, and create the conditions for commercial capital to follow. When investors see DFIs continuing to deploy through the cycle, it changes their calculus. We have been here since 2002. That continuity is itself a form of market-making.

EnterpriseAM: How do you get commercial partners into markets like Egypt without the concessional subsidy that made them accessible in the first place?

LM: The structural reset in development finance, what I call the shift away from the old donor-recipient model, is precisely about this dynamic. We are not trying to drag pension funds into markets that sit outside their fiduciary mandates. What we are doing is using our capital to take the early-stage risk off the table (construction risk, regulatory uncertainty, power purchase agreement exposure) so that by the time a project like the Suez wind farm is generating predictable cashflows, a commercial investor can come in on terms that work for them.

We built Ayana in India from scratch in 2017 with USD 100 mn, brought in partners as the business matured, and exited last year for USD 2.3 bn. That capital gets recycled into the next de-risking cycle. Private investors do not need to care about development impact — they need a return. Our job is to engineer the point at which that return becomes available.

EnterpriseAM: You’ve backed local VC funds like Algebra Ventures and Endure Capital. How do you think about exits when the EGX pipeline for tech and growth firms is thin?

LM: Supporting VC and private equity funds is not just a financial play for us. It’s more of a market-building play. These funds grow companies that eventually, in theory, transition to public markets or attract strategic buyers. The fund managers I met here a few days ago are genuinely sophisticated. The ecosystem is being built. Whether the public markets infrastructure catches up quickly enough is a separate, harder question.

SS: The EGX is not the only exit route, and frankly, for the stage of companies we are backing, it probably should not be the primary one right now. Strategic sales to buyers who can scale the business further often produce better outcomes than a public listing. Our patient capital model means we are not forced sellers, so we can hold through a period when market timing does not cooperate and wait for the right window. What we are focused on is building companies that are genuinely valuable, because a strong company always creates its own exit options.

EnterpriseAM: Leslie, you come from a capital markets background. DFIs are often criticized for being too slow. What have you changed at BII since taking over?

LM:This is an industry-wide reckoning. The IFC, the EBRD, and the African Development Bank are all asking the same question. For us, it is three things: pulling bottlenecks out of the investment approval chain, moving toward standardized structures that institutional capital can interface with — rather than bespoke transaction-by-transaction documentation — and building mutual reliance frameworks with other DFIs so we stop duplicating due diligence on the same transactions. We are already running that model with the EBRD in Ukraine. Early days, but the direction is set.