Egypt is building a dam in Tanzania that pays off more there than at home — and there’s a strategic reason

The Julius Nyerere hydropower dam, a USD 2.9-3 bn project on Tanzania’s Rufiji River, was formally inaugurated this week. Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly attended the inauguration on President Abdel Fattah El Sisi’s behalf, and Tanzanian President Samia Suluhu Hassan hosted the event. Built for Tanesco, Tanzania’s state electricity utility, by a consortium of Elsewedy Electric and Arab Contractors, the dam holds back a 34 bn cbm reservoir and generates roughly 2.1 GW, enough to supply more than 60 mn Tanzanians, according to Elsewedy’s own project page.

It’s not an isolated project: Last month, seven Egyptian investors signed land allocation agreements at Elsewedy Industrial City (EIC) in Tanzania during the Tanzania-Egypt Business and Investment Forum hosted by Tanzania’s Investment and Special Economic Zones Authority (TISEZA) in Dar es Salaam. The companies agreed to establish pharma, engineering, and food manufacturing facilities, targeting approximately USD 50 mn in total expected investments. Two separate MoUs covering electricity, transport, and renewable energy were also inked during the event.

Beneath the headlines lies a deeper story: a strategic move toward regional influence that is largely invisible in the official data. Egypt’s outward FDI figures don’t break out Sub-Saharan Africa, so the scale of the push is hard to measure even as the state throws presidential-level weight behind it, trading near-term hard-currency returns for a multi-decade platform on the continent.

Strategy over short-term plays

Senior FDI economist and macro analyst Islam Magdy tells EnterpriseAM “there are clear indications that this is becoming strategic rather than remaining purely opportunistic.” The dam is the strongest data point: a coordinated Egyptian industrial consortium, backed by the state, executing one of Africa’s largest infrastructure projects, with ministers and presidential-level visibility attached to the launch. Arab Contractors chairman Ahmed El Assar said the concrete work alone took 723 consecutive days. Elsewedy Electric CEO Ahmed Elsewedy said the company’s contribution centered on electrical systems and grid connections, including more than 1k km of cable and heavy-lift operations totaling over 30k tons.

That scale of execution, paired with the government’s recent move to set up a dedicated investment entity to coordinate Egyptian investment across Africa — complete with a database of prospective investments and financing and risk-underwriting mechanisms — points to something more organized than a series of one-off corporate ventures.

There’s also a longer-running thread behind the headline projects: Water Resources and Irrigation Minister Hani Sewilam flagged a concrete USD 100 mn Egyptian-funded vehicle to develop bankable projects across the Southern Nile Basin, building on water cooperation with Tanzania dating back to 2007, namely groundwater well projects for drinking water, according to a statement. A new bilateral framework on water resources and irrigation is now being finalized, covering 30 additional groundwater wells and two rainwater-harvesting dams.

The logic looks counterintuitive: why would the state fund a multi-decade project that will generate more revenue in Tanzania than in Egypt? The answer is that Egypt is optimizing for something other than near-term returns. Paying upfront for a project like Elsewedy Industrial City is a deliberate trade: regional geopolitical leverage and long-term economic hedging over near-term hard-currency returns or liquidity.

Breaking it down

Here are four reasons the trade makes sense, according to Magdy:

• Buying influence (water and national security): Tanzania sits on Lake Victoria, the primary source of the White Nile. Because Egypt relies almost entirely on the Nile for its drinking water and farming, water security is a non-negotiable national priority. Locking Tanzania into deep infrastructure and industrial partnerships buys Egypt a kind of long-term goodwill and leverage that aid or diplomacy alone wouldn’t;
• Diversifying against sinking currencies: The EGP has suffered massive devaluations in recent years. By encouraging domestic companies to establish assets and manufacturing bases abroad, Egypt creates an offshore economic buffer — even if the domestic market experiences high inflation or stagnation, Egyptian corporate giants like Elsewedy remain profitable abroad, protecting the value of Egyptian capital;
• Creating markets for domestic Egyptian suppliers: While the products made in Tanzania are sold to local consumers, the building blocks are often bought from Egypt. The factories in Elsewedy Industrial City will need heavy machinery, specialized tools, raw manufacturing inputs, and engineering services, much of which will be exported directly from Cairo. That generates revenue and retains jobs for manufacturing suppliers back home;
• Competing for the Africa platform: East Africa is one of the fastest-growing economic regions in the world, and major global powers (China, Turkey, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia) are competing for influence. If Egypt only sat back and exported finished goods from home, it would eventually be priced out by cheaper Chinese manufacturing or Gulf funding. By physically setting up shop in Tanzania, Egypt claims a permanent piece of real estate in Africa’s growing consumer market.

The blind spot

The catch on all of this: it’s difficult to verify with hard numbers. “Egypt’s published outward FDI data does not provide a reliable geographic breakdown at the Sub-Saharan Africa level, and that is precisely the problem,” Magdy tells us. The CBE publishes FDI by country, but South Africa is the only Sub-Saharan African country broken out as its own line item — everything else, including Tanzania, falls into an undifferentiated “Other Countries” bucket. The problem compounds on the receiving end too. A company like Elsewedy Electric may route capital through existing regional subsidiaries rather than direct transfers from Egypt, meaning the Egyptian origin of funds may not even surface in Tanzania’s own balance-of-payments data. According to Tanzania’s FDI data shared with us by Magdy, total FDI inflows stood at USD 1.72 bn in 2024, with China, Vietnam, Mauritius, the UAE, and the UK as the top five sources. Egypt doesn’t appear among them.

On the immediate investment figures, the seven companies signed land allocation agreements targeting approximately USD 50 mn in expected investments across pharma, engineering, and food manufacturing facilities. According to Magdy, “these are projected figures tied to future factory construction; the gap between announced commitments and capital actually deployed remains the key variable to watch.”

Money moves differently

The economic model driving Elsewedy Industrial City differs fundamentally from Egypt’s expansion into the Gulf and Iraq. “The more precise framing is market-seeking FDI versus the market and contract-seeking model with a stronger hard-currency revenue and repatriation component that characterizes much of the Gulf and Iraq expansion,” Magdy says. As previously reported, Egyptian companies in the Gulf and Iraq generally earn in stable or hard currencies, so the balance-of-payments benefit shows up quickly through repatriated earnings. Egyptian firms’ income from foreign investments hit USD 2.90 bn in FY 2024/25, against USD 524.1 mn in new outward investment that year, meaning income from the accumulated stock of past investment ran roughly 5.5x that year’s new outflows.

The Tanzania model, however, works differently. Unveiled in November 2023 across 2.6 mn sqm, EIC sits 70 km from Dar es Salaam and targets USD 400 mn in total investments across roughly 200 factories. With 70% of output targeting Tanzania’s domestic market and 30% targeting export, the pitch leans on Tanzania’s access to Indian Ocean ports and to landlocked neighbors — including Burundi, Rwanda, DR Congo, Uganda, and Zambia — that rely on Tanzania as their route to the sea.

And the model isn’t theoretical for Egypt’s biggest listed players. CI Capital’s Industrials sector head Mark Adeeb notes that 40% of Elsewedy Electric’s sales are already driven by foreign operations, excluding direct exports from Egypt (which account for another 31%), and “it’s pretty much the same case for other major players like Orascom Construction, where 64% of their revenue is driven by operations outside Egypt.”

Operating in a market where 70% of sales are denominated in TZS naturally raises questions around convertibility and income repatriation back to Egypt. However, industrial majors rely on financial risk-mitigation tools rather than taking unhedged local currency exposure. “Large players normally use hedging strategies, such as forward contracts and other currency hedging mechanisms,” Adeeb explains. “Elsewedy specifically locks in a certain gross [income] per ton when it comes to cable sales, for instance, hedging against both currency and commodity swings.”

There is also a platform dimension that matters here. EIC is a fully serviced industrial zone offering access to 400 mn consumers across East, Central, and Southern Africa through Tanzania’s trade agreements. Once established, this platform could serve as an entry point for Egyptian companies into East African markets more broadly.

Logistical frictions

Does this regional expansion move the needle on Egypt’s immediate USD position? Not yet, and the mechanics explain why, Magdy says. Outward FDI in its initial phase is a use of capital, not a source of FX. When an Egyptian company invests in Tanzania, those funds flow out first, and the benefit only materializes later through dividends, royalties, procurement from Egypt, and retained earnings distributed to Egyptian shareholders. Magdy stresses that “the scale of Egyptian investment in Sub-Saharan Africa is currently too small to generate repatriated earnings that would materially affect Egypt’s FX position in the near term.”

Egyptian companies also face well-documented operational friction points across the continent — high freight costs and thin shipping links between Egypt and African markets, weak correspondent banking that complicates earnings repatriation, and pricing pressure from Chinese manufacturers. Egypt is working through some of this directly.

The Tanzania anchor is one piece of a wider, multi-sector platform strategy we’ve tracked across East Africa. This includes the Outrovato platform in Kenya, which has onboarded roughly 200 Egyptian factories targeting USD 30-60 mn in bilateral trade; Rosetta Energy Solutions’ small-scale LNG projects; a maritime pact with Eritrea for a direct Red Sea cargo route; a multi-purpose terminal at Djibouti’s Doraleh Port; and ongoing efforts to market Berenice Port as a regional logistics gateway. The push also builds on a 2024 framework and earlier logistics links, including a multi-purpose terminal at Dar es Salaam port.

Some of this may be less about state design than corporate reality. Egyptian companies with strong technical capability are encountering slower domestic growth prospects in certain sectors, and regional expansion may be less a response to state incentives than a natural consequence of outgrowing their home market. “The more interesting question may be whether the state is organizing around that corporate reality rather than originating it,” Magdy says.

Can we afford to wait?

Given how visible the state has been in all of this, it’s a fair question whether Egypt is diverting resources to Africa that could otherwise go toward its own economy. Magdy pushes back on the framing itself: most of what’s driving this expansion is private capital, not budget allocation. “Companies like Elsewedy, Orascom, and Edita are making commercial choices, and if they had not gone to Africa, that capital would not necessarily have been deployed domestically,” he says. The state’s own financial exposure is comparatively small, and Magdy argues it’s better understood as an investment in influence than spending at the expense of domestic development.

The political logic behind that influence is where he sees the real stakes. African support carries real weight in multilateral forums, particularly on Nile Basin issues, given the sheer number of African UN member states, a form of return, he argues, that no direct financial metric captures. And the competitive clock matters: China, Turkey, the US, and Israel are all building an economic presence across Africa, despite lacking Egypt’s geographical proximity, history, or waterway ties.

“The cost of delay is higher for Egypt than for anyone else,” Magdy says. “The world today is built on relationships, and the cost of building those relationships later, after others have already established themselves, will be significantly higher than building them now.” As he frames it, the real question isn’t why Egypt is investing in Africa instead of at home — it’s whether Egypt can afford not to.

That also explains the state’s visible hand in projects that are mostly privately financed. “The government-level visibility is intentional,” Magdy says. “Even when the investment is private sector-led, the state presence sends a message: Egypt is here as a long-term partner, not just as a contractor on a single project.” A prime minister attending a dam inauguration isn’t necessarily a signal about who’s paying for it. Rather, it’s a signal about who Egypt wants to be seen as in a region where several larger powers are competing for the same kind of standing.

(** Tap or click the headline above to read this story with all of the links to our background as well as external sources.)