Five years into RISE, safety metric frozen as World Bank ratchets up fiduciary risk on Egypt’s railway loan

The World Bank has flagged “high” fiduciary risk on its USD 440 mn loan to modernize railway safety along the Alexandria-Cairo-Nag Hammadi corridor — and more than five years in, the project’s lead safety metric hasn’t moved, according to the bank’s implementation status and results report (pdf). The loan — known as RISE, for Railway Improvement and Safety for Egypt — is run by Egyptian National Railways (ENR) under the Transport Ministry. Fiduciary is the only risk category the Bank has escalated since approval: everything else, from macroeconomic to technical to stakeholder risk, sits where it did in March 2021.

SOUND SMART- Fiduciary risk is the Bank’s assessment of whether borrowed money is properly tracked, controlled, and spent as intended — covering financial management, procurement, and accounting. Its risk ladder runs: Low, Moderate, Substantial, High. The Bank’s own guidance (pdf) defines a “high” rating to mean the fiduciary environment is “weak,” internal controls are “unable to prevent or detect irregularities,” project funds are “routinely diverted,” and procurement contracts “routinely exceed their original value and schedule.”

Asked directly what drove the fiduciary downgrade, the World Bank told us it’s about financial management control specifically — not the project’s overall performance — and that the Bank and ENR have “agreed on corrective measures to strengthen controls and oversight,” with future ratings depending on how those measures are implemented. The Bank did not specify what specific lapse triggered the shift, or exactly when it occurred. The Bank’s documents show the downgrade was first proposed in July 2024 (pdf) and formally entered the books as the approved rating by December 2024 (pdf). The latest report, from August 2026, reaffirms it. What drove the change between those dates, the Bank hasn’t said.

The rest of the Bank’s scorecard is steady. The Bank still rates both the project’s progress toward its objective and its overall implementation “moderately satisfactory,” keeps overall risk at “substantial,” and opens its status note by calling the project “progressing with recent signs of modest improvement.”

The warning sign is the money: More than five years into a project meant to close by 2027, ENR has disbursed just USD 200.82 mn — 47.68%, under half — of the loan whose value has since been revised down from USD 440 to USD 421.2 mn. While the Bank did not specifically clarify whether it is confident the remaining USD 220 mn can realistically be absorbed and spent effectively before closing, it said disbursement is “closely linked to verified progress” under major works contracts, and pointed to “substantial progress” on other fronts.

Why the corridor needed fixing

RISE covers roughly 760 km of ENR’s approximately 5k km national network, running through 11 governorates from Alexandria to Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt — a line the World Bank says carries over one mn passengers each weekday. The project is not looking to build a new railway, but rather aims to modernize the signaling and safety systems on the existing one.

RISE is a direct continuation of the Egyptian National Railways Restructuring Project (ENRRP), which modernized signaling specifically along the Alexandria-Cairo and Beni Suef-Nag Hammadi corridors before closing in December 2020; work left unfinished at closure was “transferred to RISE to ensure continuity and completion of Egypt’s broader railway modernization program,” the Bank said. The report attributed the delays to lengthy procurement processes, disruption of the 2011 uprising, and the fact that ENR’s safety procedures and operating manuals dated back to 1903 (pdf). RISE picks up where that left off, rolling over the unfinished signaling work and adding the one segment ENRRP never touched: Cairo-Giza-Beni Suef, a 125-km stretch requiring signaling modernization from scratch.

On what’s specifically driving delays in the Cairo-Giza-Beni Suef segment, the Bank said no single factor alone explains the implementation timeline, but listed five contributing factors, including “sourcing of materials, design reviews, site handover requirements, scheduling of technical works, and contract-management processes.”

The USD 440 mn loan itself doesn’t cover the full cost of the work — it’s the World Bank’s share of a larger USD 680 mn project, topped up by counterpart financing from the Finance Ministry to ENR. The Bank approved the loan back in March 2021, alongside a USD 241.1 mn ENR contribution. That total breaks down into three components: USD 602 mn for signaling modernization, replacing manual, decades-old signaling with automatic block systems, electronic interlocking, and level-crossing protection; USD 54 mn for building ENR’s internal safety-management and asset-tracking capacity, including staff training; and USD 24 mn for institutional reform, chiefly a push to shift ENR from unconditional government subsidies to performance-based funding tied to actual service delivery.

Where the numbers stand today: The report’s own disbursement chart projects a sharp acceleration to near-full disbursement by the end of FY 2026/27 — a trajectory that would require spending the remaining c. USD 220 mn in 13 months, against a prior pace that delivered about USD 55 mn in the preceding twelve. The report attributes at least part of the drag to the Cairo-Beni Suef segment specifically, describing it as “significantly behind the original schedule” and the corridor’s main outstanding work — the one segment RISE, not ENRRP, was responsible for building from the ground up.

What the numbers show

The indicators that haven’t moved: RISE’s lead outcome measure — fatalities and weighted serious injuries per bn passenger-km, an EU-standard composite safety metric — is reported unchanged from its 2020 baseline of 0.56, against a March 2027 target of 0.44.

User satisfaction with the ENR services has not moved off its 60% baseline, against a target of 80% by project close. This indicator tracks passenger ratings on punctuality, air conditioning, cleanliness, ticket availability, customer service and staff attitude, and overall trip quality on a five-point scale, with only those rating four or five counted as satisfied. It also tracks the passenger perception on quality improvements at stations. However, there is a structural lag to this measurement as user surveys are performed annually and will be repeated at mid-term and project close, meaning that it does not capture m-o-m changes.

Climate-resilient signaling coverage on the new Cairo-Giza-Beni Suef segment sits at zero of a 125 km target, pedestrian barrier crossings are at zero of 10, and the shift to performance-based ENR funding — the project’s core institutional reform — remains unimplemented, with a USD 29 mn performance-based payment marked “Not Due.”

What’s going well: Train punctuality already hit its 90% target early, up from a 75% baseline. The project’s push to recruit more women into ENR’s engineering roles has outperformed its own goal — 306 female graduates recruited as of December 2025, against a 240 target. Signaling tower commissioning is roughly on pace at 51 of 70 towers.

What the government says

Track renewal is underway on roughly 107 km of line in parallel with the safety work, and that signaling upgrades sit within a broader package of 21 projects aimed at lifting network efficiency and safety, a government official separately tells us. New projects will introduce European Train Control System (ETCS) automatic control, meant to raise safety standards and reduce reliance on human intervention, he says. Signaling and track-renewal work are proceeding in parallel to maximize returns on the investment and improve train punctuality, capacity, and safety for passengers and staff alike, he adds.