ITIDA’s Ahmed El Zaher on the jobs question hanging over Egypt’s outsourcing boom

Ahmed El Zaher (LinkedIn) has a simple answer for anyone who still thinks Egypt’s outsourcing industry is a call center business: it stopped being one years ago. El Zaher runs the Information Technology Industry Development Agency (ITIDA), the government body mandated to turn that conviction into a durable source of hard currency receipts, and the sector he oversees now spans business process outsourcing, IT services, and engineering and R&D. Outsourcing generated USD 5.2 bn in FY 2025/26, making up around 70% of Egypt’s USD 7.4 bn in total digital exports, with some 195.3k Egyptians working in the exporting industry as of the end of June. They’re employed by 252 exporting companies that together run 282 specialized centers across the country.

He says the sector didn’t get here by accident. “The product of building an integrated ecosystem over years of collaboration between the Communications and Information Technology (CIT) Ministry, ITIDA, the private sector, and international partners reached a stage of self-reinforcing momentum, driven by a genuine environment of trust and a track record of accumulated successes,” El Zaher tells EnterpriseAM.

El Zaher sees sector revenues growing north of 23% in the government’s 2026/27 fiscal year to USD 6.4 bn despite the impact of the war in the Gulf, which, alongside Europe, is a major market for Egyptian services exports. His longer-term goal is to see that figure rise to USD 8 bn or more by the end of 2027/28. Some 220k Egyptians will make a living in the industry by the end of the current fiscal year, he says.

Where’s the growth coming from? ITIDA is targeting the US, the UK, Germany, France, and the Gulf while expanding beyond large clients to mid-sized ones and pushing into non-traditional markets like Pakistan and Vietnam, El Zaher says.

Is AI coming for the sector?

Job creation (+12% y-o-y) is running behind export growth (+23% y-o-y), a gap our MENA+ edition flagged as also emerging in India as AI pushes its way into the industry. Across India’s largest IT exporters, revenue has kept climbing even as the four biggest firms shed more than 42k jobs in two years. According to industry insiders, AI is increasingly substituting for the human labor that used to be the product. India is several years ahead of Egypt in the services export game, and the concern is that climbing into higher-value work — ER&D, applied AI, chip design — may not outrun the technology, because the same forces eating into call center work eventually come for higher-value jobs.

El Zaher doesn’t see it this way. His answer is that AI will reshape jobs rather than erase them. AI will take simple call center jobs, he says, but there will be new avenues for Egyptians in higher-value professions. There will be fewer people answering calls and doing simple chat-based help, and more programmers running teams of agents, scenario designers, and specialists who build and run the automated systems for banks, engineering outfits, and beyond, he explains.

Want proof that we can climb the value chain? Look no further than chip design. We don’t make chips here — there’s no “fab” in the global sense of the word that sees a TSMC cranking out mns of chips for Apple — but Cairo has emerged as a chip-design powerhouse in the past 15 or so years. We’re not chasing plants that will make silicon wafers (“Our real strength lies in human brains — the talent,” El Zaher says), even if there is a meaningful amount of local fabrication work taking place in research labs. Today, Egyptian chip-design firms work primarily for global clients, including design centers for a number of global semiconductor players, giving us an entry point in the supply chains that produce some of the world’s hottest tech products across a range of industries.

“All IT companies now work with AI in one way or another, but the industry has several layers,” El Zaher explains. “In Egypt, we focus primarily on the applications and innovative-solutions layer, where we have strong capabilities and highly skilled young talent. The central goal is turning AI into direct economic and social value.” ITIDA thinks it can keep pushing Egypt’s large workforce — with north of 800k university graduates entering the system every year — into higher-skilled jobs fast enough to keep employment growing.

His solution: A fresh 2027-2030 strategy, with AI at its center. A dozen international and local firms are interested in helping ITIDA build that strategy, El Zaher tells us.

Pushing up the value chain

Valeo has opened an AI applications development center in Egypt, building on the automotive software and embedded systems work it already runs here. Capgemini has set up a specialized AI center of excellence, and Konecta has launched what it calls its first global center of excellence for generative AI from Egypt. Call center outfit Concentrix has started building AI solutions out of Egypt with local teams for its international clients.

International players aren’t the only ones pushing into more sophisticated services. Local players are building Arabic-language AI tools, alongside startups applying AI across healthcare, education, agriculture, and e-commerce. El Zaher casts the pattern as a shift from Egypt as a place that delivers outsourcing services to a regional base that develops AI solutions and exports them.

Water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink: Nearly 800k people graduate from university in Egypt every year, but every hiring manager knows in their bones that too few have the skills businesses need. El Zaher points to training programs including ITIDA’s AI and software testing certifications and a train-to-hire program for 5.4k people, delivered by 19 companies in Egypt, as part of the answer. Other CIT Ministry affiliates, including the NTI and ITI, aim to train another 800k or so annually. Some of those programs run all the way to specialized MSc degrees, with labs backed by Huawei, Cisco, and Ericsson participating. The test is how many come out with skills companies will pay for.

We have lots of competition

The catch, of course, is that Egypt isn’t the only country making this pitch. India, Morocco, and Eastern Europe are all chasing the same foreign markets, and the conventional way to get ahead is on price. Successive devaluations have left Egypt priced well below India for many services exports.

El Zaher agrees Egypt is attractive price-wise but says ITIDA isn’t going to make that the selling point. We’re 60-70% cheaper than regions including Eastern Europe, he says, but the real hooks are more meaningful than cost, El Zaher insists. He cited multilingual talent, proximity to European, Middle Eastern, and African markets, and the fact that Egypt hasn’t been disrupted by the US-Israel war with Iran as among these hooks.

ITIDA’s latest industry summit saw 127 participating firms, including 55 global players, committed to creating 70k-75k jobs in Egypt over three years under MoUs with ITIDA. Sixteen new companies have entered Egypt, and three more global players joined the market recently outside the summit agreements. These include Ernst & Young MENA, which is setting up a regional consulting and IT outsourcing hub here, and Ibex, a US firm that specializes in AI-powered customer experience. The government is also preparing to open new premises for major global firms, including InteLogix.

REMEMBER- US-based outsourcing firm InteLogix is scaling up in Egypt, opening its New Cairo headquarters last week after acquiring local operator Athear in October 2025. The company plans to grow its local workforce to more than 1.3k over the next three years, up from about 135. InteLogix will provide customer experience, business process outsourcing, and IT services from Cairo, targeting markets speaking Arabic, Turkish, French, German, Spanish, and Portuguese, with AI-enabled infrastructure.

Do incentives matter?

El Zaher doesn’t think we need to offer new incentives to attract outsourcing business. “Quite the opposite,” he says — global companies coming to Egypt are no longer demanding direct incentives given how solid the country’s fundamentals are. Those fundamentals are more important than any targeted tax break or investment handout, he argues.

And unlike exports of products and services that demand significant imported production inputs, outsourcing earnings tend to stay inside Egypt (at least until closer to dividend season for some multinational players). Companies based here bill in hard currency while paying most of their costs domestically, which sharpens the country’s USD-denominated competitiveness against neighboring markets.

“Local value added is exceptionally high, reaching as much as 90% in some activities,” El Zaher says, “which means most export earnings remain inside Egypt’s economy as wages and investment.”

What’s next

For all the export targets and strategy documents, El Zaher is clear about what he most wants a global investor to hear, making the case via the balance sheet. “My message is to study the full equation,” he says. “The smart investor doesn’t just look for a low-cost location — they look for an integrated operating ecosystem that [ensures] stability and long-term profitability. Egypt provides exactly that — an abundance of young, specialized, multilingual talent, government support and attention to the industry, competitive operating costs, infrastructure, and a distinctive strategic location.”

What that ecosystem looks like after 2026 is an open question. ITIDAexpects to begin work with the awarded consultant before year-end on a 2027-2030 strategy that puts AI and the highest-value activities at the front. How that strategy treats AI is the thing to watch — it will be the key factor in whether Egypt can keep export and job growth moving together as technology reshapes work that has provided hundreds of thousands of young Egyptians with a chance to join the middle class.