Remittances hit a record USD 38.2 bn in the first nine months of 2026

Good morning, friends. Africa has spent a decade arguing that the three agencies pricing its debt get it wrong. Now it’s building its own measure of what its debt is worth, and Egypt has had a hand in designing it from the start.

Meet the African Credit Rating Agency (AfCRA), which launched in Mauritius in October and wants its first sovereign ratings out by the end of March 2027. It is already in talks with 15 governments, and Egypt’s central bank has been in the room since 2019. The harder question (whether a rater paid by the governments it grades can shift borrowing costs) is one we put to a former BNP Paribas senior economist below in our top story.

Then the Fed, written by one of you: Yassin Amr is 16, follows the Fed closely, and shows that a US rate hike lands on the EGP long before it touches anything we owe Washington — just USD 5.8 bn of our USD 163.9 bn external debt stock. The real exposure lies in floating-rate World Bank and IMF loans and in the currency itself. Read his full piece below, which ends on the two meetings that will test the argument: the Fed on 9 December and the CBE on 17 December.

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A clean handover

The National Bank of Egypt (NBE) expects to close its acquisition of Banque Misr’s UAE branches by the end of November or mid-December, NBE CEO Mohamed El Etreby said in an interview with CNBC Arabia. The transaction now has near-final approval from the UAE central bank, with only commercial registry procedures left before final sign-off. NBE has finished due diligence and valued the branches at a 1.02x book, under terms that leave Banque Misr liable for any obligations that surface within a year of closing, he added.

The acquisition is part of NBE’s push for a direct presence in the UAE, where it already runs a representative office and holds a Category 3 license at the Dubai International Financial Centre, and has separately applied to open branches of its own, El Etreby said.

REMEMBER- The UAE central bank gave NBE a preliminary nod to take over the branches in September, weeks after the US Treasury’s FinCEN proposed cutting them off from correspondent banking with US institutions. FinCEN alleges the branches processed about USD 1.8 bn between January 2024 and June 2026 for 103 companies that may be linked to Iranian shadow-banking networks. Fitch expects the proposal to have limited impact on Banque Misr’s credit rating, since the branches account for less than 5% of its assets and net income. It added that the sale to NBE would lower the risk, though it’s unclear whether the deal would lift the restrictions.

Home is where FX is

Egyptians working abroad sent home USD 13 bn in July-September, up 20.4% y-o-y, according to a Central Bank of Egypt statement, taking the total for the first nine months of 2026 to a record USD 38.2 bn. The period turned out far better than Onafriq (a cross-border payments platform) had predicted in June, when it warned that Gulf-based migrant workers were running down their savings and that remittance volumes could collapse by 3Q if the war dragged on. That steady flow is buying Egypt time to fix the weaknesses that remittances keep covering for.

The money keeps coming because Egyptians abroad still trust the banking system with it, the payoff of the monetary reforms that followed the March 2024 float and closed the gap with the parallel market. That trust has held even through the EGP’s swings since the war broke out in February, including a then-record low of 53.53 to the USD in March. And it’s turned remittances into one of the economy’s most reliable sources of FX: they jumped 29.6% to USD 47.3 bn in FY 2025/26, by far the biggest offset to a merchandise trade deficit that widened to USD 64.8 bn, according to the balance of payments.

But the same balance of payments shows how much remittances are making up for. Non-oil exports grew just 7.8% to USD 37.3 bn in the last fiscal year, while the current account deficit still widened to USD 22.5 bn. The government has started to push on exports, raising export rebates by an average of 35% and covering up to half the freight bill to new markets. By our read, the flows give the government room to go further with the fiscal, structural, and legislative reforms that let the economy make and export more, leaving it better placed to absorb the next shock.

What should we teach our kids in the age of AI? And on the policy-level, where do we start? On this episode of Making It, Sherif Kamel, dean of AUC’s Onsi Sawiris School of Business, discusses how AI shows up in the classroom.

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PSA-

WEATHER- Cairo is in for a gentle autumn day today, with a high of 24°C and a low of 13°C, the high back up a degree from yesterday while the night slips one cooler, according to our favorite weather app.

It’s a touch warmer in Alexandria too, with a high of 24°C and a low of 17°C.

The big story abroad

China’s trade surplus broke the USD 1 tn mark for the second straight year. The country’s surplus hit USD 1.04 tn over the first 10 months of the year, keeping it on track to top last year’s all-time high of USD 1.2 tn. October exports rose 35.2% from a year earlier, with chips and cars powering this year’s gains, even as Beijing faces growing calls to bring its trade into better balance.

Slovakia calls Germany’s Ukraine-for-budget ultimatum a “textbook case of blackmail.” Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Bulgaria are resisting Berlin’s push to make new Ukraine aid a condition for signing off on the EU’s next long-term budget. Slovakia has threatened to use its veto. Kyiv faces a EUR 70 bn funding gap next year, and Brussels has pledged to cover about EUR 45 bn of it, with a new round of joint EU debt emerging as the leading option.

AI’s power hunger has firms hunting for used turbines and retired jet engines. Wait times for expensive new gas turbines now run into the next decade, pushing utilities, developers, and companies rushing to supply electricity to AI data centers to scour global markets for used units, bring idle machines back into service, and repurpose decommissioned jet engines, Reuters reported yesterday. Appetite for power-intensive data centers keeps climbing even as concerns about AI’s dangers grow and the recent sell-off of related shares, which leaves turbines and other key power equipment in short supply.

*** It’s Hardhat day — your weekly briefing of all things infrastructure in Egypt: EnterpriseAM’s industry vertical focuses each Wednesday on infrastructure, covering everything from energy, water, transportation, and urban development, as well as social infrastructure such as health and education.

In today’s issue: We look at how the central bank’s rate hike is squeezing real estate developers offering decade-long payment plans.