Good afternoon, friends, and happy almost-weekend. At home, we’re celebrating a narrowing financing gap — and manifesting a long weekend next week.
THE BIG STORY TODAY-
Financing gap narrows by half in current fiscal year: The IMF sees Egypt facing a financing gap of USD 5.8 bn in FY 2025-26, compared to USD 11.4 bn in FY 2024-25, excluding disbursals from the Extended Fund Facility (EFF), the IMF said in its country staff report (pdf) for the fourth review of our USD 8 bn loan program.
The government has secured financing commitments for the next 12 months from international partners, aiming to completely close the country’s financing gap, according to the report. This includes financing related to the sale of development rights or real estate, the IMF noted. Arab countries also are expected to keep their deposits worth USD 18.3 bn at the Central Bank of Egypt until the end of our EFF arrangement in October 2026, unless they are used for the purchase of equities, according to the report.
THE BIG STORY ABROAD-
It’s another day with a mixed bag of headlines in the international press, but the common thread among most is Trump’s ongoing global tariff war. Among the stories getting top billing:
The Trump administration raised USD 47 bn in additional customs revenues in 2Q 2025, after US trade partners broadly refrained from retaliating against the US president’s tariffs, according to the Financial Times. Most countries have opted for negotiations in fear of facing even higher tariffs, which already reached their highest levels since the 1930s.
For Indonesia, negotiations proved the better path: The US reached a new trade agreement with Indonesia, Trump announced yesterday, following negotiations described by Jakarta as an “extraordinary struggle,” according to CNN. The agreement will see the US impose a 19% tariff on exports from the country, a decrease from the initial 32% threatened by the US president.
MEANWHILE- UK inflation accelerated to 3.6% in June 2025, up from 3.4% in May — the highest since January 2024, according to the Office for National Statistics. The jump was mainly fueled by both fuel and food price inflation. Despite the rise, the Bank of England remains optimistic about cutting interest rates, which currently remain much higher than the bank’s target rate of 2%. (BBC | The Guardian)
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☀️ TOMORROW’S WEATHER- We hope you’ve acquainted yourself with the heat, because tomorrow temperatures in Cairo are set to peak at 39°C, before cooling down to 25°C. It’s a cooler story up north, with temperatures reaching a high of just 29°C and a low of 25°C, according to our favorite weather app.
?️The Gen Z Stare is real, and it’s baffling millennials: The latest generational workplace debate is here, and this time it’s about eye contact. Some millennials are calling out their younger coworkers for what they term the Gen Z Stare — a wide-eyed, blank, slightly awkward look that, to them, reads as a total breakdown in basic communication, according to Business Insider.
Is it social anxiety or just overload? The viral moment started with videos showing Gen Z workers staring silently at customers or colleagues without responding — especially in service jobs. While some viewers say it signals poor soft skills, others argue it’s just young people processing nonsense in real time. One viral example is a hypothetical customer asking if a strawberry banana smoothie contained bananas, prompting a stare that many felt was entirely justified.
Many Gen Zers are pushing back, saying they’re not rude — they’re just tired. Some claim the stare is reserved for illogical questions or forced small talk. Others say it’s a natural pause, a reaction to overstimulation, or simply a reflection of a generation that doesn’t quite appreciate faking enthusiasm.
The Gen Z Stare follows other viral debates about younger workers oversharing, setting boundaries, or avoiding leadership roles. Beyond the stare, Gen Z is rewriting the rules of workplace culture. More young professionals are turning down promotions and leadership roles in favor of maintaining better work-life balance, practicing “conscious unbossing” to avoid the stress that often comes with managing people. The generation is placing mental health, autonomy, and personal time ahead of the traditional pursuit of upward mobility. Why climb the ladder if the top looks miserable?
They're also embracing micro-retirement. Another emerging pattern is the rise of micro-retirement — extended breaks between jobs or brief sabbaticals taken during employment. Gen Z has also popularized trends like quiet quitting — doing only what the job requires — and voice quitting — openly expressing dissatisfaction or disengagement, The Atlantic writes. While not entirely new, these breaks are being reframed as intentional pauses rather than signs of instability.
Gen Z is clear about their priorities: Gen Z’s approach to work favors flexibility, transparency, and well-being over rigid schedules or hierarchical structures. From how they take time off to how they interact with authority, the generation is prompting companies to reconsider long-held norms about what productivity and commitment look like in the modern workplace.
Egypt’s AI ecosystem is steadily on the rise, with Egypt ranking second in Africa and 56th worldwide in AI readiness according to the 2022 Government Artificial Intelligence Readiness Index. As more and more sectors and enterprises begin to adopt AI in their day-to-day operations in Egypt, we’re left with many questions: what industries are leading in AI adoption, what is their approach, and what specific use cases are gaining the most traction?
To get some answers, we caught up with Ahmed Mahmoud, co-founder and CEO of DXwand — an Egyptian-led regional B2B startup offering generative AI agent solutions designed to cater to the needs of myriad industries.
E: What industries would you say are leading AI adoption?
AM: In terms of willingness, financial services are surprisingly eager. The financial services sector is often perceived to be risk-averse and appreciates steadiness over innovation, yet they’re proving willing to adopt. But when it comes to procedural measures, things can get a little slow.
Education, on the other hand, is quick to adopt AI. There’s already added pressure [on the education sector], given that teachers and students around the globe are utilizing existing AI tools. Education was pushed, I would say, into adoption. The industry had no option — either leave control to teachers and students, or take hold of the narrative and offer its own solutions.
E: How does the financial sector adopt AI?
AM: In many ways — what we’ve witnessed, aside from customer service, is institutes veering towards agentic financial services. If you go to a chat bot and tell it your credit card got stolen, you’d expect it to tell you what to do or who to call. That’s not agentic customer service.
What agentic AI does is act straight away, just like an actual human would. In terms of business viability, this makes more sense. AI agents troubleshoot, reason, and take actions — and that’s what institutes are opting for. We also have generative insights, where upon providing a query, you’d receive dashboards on the go. Say, for example, you want to compare the sales volume of two branches for a specific product within a specific time period; you’d get the numbers, why sales are fluctuating, what the reason behind that may be — whether in policy changes or otherwise.
It digs deeper into all the available enterprise knowledge to provide the information you need to take action. This proves especially beneficial for financial service enterprises that operate on a magnitude of data.
Another thing is sales, the AI agent helps with categorizing the leads, and helps the sales agent personalize their approach based on real data. It essentially conducts a preliminary KYC (Know Your Customer), which already saves the sales agent at least a week’s worth of work.
E: By contrast, what industries have been the most resistant to AI solutions?
AM: Healthcare has its concerns, and that’s understandable. After all, AI isn’t flawless, and the medical field is a very sensitive one. You can’t hold AI accountable for any mistakes made in the field. Healthcare isn’t against its adoption, but it's adopted in less sensitive areas. There are limitations by design. Similarly, legal industries follow a similar approach — adopting AI in a limited and specific context.
E: What are the most common use cases for AI you would say?
AM: We recently went live with the education ministry in Kuwait, and it came as a surprise. Prior to adoption, we would hold sessions and training programs to acquaint teams with the system. With the Kuwaiti education ministry, we didn’t have to do anything — it just took off — they were self-sufficient from the get-go. I’ve been working in tech for years and I’d never seen a system adopted this fast before.
Use cases vary; students use our AI to deepen their understanding of classes, gain in-depth knowledge, and learn on their own terms. If students want a mock-up exam, AI can create it and assess their performance. AI can then dig deeper into the students’ weaker areas. For teachers, they can utilize our tools to create custom-content that aligns with official curricula, something general LLMs cannot do. The tools we provided for the ministry allow teachers to create anything from gamified tasks to workshops drawing straight from the curricula.
E: What surprised you the most about how Egyptian companies implemented AI?
AM: SMEs in Egypt are more courageous when it comes to adoption. They’re hungry for it. This agentic technology was incredibly expensive in its earliest days, but when these prices started dropping and became more accessible, and when companies like DXwand began building further solutions into their platform, it became an affordable option. Since 2018, we’ve been working with different enterprises — and this year we started servicing SMEs. Six or seven out of 10 SMEs are willing to try out agentic AI. It’s a different story for the big enterprises; that rate is lower. This proves that AI’s impact on the economy in Egypt will be substantial, especially when these SMEs grow and become more scalable.
E: What challenges have you faced when implementing AI in Egypt?
AM: Regulations are one key challenge. There aren’t any AI regulations that I know of. There’s no guidebook on what could be done and what couldn’t. Companies risk suddenly finding themselves in violation of newly introduced rules that basically prevent them from utilizing what they’ve already adopted. That’s a very high risk. Many companies remain averse to AI adoption until regulations are put in place. Businesses are eager to keep up pace with developments, but regulatory uncertainty is holding some of them back. Exchange rates and credit card restrictions have at times made implementations more difficult.
E: For AI adopters, how do they calculate that return on investment?
AM: It depends on the use case. In cases like procurement automation — which follows a standard cycle and is largely administrative — we typically automate around 80% of the workflow. The cost savings are immediately clear. Consider a telecom company looking to build a cell tower. The procurement cycle for that might take a year, and a majority of that is administrative again. It’s not just time lost — it’s about the cost of that time.
E: Which AI applications have the highest adoption potential among Egyptian businesses within the next 3-5 years?
AM: Tools that leverage AI for insights and analytics — whether in real estate, marketing, financial services — are likely to see the strongest uptake. Customer service is also poised for significant transformation, with automation and personalization becoming key drivers.
E: What advice would you give Egyptian business leaders who are just beginning to explore AI adoption?
AM: I’m not one for advice, but if I were starting a business today, I would start early, do things fast, and implement AI quickly. I wouldn’t wait by any means. I could use AI to operate any aspect of my business — I wouldn’t have to spend a lot of mental energy on recruitment or outsourcing.
Nada does not boast a literary background. He, however, managed to capture attention with a novel that doesn’t seek to please or entertain, but rather to pose difficult questions about power, fear, and religion, in complex Arabic that conveys a collective nightmare.
The plot: The novel takes place in a fictional Upper Egyptian village called Nag’e Al Manasi during the ‘70s. The story begins with a mysterious explosion in the sky, the cause of which is unknown. The explosion isolates the village from the world, to the extent that its inhabitants still believe that the war has been ongoing since 1967, and that the Israeli enemy might infiltrate their village at any given moment.
Moments after the explosion, the villagers are afflicted with a peculiar epidemic that alters both their features and behavior. Their hair falls out, they become sensitive to light and sound, and they grow lethargic. The author gives no direct explanation for this, and so the reader is left to draw their own conclusions. The residents express a state of collective fear and loss amid this state of confusion. What ensues: all that was once familiar is gone.
The novel teems with memorable characters, most notably Imam Ayoub, who finds himself powerless to understand what’s happening, and begins to doubt everything he has ever believed in. Alongside Ayoub, Khalil Al Khouja, a powerful state representative who has long taken hold of narratives through media, publishes a paper called the Voice of War, and begins to recruit the village’s youth. Hakim, his mute son, soon comes into play. There’s also Shawahi, a woman seemingly unaffected by the epidemic, who is seen by the villagers as a symbol of freedom.
As the story progresses, the narrative style shifts to multiple narrators. We follow eight different characters from across the village, each narrating their own version of events. Despite the differing interpretations of the crisis, the main theme remains clear. This is a novel that doesn’t build its world around an epidemic, but rather around the loss of trust, humanity’s helplessness in the face of what it cannot understand, and what questions arise when no answers are found.
The Prayer of Anxiety is a novel to be savored. It’s a work akin to a dream — with no clear ending nor beginning. Nada tackles pivotal issues with his own signature prose, shifting between realism and surrealism without losing the plot. In the end, the reader is left with one fundamental question: how do you survive in a world where everything has lost its meaning?
?️Sharmoofers take on New Cairo. This Friday, 18 July, the crowd favorite Egyptian band will be bringing their signature wild energy to New Cairo’s Family Park with an eight-hour concert. If that sounds like a fun night to you, we’d suggest brushing up on the lyrics of your favorite Sharmoofers hits. Tickets can be purchased through Tikgo.
HAPPENING THIS WEEK-
Tama Impala might feel like he’s only going backwards, but El Sawy Culturewheelcertainly isn’t. Tonight, the Zamalek destination is holding a Tame Impala tribute night, featuring Egyptian band Revamped. You can book your tickets through Culturewheel’s website.
Cardio by the shore? Sign us up. This Friday, 18 July, Ramla by Marakez will host Egypt’s adrenaline-packed spinning marathon Party on Wheels. The event, which is making its long-awaited Sahel debut after years of spinning in El Gouna, will hit Sahel’s shores for a five-hour ride. So if you couldn’t quite get that beach body ready by summer, all is not lost — and with Party on Wheels, fitness comes with a side of DJ beats… and much more. To sign up, reach out to info@beachmonkeyz.com
Downtown Cairo’s Consoleya will host quite the paint-splattered affair this Friday, 18 July — a Paint and Breath experience curated by Narmer Palette. To reserve your spot, reach out to Narmer Palette through their Instagram account.
HAPPENING LATER-
The second edition of contemporary exhibitionArt Space will kick off on Saturday, 19 July and wrap up Tuesday, 30 September, as Sahel season comes to a close. Throughout its duration, the exhibition will feature a slew of visual art installations, interactive workshops, and multidisciplinary exhibitions.
Pop-star Nancy Ajram and shaa’bi legend Hakim will light up the stage at Layali Marassi on Saturday, 26 July. The two megastars will be at the Address Beach Resort for a night of nostalgic hits and performances bringing together generations of music lovers by the beach. You can grab your tickets from Ticketsmarché.
Get caffeinated and grab your polaroid camera, because on Friday 8 August, &ME — one fifth of Keinemusik — will be bringing the beats all through the night until sunrise at North Coast’s Sol Beach. Promising to have you dancing till the sun’s up, the German EDM DJ and producer will be going solo this time around. Tickets can be purchased through Ticketsmarché.
The EGX30 fell 1.4% at today’s close on turnover of EGP 4.4 bn (11.3% below the 90-day average). International investors were the sole net buyers. The index is up 12.6% YTD.
In the green: Alexandria Mineral Oils (+2.1%), Sidpec (+2.0%), and Egypt Aluminum (+1.2%).
In the red: Credit Agricole (-3.3%), TMG Holding (-3.2%), and Fawry (-2.9%).
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