Lemania Swiss International School (LSIS) — the country’s first Swiss sports-focused school — is now planning to open its doors for the 2027/28 academic year, a year later than planned. The decision to delay was taken in February and came down to construction licensing, Eduhive CEO Karim Mostafa tells EnterpriseAM.

Our friends at CIRA Education, the listed operator behind the new school and Eduhive’s corporate parent, confirm that they are preparing to launch LSIS with their partners at Lausanne-based École Lemania. CEO Mohamed El Kalla confirmed the delay in a public statement in September.

Construction is underway, and the school is recruiting students. Madinet Masr, the developer behind the project, is due to hand over the first phase in April 2027 — five months before the doors open — Mostafa tells us. The first intake will run from pre-K to Grade 5, with the school building out to its full range in a second phase, although no timeline for that has been announced yet. LSIS is targeting 200 students in year one, and the EGP 350 mn investment figure announced in 2024 is unchanged. “The school is officially registered with the International Baccalaureate (IB) and currently in a pre-candidacy stage. The authorisation process will follow once the building is finished,” LSIS Founding Principal Matt Chambers tells EnterpriseAM.

REFRESHER- LSIS was the group’s headline K-12 project when it was first announced. Madinet Masr and CIRA subsidiaries Al Ahly CIRA and Eduhive announced the EGP 350 mn project in June 2024 to anchor a Taj City development that also includes the EGP 2 bn Klub Kayan sports facility with BlueRibbon. In his September statement, El Kalla lists it beside a Shorouk City high school extension CIRA signed this year, both targeted to welcome their first students in 2027/28.

Sports are built into the school. From kindergarten, students will spend around five hours a week training with coaches the school employs from Klub Kayan’s network of trained staff, Chambers tells us. Students will have access to Klub Kayan facilities, and the campus will have its own pool, basketball courts, and football pitch. All students start on Trax Athlete and begin to specialize around Grades 5 to 8 depending on how they develop.

What’s Trax: On Trax Athlete, students try out a range of sports before settling on one with their coaches and parents. By Grade 8, they select two: a primary sport based on interest and ability “tracked over years” and a second to help avoid the fatigue and injuries that can come with specializing too early — or with a parent pushing a specialization on a child, Chambers tells us. The aim is to guide students to be “professional international athletes in their early 20s,” he explains, “not just regional successes in their early teens.” Athletic and academic progress are tracked together, with the school able to pull coaches’ reports at any point.

Future Founders, a broader leadership and enrichment pathway, runs alongside the athletics track in the primary years. It spans well-being, historical inquiry, design thinking, STEM, sustainability, and entrepreneurship — a component developed with the Swiss Business School Lausanne.

The wider build: CIRA’s pipeline has continued to grow since 2024. The group used an August press conference to lay out EGP 2 bn in investments over two years — including its Damietta university hub, Seneca’s East Cairo campus for the 2028/29 academic year, an Accor-operated teaching hotel, and agtech schools — along with a planned 4Q 2026 EGX float for healthcare arm Egyptians for Healthcare Services. CIRA says it processed more than 46k admission applications this cycle and remains on track for 100k students by 2030.

The numbers give some context to the sequencing. CIRA’s K-12 network stayed flat at 30 schools this cycle as utilization rose to 94.5% from 94%, pushing total students to 38.6k from 37.4k. Higher education expanded, with enrollment climbing to 45.5k from 36k at 91% utilization, alongside an inaugural postgraduate cohort of 401 students. Meanwhile, technical schools increased from one to three, nurseries from 10 to 13, and reach extended from 13 governorates to 15.

The international school segment is growing faster than private schools generally, a government official tells EnterpriseAM, on the back of the cost of building schools and a greater willingness among families to spend on education. Ministry data puts the number of international schools at 449 running up to the preparatory stage and 487 up to secondary, against an average of 390 two years ago — though the earlier figure isn’t broken out by stage. Most are accredited by American or British bodies and offer both the American diploma and IGCSE, the source tells us, with a smaller group running the British curriculum alone.

OUR TAKE- LSIS is entering a segment that’s growing faster than Egypt’s private schools overall but still dominated by American and British curricula. That makes the Swiss name and the sports model the real differentiators here, rather than the curriculum.

Tags: