For a decade, the narrative of the Egyptian knowledge economy was all about the brain drain. The country’s most promising scientists, pharmacists, and engineers were seen as a primary export — individuals who left the local market to find the infrastructure and the capital of Europe or North America.

But a new trend is emerging. A cluster of Egyptian companies that develop individuals’ professional capacities — led by the likes of cloud lab Nawah Scientific, education-focused healthtech 30Med, and edtech Farid — is flipping the script. Instead of losing the brains, Egypt is beginning to export the infrastructure to develop expertise elsewhere.

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In the Middle East and Africa, the pharma and medical sectors face a chronic paradox. Universities are producing record numbers of graduates, yet CEOs in the pharma sector consistently complain of a skills deficit.

From classroom to cleanroom

The gap isn’t theoretical — it’s practical. A pharmacy student at a public university in Egypt or a medical researcher in Rwanda may have the intellectual capacity to develop a new drug formulation, but they rarely have access to the ISO-accredited hardware or the standard operating procedures required to meet international regulatory standards.

Traditionally, a university would have to spend mns of USD to build a high-end lab that might be obsolete in five years — and that’s where companies like Nawah come in. The cloud lab model pioneered by Nawah Scientific — which has just closed a USD 23 mn Series A round — changes the ROI on a medical degree. By providing R&D-as-a-service, Nawah effectively becomes the outsourced research campus for the region’s universities, allowing them to bypass the massive capital expenditure of hardware and focus instead on the software of human talent.

Nawah’s latest capital injection is earmarked for a massive geographical pivot, with a 10k sqm global research hub in Rwanda to provide scientific research services across East Africa, CEO Omar Sakr tells EnterpriseAM. The healthtech is also planning to double the size of its existing laboratories in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, along with the Kingdom’s first research center.

Nawah’s expansions abroad also cement Egypt’s position as a regional research and innovation hub, former General Authority for Investment and Freezones CEO Hossan Heiba tells EnterpriseAM.

In Egypt, Nawah has already become a critical bridge for many universities. Through dedicated days, pharma and biotech students move out of lecture halls and into an environment that meets US FDA and ISO-17034 standards. But the importance of this interaction isn’t just about learning how to use a pipette; it’s about learning the language of compliance that global pharma requires.

Exporting medical expertise

While Nawah digitizes the lab, Rology is digitizing the hospital’s diagnostic wing. By using AI to export the expertise of Egyptian radiologists to hospitals in Saudi Arabia and Kenya, Rology is proving that a doctor’s physical location no longer dictates the quality of a diagnosis. It’s an education-as-a-service model where junior doctors in remote areas are mentored by senior experts through the platform’s peer-review layers.

Local healthtech 30Med has also set its sights on expanding its medical education to the GCC and across North Africa. Through interactive video content, they solve the continuous professional development problem for the fast-changing sector. This ensures that as pharma becomes more complex, the workforce’s knowledge doesn’t lag behind.

Even the way we buy medicine is being re-educated by local startups — and they’re working on expanding regionally too. Platforms like Chefaa and Grinta are transforming the independent pharmacist from a simple retailer into a data-driven health operator. By teaching the business of pharma through their B2B platforms, these companies are professionalizing the pharma supply chain across the region.

The model applies to more than just the pharma sector

For decision-makers, this shift signifies a move toward distributed expertise, where standardized processes can be exported to markets like Riyadh or Nairobi without the need to physically relocate top-tier talent. As Nawah, Rology, and 30MED scale across the continent and the Gulf, they are proving that the most sustainable way to flip the script on brain drain is to own the platform that develops the brains in the first place.

Egypt’s greatest export is no longer just its people — it is often the infrastructure of expertise. We’ve seen this model works for Egypt’s pharma and healthcare industry; the question is: What other sectors are ripe for Egyptian expertise as a service?

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