Egypt’s trucking sector is bracing for a boom, with truck sales skyrocketing 108% y-o-y in 2025. But there’s a catch: hardware is outstripping human capital due to a critical vocational education gap. While the private sector is eager to upgrade fleets, the country’s vocational training and licensing systems are creating a massive labor bottleneck.

Why it matters: For a country pivoting toward export-led growth, logistics is only as good as the people moving the goods. Currently, the path to becoming a heavy-truck operator is a marathon of bureaucracy rather than a speedy or effective vocational education and training framework.

This is especially a problem for the heavy-trucking segment, which does the heavy lifting in moving our goods. To qualify for driving a heavy truck or a trailer, a professional driver must hold a third-class license for three years, then a second-class license for three years before securing a first-class license. “That’s six years before you can drive a heavy truck — or what I call a progression barrier,” Reliance Operations and Maintenance Services (Roms) Managing Director Omar Ragheb told EnterpriseAM.

Hiring has also grown difficult for operators. Even established companies report a hiring success rate of 40% at best, the founder of logistics asset fractional ownership platform FRCTN Karim Othman told EnterpriseAM.

And that shortage is not merely about headcount, it is a “skills and incentives mismatch,” Othman told us. For example, there is a significant migration of skilled Egyptian drivers to Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, drawn by massive infrastructure projects, better pay, and superior and predictable working conditions, both Othman and Ragheb told us.

By the numbers: Roms estimates that the market has a gap of some 8k truck missions a day — essentially 8k loads a day that cannot be moved efficiently due to a lack of available assets or drivers. “You need at least to double the workforce in the industry because you need about two drivers for every three trucks to keep them moving,” Ragheb told us.

One solution? Education and training. One immediate fix involves reforming the country’s licensing system. A proposed alternative is to decouple licensing from time served and base it instead on competency. “The law needs to be revisited to cut the required time to secure a heavy-trucking driver’s license from six to two years,” Ragheb said. To ensure competency, the government could accredit specific training institutions to test and certify drivers. Together, these two changes could immediately inject new, younger blood into the workforce, he added.

But formalizing education and training requirements in a largely informal sector may be difficult. About 95% of the heavy trucks in the market are owned by individuals or family businesses, with only 5% owned by companies, Othman told us. On average, an individual or a family owns three trucks, “which creates zero economies of scale in maintenance, financing, social and health ins., and training, and leads to high downtime and volatile pricing,” he added.

To formalize education, we might first need to formalize the sector, which we could do by establishing minimum wage standards, mandating social and health ins., and enforcing maximum working hours to prevent fatigue, Othman and Ragheb told us. Currently, the market operates largely informally, with drivers lacking contracts or safety nets, meaning an injury or accident results in an immediate loss of income. Formalization would create a less volatile career path that is currently missing from the industry, making formal qualification for the industry more worthwhile for workers and stopping the talent drain to the Gulf.

Tags: