Built to Last

Forty-six-year-old Azza Ibrahim looked at the busy government street outside her window in Beni Suef in Upper Egypt and recognized something. People were always in a hurry here. Always needing things done. A stationery store would work on a street like this.

She had the idea and the drive.
What she needed was the means. It started with a small printer. A loan through ZAAT — Banque Misr's financing program for women entrepreneurs, designed with IFC — allowed her to open the store. A second loan helped her grow it. She and her husband run it together.

ZAAT was the result of years of IFC advisory work with Banque Misr — market research, product design, and the deliberate effort to understand what Egyptian women entrepreneurs need. Egypt's first banking program built specifically for women. A $234 million loan to Banque Misr followed — the first gender-lens investment in a public sector Egyptian bank — with half earmarked for women-owned businesses. Through this program, more than 80,000 women have entered the formal banking system for the first time.

The same logic runs at every scale. Al Tadamun Microfinance Foundation — Egypt's only microfinance institution solely serving women — has grown its portfolio to serve over 2.6 million micro entrepreneurs since inception, supported by three IFC engagements over more than 10 years. At the other end of the spectrum, Integrated Diagnostics Holdings (IDH) — Egypt's largest diagnostics network, founded and led by women across two generations — received a $35 million IFC investment to scale across Egypt, Jordan, Nigeria, Sudan, and Saudi Arabia. IDH is the first healthcare provider in the Middle East and North Africa to obtain the EDGE gender equality certification, a recognized global standard for gender and intersectional equity.

For most of the twentieth century, the small Red Sea city of Ras Ghareb ran on oil. Its identity, its economy, and the livelihoods of its 40,000 residents were built on crude. Then, in 2019, IFC and renewable power company Lekela partnered to develop the West Bakr Wind Farm — 96 turbines capitalizing on the steady winds blowing off the Red Sea. Today the farm generates more than 250 megawatts, powers more than 350,000 Egyptian homes, and avoids more than 550,000 tons of carbon dioxide emissions every year.

Among those locally recruited was Kholoud Moustafa Bakry, an electrical engineer who had pursued a Master's degree in renewable energy, drawn by what she had already seen changing in her own city. She joined Lekela and rose to lead the West Bakr Operating Committee — often the only woman in a room of ten. Ras Ghareb's city logo has since been updated. The oil derrick is gone. In its place: a wind turbine.

West Bakr is one chapter in a larger energy story. IFC mobilized $653 million for Benban Solar Park — 1,650 megawatts, at the time the world's largest solar installation, avoiding 2 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions annually. Then, a $1.1 billion investment and mobilization in Abydos Solar and Amunet Wind — 560 megawatts and 505 megawatts respectively, at the lowest clean energy tariffs Africa had ever seen. Now comes Abydos II: 1,250 MWp of solar paired with Egypt's first utility-scale battery storage system, producing 3 million MWh of clean energy per year, avoiding 1.6 million tons of CO₂ annually, and creating more than 4,000 construction jobs — over 95 percent filled by Egyptians.

None of it was inevitable. Between 2014 and 2016, the World Bank Group worked with Egypt's Ministry of Electricity to design the Feed-in-Tariff framework that made Egypt Africa's leading solar market. Egypt built the renewable energy industry. IFC helped unlock the financing and frameworks that allowed it to scale.

Sohaila had never once thought about working in a factory. That world belonged to men.

Then she learned what Wadi Group had done. The company had made a deliberate commitment — through its partnership with IFC — to bring women onto production lines that had always been male. Not as an experiment. As a policy. When Sohaila arrived, she found herself surrounded by women doing work that the industry had never imagined for them.

It was her first job.

She was always afraid — she will tell you that herself. But on the quality control and printing line, something clicked. She found herself there, recognized for what she could do. That line became hers.

It is what she tells other women who hesitate at the edge of something unfamiliar. She knows what that hesitation feels like. She also knows what is waiting on the other side of it.

Wadi Group grew from 30 hectares of desert farmland in 1984 to 4,600 hectares today — Egypt's largest egg producer and one of the largest on the continent. IFC backed the company across multiple rounds over two decades, with EDGE gender advisory support running alongside. Egypt's agricultural exports exceeded $10.6 billion in 2025. Less than 10 percent of crops are processed domestically. Closing that gap means companies like Wadi need to recruit from the full talent pool.

Essam arrived at a remote section of the Red Sea desert in the mid-1990s, dressed in a galabeya (a traditional men's garment) and carrying a stick. At 22 years old, originating from Upper Egypt, he took a job as a security guard. The stick reflected his understanding of security responsibilities at the time, and the desert constituted the entirety of his surroundings.

He was the first security guard El Gouna ever hired.

Over thirty years, the desert became a city. And as El Gouna changed around him, so did Essam. The galabeya became a uniform. The stick became proper equipment. And the world, which had once ended at the edge of his governorate, opened up in ways he could not have imagined standing at that empty site in the 1990s.

He met people he never expected to meet — like international celebrities at the El Gouna Film Festival. He saw things he never expected to see — like a community built by Samih Sawiris, where everyone was treated equally. That was the culture, from the beginning — and Essam felt it.

Today, his two grown children work in El Gouna. His whole life is there.

In 1997, IFC made its first tourism investment in Egypt — $50 million in Orascom's vision for El Gouna when it was still under construction. Over time, El Gouna grew into a full city: more than 25,000 residents and workers, its own utilities, schools, and hospitals, a benchmark for integrated resort development across the region. In 2025, IFC returned with a $155 million sustainability-linked loan — Egypt's first by a tourism company — requiring 50 percent energy efficiency and 20 percent water efficiency improvements across much of El Gouna's hotels.

Essam arrived at a construction site, just starting his life. His children grew up in the city he helped build.

In 2016, fewer than one in three Egyptians had access to the formal financial system. By June 2025, according to the Central Bank of Egypt, that number had reached 76.3 percent — one of the fastest expansions of financial access recorded anywhere in the world. That shift did not happen because of a single investment or a single company. It happened because of decades of layered infrastructure, built piece by piece.

In 2005, IFC advisory work helped establish I-Score — Egypt's first private credit bureau, built with 29 banks, allowing lenders in the country to assess a borrower's history. Without it, the loans that followed — to Azza, to the women Banque Misr reached, to the MSMEs IFC has backed — would have been harder to make and harder to scale.

Then IFC took a bet on Fawry — a startup with an unlikely thesis: that Egyptians would trust a payment terminal at a neighborhood grocery store, in a country where cash governed 94 percent of all transactions. IFC invested $14.8 million beginning in 2013, at the moment when the model had been proven, but scale was still out of reach. Fawry now processes 2.5 million transactions a day, serves more than 35 million Egyptians, and in 2019 became the first Egyptian fintech to list on the national stock exchange. Today, Fawry is a household name, delivering digital infrastructure that everyone uses daily.

Underneath both sits a thirty-year relationship with CIB — with more than half a billion dollars of engagements from early equity to anchoring Egypt's first private sector green bond in 2021 to a capital-strengthening loan in 2024. CIB is now one of the most profitable commercial banks in Africa. That outcome was not visible from the starting point. It was the product of a relationship that kept reinvesting in itself — which is, in the end, the same story as everything else in this piece.

Every year, 1.3 million young Egyptians enter the labor market. The economy generates roughly 600,000 jobs. That gap will not close without private capital at scale — without the market-building, framework design, and long-term conviction that IFC has spent fifty years learning how to bring to Egypt.

IFC's most consequential work has often happened before the market agreed: the advisory that created an industry, the investment made before the company was famous, the relationship sustained when others did not.

That is still the work. And fifty years in, IFC and the World Bank Group are still here to do it, together with Egypt.

"Egypt's best chapter is still being written. The defining question now is speed — whether reform can translate fast enough into private sector-led job creation at the scale Egypt's demographics demand. That is the work IFC is here to accelerate."

Cheick-Oumar Sylla · IFC Division Director, North Africa and Horn of Africa