Under the title “Egyptian ICT Sector: Opportunities and Challenges” the Canada Egypt Business Council (CEBC) and the Egyptian Council for Sustainable Development (ECSD) hosted an event featuring H.E. Eng. Khaled Negm Minister of Communications & Information Technology. Esteemed guests and former ministers including Dr. Amre Moussa, Dr. Mostafa Al Saeed, Dr. Hany Helal , as well as CEBC’s and ECSD’s esteemed members, guests, businessmen and reporters.
Ambassadors of Estonia, Italy, Sweden, Republic of Belarus and Republic of Lithuania were also in attendance.

Summary of the Minister Speech:

Before I start talking about the Internet, I would like to welcome your Excellences, all the Ministers and I would like to thank Mr. Motaz for his kind invitation. It is a pleasure to be here with you today. Today, it has been 95 days since I have taken up my post and I believe it is not an easy post to occupy. It is a big burden, but I pray to God to give us the success, in order to benefit the country and its citizens. I am going to talk more about the citizens later, because I’ll be giving you good news at the end. The first thing we started with was the Economic Conference and it was one of the things that we can call the light, that was exposed to us in order to see hope for Egypt’s economic future.

The sector in the conference was three important projects: the commercial register,Ecological villages and Smart meters.

And I’m not going to go into details. However, I can assure you that the reaction was very positive in the Conference from the side of investors whether Arabs or Egyptians.

The RFPs will be launched for the Commercial Registry and the Real Estate Registry.

After the Conference, I can say that the Conference is an opportunity to keep away from any possible bureaucracy and red-tape.

Anyway, to come back to Cairo and think about critical topics, I would like to say that I was talking to Eng. Mehleb in the beginning when I started my mission. The main topic that worried us all, was that we exert a lot of effort as a Ministry, but very little of that is felt by the people
That was the path I selected: How the normal citizen can feel the circle, the efforts and the work being done by the Ministry.

We are a Ministry that is exerting a lot of effort on strategies and long-term plans, handling tasks that are very difficult in a challenging period for the country and the
Mobile services, one of the most controversial topics, are on par with international standards.

I know that the companies are here and their heads are here and I would like to thank them for their efforts and support.

I visited Vodafone and Mobinil and they showed a lot of cooperation and desire to improve investment and services.

The measurements were not satisfactory to me. Mobile communication performances are measured in networks every 3 months. I want it to be every week and to be announced every month.

The operators are often blamed – excuse me that I announced in the newspapers – but I know that was not an easy mission. It aimed at serving

he citizens.
The other thing is the Internet. We want to achieve development and we seek to reach a digital government and a digital society. That is not possible without the whole country being able to access the service. So, I can’t have the service and say it’s an
Egypt, unfortunately, has a decreased penetration rate of the Internet. It is suffering dearly.

Other countries Jordan, Tunisia, Morocco are faring much better. They havepassed the threshold of 56 million users and I am not talking about the Gulf where every house that is being built has fiber opticconnection, with a 98% coverage across the country.

How to improve penetration rates in the country?

The distribution of the penetration is also something that is difficult, because all the focus is on Cairo (48%), Giza around 39%, Alexandria 30%.
Even Mansura that has a huge university and Assiout, we are talking about a minimal value of around 18% and that is not acceptable.
We work around 18 hours a day in order to reach a point that we all want for this country and the objectives we have set.

We target to reach a penetration of 50%, which means that we need about 1.5 million new houses that will have Internet access through a year and a half. This is not an easy task. It requires improving online security and doubling the bandwidth.

This is an important point, and this is what the state is aiming at.
The last thing I would like to talk about and it is something I am proud of.It is something that will serve citizens directly.

It is the citizen saving account through Egypt Post. We have been working on it since January. It allows segments and strata of the society to reach a higher economic status, especially laborers and people who working day-by-day. If they have an accident and they die, no one is there to compensate for. These people have no insurance. If they have an income of LE 50/day, that is hardly enough.

In case any incident happens to the person who has the account, his family gets LE 20’000 and is valid until the age of 58. No medical examination, no premiums !! It allows concrete laborers, peddlers, farmers and workers to have a guarantee of being compensated in case of retirement or accident.

Even if you have a workshop and workers, you can just add a LE 50/day bonus and they can start this account.

I believe that this is something that is within the reach of everyone.