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Egypt's GDP growth will accelerate to 6.5 percent in the 2019/2020 fiscal year, compared with 5.3 percent for the 2018/2019 fiscal year ending in June, according to the country’s minister of finance.
Speaking at a conference organised by Cairo-based investment bank CI Capital, finance minister Mohamed Maaiet said that he expected growth to accelerate as a result of the country’s reform programme, which he said had supported investments and attracted foreign currency flows.
He added that Egypt would receive the next $2 billion tranche of a loan from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) soon.
“The $2 billion loan tranche was scheduled to be disbursed to Egypt by 2018-end, the IMF was negotiating the economic reform details with the Egyptian government that caused (a) small delay, which we expect to end soon,” Maieet said during a speech at CI Capital’s MENA Investor Conference in Cairo on Sunday.
Karim Khadr, managing director and head of brokerage at CI Capital, told Zawya in an interview on the sidelines of the conference that “foreign direct investment remains the main challenge that the Egyptian market faces within 2019” .
Sahar Nasr, Egypt's Minister of Investment and International Cooperation, argued that FDI investors would find a “promising” market, economic stability and an integrated investment map that she said would help to guide private sector investment into the market.
“Indeed, the partnership between the private and public sectors in Egypt helped establish a solar energy station in Aswan, the biggest in the Middle East,” Nasr said.
Egypt’s Minister of Planning, Monitoring and Administrative Reform Hala El-Saeed said during her speech that “Egypt's total public investments have registered 175 billion Egyptian pounds ($9.8 billion) during the first half of 2018/2019 fiscal year, up 12 percent from the same period last year”.
She added that the government had put in place a comprehensive plan aimed at developing the economy. Egypt’s Vision 2030 was launched in 2016 to offer a general framework governing plans and phased work programs in the coming years, the minister said.
CI Capital’s Khedr said that its four-day investor conference, which concludes on Wednesday, has attracted 280 investors from 100 institutions to hear about investment opportunities, who met 76 stakeholders from across the MENA region.
(Reporting by Marwa Abo Elmagd; Editing by Michael Fahy)
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