CAIRO — Small businesses continue to serve as a gateway into a better economic life for many Egyptian women, especially in the country’s rural areas and Upper Egypt.

Nevein Gamea, the executive director of the state-owned Micro, Small and Medium Enterprise Development Agency (MSMEDA), said in an April 14 statement that rural women control 51% of the total MSMEDA-funded projects.

At a press conference on the sidelines of the 2019 Arab Forum for Sustainable Development held in Beirut April 10, Egyptian Minister of Planning, Follow-up and Administrative Reform Hala al-Saeed announced that small and medium enterprise (SME) lending for Egyptian women — either through MSMEDA or banks — had increased and reached in 2018 46% of the total funds and loans of the banks and MSMEDA. However, there are no statistics on previous years.

At an international conference held on March 19 on the occasion of International Women’s Day at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Alexandria, Nahla Zeitoun, senior social protection specialist at the World Bank, announced the findings of a joint study carried out by the World Bank, Egypt’s National Council for Women (NCW) as well as several local human rights organizations and experts on women’s economic empowerment.