Elevating Policy To Modernise And Mobilise Trade

Challenge

In order to support the Government of Egypt’s ambitious plans to increase the country’s exports, USAID designed a project focused on trade facilitation and export development. As part of a consortium led by Nathan Associates, CID Consulting was tasked with engaging the private sector as a key driver of export growth through building the capacity of SMEs to export, as well as supporting in export marketing to ensure Egyptian firms were able to successfully leverage on export opportunities and address export market needs.

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Approach

Our participation in the project was twofold – working with the governmental entities involved – in facilitating trade and export, and working directly with Egyptian SMEs to increase their export portfolios. As part of the first component, we provided relevant Ministries with a series of holistic interventions designed to upgrade their capacity to support export and trade activities.

These ministries included the Ministry of Trade and Industry, the Ministry of Finance, and the Ministry of Investment. In the realm of private sector development, we worked across the entire value chain of equipping local SMEs with resources, processes, systems, and support required to access export markets. This includes designing the selection criteria for SMEs to access the technical assistance provided by the program, communication and outreach to source and select the SMEs, diagnostic assessments to identify the core needs of selected SMEs, and finally implementing firm-level interventions in a wide variety of areas including strategic planning, process re-engineering, human resource development, organizational design, branding and marketing.

Results

As a result of our support, several new buyers expressed interest in working with food processing SMEs in the program and importing their food products from Egypt. Throughout the project, we reached over 2,000 senior business figures, of which 585 were women, in topics including market research and trade data analysis and the importance of international certifications. As a testament to its success, export competitiveness of 90 SMEs across the engineering, automotive, food processing and textiles and ready-made garments sectors increased by an average of 40% and opened new markets.

WHAT OUR CLIENTS SAY

I'm writing to you to let you know that Lafarge Egypt won silver in LafargeHolcim MEA CSR competition under the Education/Employment category for its Occupational H&S Vocational Training Program in Suez!

This is a big milestone for us and couldn't have happened without your support and guidance during the program design and across all its phases.Also special thanks to your amazing team, Sherif and Mostafa, for working extensively on the project and designing a program to address community needs while leveraging on Lafarge Egypt expertise, managing the different program stakeholders while ensuring the project KPIs are met, coming up with creative solutions to solve any issues, devotion, dedication and passion during the different program phases from its launch in 2016 to date.

On behalf of Yasmin and myself, we would like to thank CID for the great effort and for being our extended arm in implementing the "Lafarge Health and Safety Vocational program" in Suez.

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Inji Khalil
Head of Communications, Lafarge Egypt

EDBE Egypt would like to express its sincere gratitude to the CID team for their efforts in taking part in preparing our annual report. The CID team spirit and dedication is highly appreciated, and their close follow-up and timely action has truly added a real value to the report.

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Ghada Anis
Enterprise Projects Office, Export Development Bank of Egypt