Joining me right now is Dr. May El Batran, former Member of Parliament, founding chair of Egypt's ICT committee, and current chair of the People Development Foundation, working directly with enterprises, entrepreneurs, and craftspeople at the base of Egypt's economy. Welcome to the programme.
It's a pleasure being here.
You work face to face with entrepreneurs every day. Before we get to policy — what are you actually seeing on the ground right now? When a craftsman or a young business owner comes to your foundation, is their problem access to credit, the cost of credit, or something the financial system isn't measuring at all?
It's a very interesting question. The consumer credit numbers that get cited are not business credit — this is small credit, tiny credit. I call it nano business credit. And that's where the real gap is. The money is available for business, but it's not emphasised or publicised the way consumer credit is. The large NGOs and major companies in Egypt go towards easy money for regular consumers — accessible in shops, for consumer goods. That's where the discrepancy lies. SME credit users for 2025 are reaching around 190 million — but that number is somewhat inflated because many of the same people return multiple times. We started in 2015 and we have people who have come back up to eight times on our one-year programme. But the room for growth is still huge, and the impact is real. We started in Qena Governorate in Upper Egypt and this year we're helping nearly 20,000 households — seeing people who sent their children to college, seeing families who graduated their children from school. That is the real impact of micro business credit supported by the private and non-banking sector.
You've sat on both the policy side and the grassroots side. Why does Egypt's financial system find it structurally easier to finance a purchase than a producer?
Several reasons. There is sometimes a religious reservation around interest-based lending, so financing needs to be structured as an Islamic partnership. But more broadly, with the internet, Instagram, and Pinterest, young people find it far easier to make a consumer credit decision for instant gratification and delay payment. Margins on consumables can reach 35%. For SMEs, the government offers structures with interest rates of 14 to 18% — less than half, sometimes a third of consumer rates — but it's simply easier psychologically and practically to make a consumption decision than a business investment decision.
Some experts argue productive microcredit repays itself from business revenue, creates jobs, and carries negligible defaults. Does that distinction hold in the field?
One thousand percent. Once you get the customer, they don't go anywhere. They come back year after year, growing bigger and bigger until they become fully bankable. The challenge is acquiring that first customer. In our programmes, we have had virtually no defaults — in nearly 15 years, the only write-offs were due to two deaths within the programme. Otherwise, at most a day or two of tardiness. Because it is business — money is coming in every day. We give out loans from £E10,000 to £E50,000 — roughly $200 to $1,000 — at around 18% interest. We break it down to a daily figure. We tell them: put aside £E70 a day for the instalment, and everything else is yours. We grow with them.
Let's talk about the Tamkeen initiative — half a billion pounds aimed at productive micro-enterprises. It requires businesses to obtain a tax card to access financing. How do you make formalisation an invitation rather than a barrier for the smallest enterprise?
Tamkeen starts at £E150,000 — around $3,000 — so it's a different tier of enterprise, one that already has some formal structure. What we do at the nano level is prepare businesses to become taxable, so that they can eventually access programmes like Tamkeen. Tamkeen has just signed a $10 million programme with a bank targeting around 2,400 small businesses with loans of roughly $1,600 to $8,000 per business. The fact that we're now in Tamkeen's third round shows there is a growing and deepening market — but we definitely need more.
Many of the nano businesses you support have real customers and real revenue but no audited accounts, no fixed salary, no property to pledge. Can digital wallet data, payment histories, and supplier invoices replace traditional collateral? And is the regulatory framework ready?
As the founding chair of Egypt's parliamentary technology committee, my answer is absolutely yes. With AI, you can understand a consumer's cycle and behaviour and pinpoint whether a person is trustworthy through their entire digital presence — not just their financial history, but all their behaviour as a person. We already have companies in Egypt that credit people based on their digital presence without any previous banking history, and others permitted by the Financial Regulatory Authority that credit based on banking history. The old model looks backward at financial behaviour. AI-based tools look forward, based on broader patterns of trustworthiness. I believe the opportunity is enormous. And there are also more traditional supplementary methods — shop documentation, peer guarantees, and physical assets like gold, similar to the Indian model.
On that optimistic note, Dr. El Batran, it has been a great pleasure having you with us. Thank you very much.
Thank you, I appreciate it.
