Egypt to launch handicrafts industry strategy

CAIRO – 15 November 2017: Egypt will launch a 2018-2020 national strategy for developing handicrafts and cultural industry before the end of this year, Minister of Industry and Foreign Trade Tarek Kabil announced Wednesday.

“The strategy will focus on training workers, marketing products in external markets and connecting technicians with local supply chains,” Kabil said.

Kabil made the statements during the second international conference for handicrafts, which kicked off Wednesday.

This strategy will come as part of the development strategy of the industrial sector, the minister added.

Egypt is adopting a 2020 industrial development strategy, which targets increasing the contribution of the sector in the gross domestic product (GDP) from 17 percent to 21 percent.

For that aim, Kabil launched in October the industrial investment map, which includes details about available opportunities in the industrial sector, aiming to reduce imports eventually, and it will be regularly updated with the latest developments in the sector.

The map included 4,136 opportunities in eight sectors. Around 1,260 opportunities are in the engineering industries, 860 in the chemical industries, 640 in the food industries, 600 in the textile sector, 395 in the mining sector, 180 in the pharmaceuticals sector, 122 in the metal industries and 56 in the leather industries.

In order to prepare this map, the Ministry of Industry paid field visits to more than 100 industrial zones across Egypt to collect data about them, identify their production volume and production capacity.