Neveen Gamea: 1st female industry minister in Egypt

CAIRO - 22 December 2019: As part of the new ministerial reshuffle on Sunday, Neveen Gamea, CEO of the Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprise Development Authority, was announced as the first woman to assume the position of minister of trade and industry, succeeding Amr Nassar.

It is worth noting that Samiha Fawzi assumed the position of Minister of Trade and Industry for only 30 days after the January 2011 Revolution succeeding Rashid Mohamed Rashid, but she submitted her resignation before completing any of the files; therefore, experts in the industrial sector believe that Neveen Gamea is the first minister to assume the position in natural circumstances.

Neveen Gamea has significant experience in supporting small and medium projects through financing through her work in the Social Fund for Development, which later became the Small, Medium and Micro Enterprise Development Authority.

She played an effective role in several industrial files, on top of which was financing new industrial parks, as well as supporting manufacturers in industrial cities to purchase industrial units, including the Small Industries Complex in Mergham 2 in Alexandria.

Gamea is the first CEO of the Enterprise Development Agency that participated actively in providing an appropriate environment for the success of small and micro industries, and facilitated the procedures for integrating them into the formal economy, thus resulting in an increase in the sector's contribution to providing thousands of job opportunities annually.

She has an ambitious vision to preserve the handicraft and heritage industries by subsidizing them with loans and marketing. Evidence of this is that she organized an exhibition displaying the products of heritage owners and handicrafts, which achieved great success during the recent World Youth Forum held in Sharm El Sheikh.

The exhibition shed light on the products that express Egyptian heritage in general and Sinai products in particular. It included many heritage and artistic products, including "carpets and kilims, handicrafts, furnishings, copper, lanterns, leather, glass products, women's and silver accessories, ceramics and Sinai products".

Gamea also played a prominent role in developing a new law for small projects, which makes the coming period the most important in the history of these projects, which are the locomotive of the growth of major economies.

In the recent period, Gamea worked on the file of "An Alternative to Importing"in coordination with several parties through the manufacture of local products, taking into account the introduction of new industrial units that provide the market with an Egyptian product.