WB offers Egypt $500M to provide housing units for low income

CAIRO - 22 March 2020: The World Bank provided Egypt with a new financing package worth $500 million, with the aim to facilitate access to housing units at subsidized prices for low-income families.

The fund also targets to strengthen the capacity of the Social Housing Fund and support real estate finance in designing policies and coordinating programs in the social housing sector.

Minister of Housing, Utilities and Urban Communities, Assem El-Gazzar, said that this program supports related efforts to enhance the current housing programs for the benefit of Egyptian citizens with low incomes, as it will raise the efficiency of the housing sector as a whole, and ensure the design of programs according to the needs of Egyptians with limited incomes, as well as encouraging private sector participation in the field of social housing.

For her part, CEO of the Social Housing and Real Estate Finance Fund Mai Abdel Hamid said that there are more than 300,000 families that have benefited from the program in various governorates of Egypt since 2015, noting that the program gave priority to families, as 57 percent of the beneficiaries are married and have small children.

“On average, more than three quarters of the beneficiaries' families during the past five years were in the poorest segment of 40 percent on the scale of income distributions for families in Egypt, and the result of this effort has increased this percentage steadily from 68 percent in 2015 to 80 percent at the end of 2019,” she clarified.

She added that the additional financing, which amounts to $ 500 million, will increase the amount of the social housing fund and real estate finance support to $1.3 billion to support low-income people.