(Ecofin Agency) - On April 23, 2019, Amr Talaat (photo), Egypt’s minister of IT and communications, received a delegation of the World Bank and the IFC.

Led by the World Bank’s coordinator of the MENA region Carlo Rossotto, the delegation discussed various strategies to boost the broadband penetration rate in Egypt.  

Currently, 3G and 4G technologies are the most used. Recently, Egypt made huge investments in the mobile and fixed broadband. Consequently, the number of mobile internet subscribers is gradually increasing. At the end of Q4, 2018, this number grew from 32.79 million (in Q4, 2017) to 35.06 million. 

During that same period, the number of USB modem users decreased from 3.26 million users in Q4, 2017 to 3.21 million in Q4, 2018.  

For the fixed segment, optical fibre is gradually replacing copper wire networks.

The meeting of April 23, 2019, falls within the framework of the ongoing collaboration between the World Bank and the IT and communications ministry. This collaboration is namely for the upgrading to Egypt’s broadband strategy, the elaboration of an economic model that should help identify the main sectors to increase the contribution of the IT sector to growth.

World Bank also organized a workshop to present success stories and the investment models (which contributed to transformation via the digital) in the communications sector to Egyptian officials.