Safe, inclusive, low-cost, transparent, traceable, and innovation-enabling. That sums up the advantages of cryptocurrencies, pioneered by Bitcoin. Their downside is volatility. Data aggregator Trading Economics shows Bitcoin’s exchange rate versus the dollar jumped 55% between November and December, and almost 50% between April 8 and May 22. Between July 2024 and July 2025, Bitcoin’s value doubled. Enter stablecoins, a type of cryptocurrency whose value is pegged to real-world currency, commodities, or financial instruments,” according to Investopedia, an investment platform. Therefore, their value fluctuations are more predictable and less extreme than other cryptocurrencies. Stablecoins are gaining popularity in MENA. According to…
Author: Tamer Hafez
For U.S. President Donald Trump, the GCC (Gulf Cooperation Council) countries are crucial to America’s economy and FDI. In his first term (2016 to 2020), Trump’s first trip abroad was to Saudi Arabia. In his second term, he added visits to the UAE and Qatar. According to a May press release from the White House, Trump’s 2025 GCC trip resulted in the signing of “investment agreements” worth more than $2 trillion for projects in the United States, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar. Turning those agreements into active projects requires all four nations to remain in good economic health. The…
Oil prices reached an inflection point June 1, shooting up 25% in 20 days (as of press time), driven by increasing geopolitical volatility across the MENA region. That complicates Egypt’s problem of rising energy costs, given it is a net importer of oil and natural gas and subsidizes them for individuals and industries. The straightforward response is to increase local oil and gas excavation and production. “Egypt seeks to attract more investments in the oil and gas sector by offering 61 new investment opportunities for research, exploration, and production,” Egypt Oil & Gas Group, a media company owned by the…
Artificial intelligence (AI) has been a global buzzword since 2022 when OpenAI introduced ChatGPT, an AI-powered Chatbot that parses the internet to respond to queries in natural language. The technology sparked an AI development arms race. “Meta [Facebook’s owner], Amazon, Alphabet (Google), and Microsoft intend to spend as much as a combined $320 billion on AI technologies and data center buildouts in 2025,” media outlets reported in February. Meanwhile, Stanford’s 2025 AI Index Report estimated, “The number of newly funded generative AI startups nearly tripled … in 2024. AI has moved from the margins to become a central driver of business value.”…
Nearly six months into U.S. President Donald Trump’s second term (2025 to 2028), the dollar’s status as the global currency for payments, reserves, and storing value is increasingly precarious. “The Trump administration’s economic policies bring into question the U.S. role as the central pillar of the global monetary system [and] its ‘exorbitant privilege’ of effectively being able to run indefinite trade deficits,” said an April paper from The Australian National University. What Trump and his administration intend for the dollar to achieve until 2028 is risky. Policies indicate the greenback needs to attract FDI to reduce trade deficits, retain its…
Healthy citizens, a resilient economy, and sustainable GDP growth rates have always been interlinked. “There’s a well-understood correlation that as the economy of a country improves, so the health of its citizens improves,” Francis Collins, director of the U.S. National Institute of Health, wrote on the World Economic Forum website. “What may be less obvious is that … improving the health of a nation’s citizens can directly result in economic growth because there will be more people able to conduct effective activities in the workforce.” Investors see potential in Egypt’s medical sector. According to Mohamed Haroun, Africa’s general manager for…
As most business leaders can attest, standing out in today’s marketplace is exceedingly complicated. Challenges include brands expanding product variety or selling innovative alternatives, noisier physical and virtual advertising spaces, and more customers pushing the “skip” or “close” button on pop-up ads. “The reality is we aren’t just in a race to get our products to market; we’re also in a race to communicate why our customers need those products in their lives,” Donald Miller stresses in his book “Building a Story Brand.” Getting communication wrong could be worse than offering products that aren’t competitive. “Even if we have the…
Egypt’s school education investment potential has always been massive. A June 2024 UNICEF paper said the country’s “student age population” in 2025 was 32.5 million. If they were a country, it would be the sixth-largest among MENA’s 19 nations. Meeting the academic and vocational demands of such a large market has proved difficult. “The quality of education [in Egypt] remains a major challenge,” said UNICEF. “Many schools have poor infrastructure, with around one in five school buildings unfit for use … More than half of the students in Egypt do not even meet the low benchmark in international learning assessments.” …
For Egypt, transitioning from fossil fuels to clean, sustainable, renewable energy goes beyond protecting the environment or keeping up with investment trends. “Green energy is about energy security,” Ossama Bishay, Orascom Construction CEO, told AmCham Egypt’s April Investment Conference. “We don’t have fossil fuel self-sufficiency,” and continuing to import is unsustainable. “Our main energy source needs to be renewables,” stressed Beshay, noting that Egypt has the natural resources for that transition. “Our wind energy is generated from one of the most efficient locations (the Red Sea coast), and we have the clearest sun rays in the world in the south.” …
Despite a depreciating pound, double-digit inflation, and regional tensions, foreign investors continue to pour billions into mega greenfield projects in Egypt in response to the government’s accelerated plans to build new coastal cities. The latest investment was last year when the U.A.E. pumped $35 billion into the construction of Ras El-Hekma on the Mediterranean coast, igniting the push for more new destinations. At AmCham Egypt’s Investment Conference in April, government and private sector speakers from the real estate industry discussed the opportunities, challenges, and role of the private sector and Egyptian developers in building attractive new cities. Government plan According…