After “Decent Life”..3 other Egyptian initiatives on UN SDG Good Practices

25 / 07 / 2021

By Marwa Nassar - -

Three Egyptian initiatives were listed on the SDG Good Practices platform of the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UN DESA) shortly after the inclusion of the presidential initiative Decent Life.

The Decent Life initiative was included on the platform for its outstanding commitment to the 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The initiative aims at developing Egyptian villages and changing the lives of about 58 percent of Egypt’s population.

The three initiatives included on the platform are Rowad 2030, the Upper Egypt Local Development Program (UELDP) and the Integrated System of Investment Plan Preparation and Monitoring (ISIPPM).

The three initiatives – which are implemented under Egypt Vision 2030 that copes with the SDGs – were listed on the platform for several reasons, mainly because each initiative serves several goals of the SDGs. Moreover, the three initiatives have managed to realize progress on the ground and have positively affected people’s lives.

The first initiative: Rowad 2030:

Rowad 2030 – launched under the umbrella of the Ministry of Planning & Economic development since 2017 – aims to build an integrated and inclusive entrepreneurial ecosystem that enables youths to establish their own businesses and projects. This will in turn help to consolidate the role of entrepreneurship in the development of the national economy through the implementation of the Project’s four pillars.

The four pillars are Education & Training, Entrepreneurship Awareness Campaigns, Business Incubators and Capacity Building for Government Officials.

Thus, Rowad 2030’s approach will assist in achieving SDG1, SDG4, SDG5, SDG8, SDG9, SDG10, SDG12 and SDG17.

The four pillars of Rowad 2030 will engage with several environmental and economic issues like the gender equality, eradication of poverty and economic growth, etc. They will also address the needed institutional change in the Egyptian governmental bodies and endorse an innovative-oriented approach.

How Rowad 2030 contributes to SDG implementation:

Rowad 2030’s four pillars will endorse SDG goal 4 of providing quality education through for example its collaboration with high ranked universities like Cambridge University.

Rowad 2030 also serves SDG goal 12 through launching awareness campaigns in schools and universities.

Moreover, Rowad 2030 practice of developing business incubators and supporting the students’ entrepreneurship projects generated from the education pillar, it can implement SDG goals 1, 8 and 9.

It will help in ending poverty, in promoting inclusive and sustainable economic growth, and employment and decent work.

Rowad 2030 launched its Master program of Entrepreneurship in collaboration with the University of Cambridge. It provided a fully funded professional certificate in Mastering Business Skills for Entrepreneurs in collaboration with the American University in Cairo (AUC).

It also provided a fully funded professional certificate in collaboration with the German University in Cairo (GUC).

Rowad 2030 project supervised the implementation of Fellowships and Masters’ programs in collaboration with King’s College London for Public Officials and Governmental Employees. These scholarships enriched the first and fourth pillar and enhanced the abilities of governmental employees through emphasizing knowledge and exchanging of expertise.

Rowad 2030 developed four main incubators that serve different sectors like the tourism incubator in collaboration with the Arab Academy for Science, Technology & Maritime Transport, the Micro factory, the first artificial intelligence incubators at Alexandria & Ain-Shams Universities, the first Egyptian-African online incubator.

Also, it established 5 generic incubators in different universities to support startups and projects that serve and develop the industrial sector.

Rowad 2030 launched “Rowad Meter” which acts as an entrepreneurship observatory that displays a continuous updated national database and quarterly reports for the latest work of all incubators in Egypt.

Rowad 2030 also launched multiple awareness campaigns in entrepreneurship which “Ebdaa Mustakbalak” is on top of them in coordination with different entities and ministries.

Rowad 2030 is funded by the National Bank of Egypt and Banque Misr. There is a monitoring and reporting committee for each activity across each pillar that is supervised by relevant corresponding field experts.

Rowad 2030 covered through its campaign of “Ebdaa Mustakbalak” to 27 governorates, 301440 school students, established 35 model classes,18 universities and trained around 1250 teachers and public mentors .

Rowad 2030 awareness sessions reached out to 4.5 million youths.

Rowad 2030 established 9 business incubators and created around 665 incubation opportunities.

It also created around 330 job opportunities and saved about EGP 231 million.

It also selected around 400 students and generated 55 innovative entrepreneurial project ideas.

Rowad’s pillars could foster the national economic growth and reduce inequality through raising additional financial resources from multiple source (SDG 17), achieving higher levels of economic productivity through employment, technological upgrading and innovation (SDG 8&12), and ensured quality education (SDG4).

Rowad 2030 is planning to address the poorest villages within Egypt. Also, because Rowad 2030’s reports showed the high interest of women in entrepreneurship field, it aims to support women in different governorates through carrying out online training sessions in entrepreneurship, discussion sessions and developing craft workshops.

The second initiative: ISIPPM:

The ISIPPM is a robust, secure, user-friendly, integrated and easily accessible national system for public investment plan preparation and monitoring. It is also a source of reliable information for the Ministry of Finance, the National Investment Bank and other decision-making agencies in Egypt.

The ISIPPM’s main aim is to raise the efficiency of services, maximize the return on investment, increase its effectiveness, and thus improve the lives of citizens.

The initiative serves Goal 16 on peace, justice and strong institutions and Goal 17 on strengthen the means of implementation and revitalize the global partnership for sustainable development.

The approach of the Ministry of Planning and Economic Development (MPED) for supporting the automation of the ISIPPM includes six key pillars.

The first pillar is “Ensuring Process Excellence” by reviewing all the public investment processes within the MPED and between the MPED and Ministry of Finance (MOF) to ensure that they are efficient and undergo regular improvement.

Technical expertise is being provided to continuously improve and enhance existing product information management (PIM) processes and workflows. Assistance has also been provided in documenting and drafting all existing processes.

The second pillar is “Enabling Automation Governance” which prescribes the monitoring, management, and re-architecting of systems under automation.

The third pillar is “Safeguarding Data Governance”, which includes management principles, access, and usage decision rights, and securing the data resources.

The fourth pillar is “Consolidating Automation Applications Governance” by choosing the appropriate programming language that is aligned to the requirements of the system.

The fifth pillar is “Supporting Technical Skills Development” given the importance of ensuring the sustainability of the ISIPPM development, the MPED has put together a highly experienced team of developers to work on the ISIPPM.

The sixth pillar is “Sustainable Deployment” by maintaining automated applications and documentation to keep applications operating efficiently.

The ISIPPM not only automated the system of plan preparation, implementation and monitoring, but as well it is a system where decision making about planning allocations is made automatically, through system imbedded selection criteria.

Key interventions were introduced via the ISIPPM to enhance the plan preparation; included a workshop which was held to identify the criteria that the MPED qualitative sectors consider when evaluating projects, the IT team working on ISIPPM developed a dashboard that was tailored to create needed analytics, and a new automated M&E module was developed.

The MPED, using equipped tablets, initiated field visits to confirm and revise the data about the progress. The field M&E system is directly linked with the database of public investment projects.

The MPED worked on supporting governmental employees (800 civil servants) through training on the new electronic system.

The MPED is currently providing trainings on “Planning Concepts” for districts & directorates.

How ISIPPM served sustainability:

The initiative equipped the MPED IT department with up to date coding software and high-end computers with enhanced features to enable them to perform their jobs efficiently, in addition to the needed trainings.

It also provides full documentation of existing process flows, databases, coding language in addition to user friendly manuals and online explanatory videos to guide new and old users throughout the system.

Under the initiative, the MPED conducted ToT training for young employees to act as the ISIPPM ambassadors and train all Government of Egypt (GoE) entities on the new system.

The third initiative: the Upper Egypt Local Development Program ( UELDP):

The UELDP – which was launched in 2016 under Egypt Vision 2030 for realizing sustainable development – was instrumental in the GoE’s efforts to reduce disparities and localize sustainable development. Implementation required inter-ministerial collaboration; whereas, the international partnerships built secured funding and developed operational mechanisms.

Local Governments empowerment enhanced matching community needs and boosted water, sanitation, connectivity, industrialization, local economic development, employment generation and waste management services.

The UELDP inspired national policy actions to reduce disparities and mobilized resources for the development of more than 1,500 villages across Egypt.

The initiative served the UN Sustainable Development Goals; Goal 1 on No Poverty, Goal 3 on Good Health and Well-Being, SDG 5 on Gender equality, SDG 6 on Clean Water and Sanitation, SDG 7 on Affordable and Clean Energy, SDG 8 on Decent Work and Economic Growth, SDG 9 on Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure, SDG 10 on Reduced Inequalities and SDG 17 on Partnerships for the Goals.

How UELDP contributed to SDGs:

Under the guidance of the Inter-Ministerial Steering Committee, the UELDP enhanced Local economic development and service delivery by expanding Local Governments’ mandates.

It established Local Implementation Units (LIU) in each Governorate to facilitate participatory investment planning and implementation of Annual Investment Plans.

Disbursement-Linked indicators were jointly developed by GoE and the World Bank to sharpen the focus of monitoring and encourage results-based management at local level. Through four planning cycles, more than 3,700 projects were implemented and changed peoples’ lives.

The UELDP introduced – in collaboration with the MPED – a formula-based allocation system for public capital expenditure.

The formula was the fruit of joint efforts of the Ministries of Finance, Local Development, and MPED. It accounted for population, urbanization level, and poverty-levels to determine governorates budget allocation.

Egypt has been working hard to achieve the sustainable development goals. Decent Life was the first major step in this regard as it cherished the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals. The three other initiatives – Rowad 2030, the ISIPPM and the UELDP – sought to serve several SDGs and this was the main reason behind their listing on the UN’s SDG Good Practices platform.