Entrepreneurship for Growth: Empowering Egypt’s Aspiring Businesses

Entrepreneurship is essential to Egypt’s economic growth, especially amid the current challenging global context. By starting their own businesses, entrepreneurs like Fatma can generate sustainable incomes for themselves and create more jobs within their communities, boosting incomes for more people. 

This project aims to support Egypt’s ongoing efforts to create more private sector jobs by promoting entrepreneurship and expanding access to finance for small and medium enterprises (MSMEs), as well as high growth firms and innovative start-ups. It builds on the success of its predecessor, the Promoting Innovation for Financial Inclusion project, which over its five-year life span helped create and maintain more than 290,000 jobs.

Farah Osman, 34, is a co-founder of Bluworks, an HR Tech company which benefitted from the project’s funding component that is dedicated to innovative start-ups.

Bluworks is a mobile-first HR platform that enables companies to streamline blue-collar workforce management, including scheduling, time tracking, bonuses and penalties, payroll and more. This platform also empowers workers with visibility over their pay, performance, and potential for growth.

“Our vision is to build an integrated platform that helps companies manage, incentivize and develop their blue-collar workers. We also aim to provide opportunities for growth and support services for the blue-collar workers themselves.” said Farah. “When raising funds for the company, we wanted to tap into leading local and regional institutions, and we are very fortunate to be able to do that in November of last year and the application process was very smooth,” she added.

Blueworks currently supports 15 companies — reaching 1,200 blue collar workers —in the food and beverage, retail and facility management industries. The company plans to expand to other sectors and regions, and to link workers to potential job opportunities.