Dr. Noha Yahya
Assistant Professor in Economics
Faculty of Business, Ain Shams University

Release of “Sustainable Development Strategy: Egypt’s vision 2030” in 2016 followed by the dissemination of the “National Strategy for Egyptian Women 2030” in 2017 has attached greater importance to the social and economic empowerment of women as a strategic target in Egypt.

For this, Egyptian Women entrepreneurs began to gain recognition as they are witnessing slow but steady progress whereby self-employment boosted from 12% in 2018 to reach 18% in 2023, also, according to the MSMEDA, in 2023 around 35% of women entrepreneurs were provided with access to adequate mentorship and support programs. Besides, according to the Global Gender Gap Report 2024, 5.53% of firms were ruled by women and 6.3% of firms were with female top managers. According to the World Bank’s Findex 2021, 23% of women in Egypt were having financial institution accounts. Besides, almost 50% of researchers were women in 2023. Also, women share on boards in the non-banking financial sector recorded 22% in 2022 after which came the Egyptian Exchange with a 17.3% share followed by the banking sector with 16.5%.

Despite the progress achieved and improvement in women’s legal access to employment as ministerial decree no. 34 of 2021 and articles 5 and 53 in the new labour law no. 14 of 2025, challenges still exist. Challenges appear mainly in disparities in earnings among gender especially in the private sector, limited network access for women in rural areas, deficiency in awareness about mobile-based financial tools, lack of women credit information and history, work-family conflict, limited ICT-enabling technologies, constrained training especially on highly-skilled jobs and social-cultural commitments.

A recent report published by OECD in 2026 concerning ‘Women’s Economic Empowerment in Egypt’ offered estimations and argued that expanding female labor force participation and removing barriers would result in progress in welfare by 25%. Furthermore, equalizing labor force participation would raise GDP by 60%.

In Conclusion, Egypt witnessing gradual progress towards reinforcing a broader inclusive and equitable society through amending legislations, reforming laws, establishment of Gender and Non-Discrimination Unit in 2019 by the ministry of labor, number of governments initiatives, improvement in literacy records generally and educational attainment specifically.

As a concluding recommendation, it is beneficial to complement the establishing national strategies with multi-faceted approach by expanding women entrepreneurship training in rural areas aligning with women needs, providing subsidies as incentives to promote women participation in international exhibitions, developing e-commerce platforms targeted for women entrepreneurs, providing Arabic financial literacy mobile applications, launching gender-sensitive policies, reducing collateral requirements, widening the scope of partnerships between concerned ministries with women and private sector, and monitoring the proper implementation of the new Labour Law No.14 of 2025 concerning removing barriers that hinders women from entering high-quality jobs. As a final point, empowering women entrepreneurship is a pathway and key driver for innovation, economic growth and sustainable development.