Visiting the Giza pyramids isn’t an easy trek. Before you get to enjoy the splendor of the ancient world, you must first traverse the governorate’s crowded streets, aggressive touts, polluted dike and ubiquitous piles of garbage. But imagine if you could take an idyllic boat ride on the Nile River instead, turning the onerous journey into one of quiet solitude on the water.

And that’s exactly what engineer and tourism consultant Amr Gawdat hopes to achieve thanks to a new initiative designed to help entrepreneurs and creative minds give back to Egypt in the wake of the revolution.

Amr Gawdat had this idea for years, but unfortunately under the previous regime it never saw the light of day. The idea is to clean and widen the Al-Mansouria Canal, which connects El-Bahr El-Aazam Street to El-Haram Street, as well as add a 300 meter waterway to the pyramids and it will cost $50 million (LE 298.55 million).

But with the help of a Bank El-Afkar, an innovation bank that collects and brokers deals for development projects, his idea is in the final stages of implementation.

The bank is the brain child of innovator Mahmud Emara. Because the country’s government is still in transition and struggling under funding pressures, there is less government funding for projects and initiatives. Private investors are also leery of spending big bucks, due in part to the market instability. Seeing an opportunity to promote homegrown talent, Emara helped form the innovation cabinet under the bank’s auspices.

“These coming months are almost dead ,and no one will invest in Egypt, so the bank team is collecting all the good ideas with all their studies and will make them ready for implementation so when the next government comes we will be ready and start automatically or even start what we can now with investors’ help,” says Emara.

Its role is to evaluate ideas submitted by Egyptians on the innovate.cabinet.gov.eg/IBS website. Before being accepted, proposed projects must meet several requirements, including readiness for testing and implementation as well as proven benefits to the country. Afterward, Bank El-Afkar will conduct further studies, if necessary, to help obtain governmental approval and, most importantly, find investors to finance the projects as well as broker deals. So far, the idea has been an unfettered success: The bank began receiving ideas in April 2011 and now has 2,000 submissions.

Getting approval
The concept of innovation banks was first discussed in 1987 at a conference in Paris at the behest of Ahmed Lotfy, Egypt’s prime minister at the time.

“Many people have tried to push this idea through, but under the previous regime no one listened. Many youth and Egyptians in general have lots of ideas to develop Egypt but yet nothing happened,” he says.

Emara, who also works for the cabinet, has a Master’s in political science from l’Université Paris-Sorbonne and spent 25 years in France where he built companies. Upon his return to Egypt, he began looking for ways to give back to his home country.

Last February, Emara contacted Prime Minister Essam Sharaf and discussed the idea of the bank. He says the prime minister immediately approved of his program and has been one of the bank’s greatest supporters since. More than a year later, the government is supervising and coordinating efforts with Bank El-Afkar to take the best and brightest ideas to fruition.

Several of the ideas are in final discussions, including Fawzy Hammad’s proposed project to further develop the marina in Suez. An engineer with 18 years of experience working at the Suez Canal, Hammad took his plan to commercialize the marina with repair shops, food outlets and other value-added ship services to the bank because he needed help managing such an undertaking. His hope is that by mimicking other international ports, he can help Suez generate more income and improve the canal’s shipping services.

Now, the Suez Canal has nearly the worst canal facilities in the world, yet it’s an international canal that many ships have to travel through. Many have started to go back to the old Ras El-Ragaa El-Saleh route because it is not safe to travel though a canal without any facilities, Hammad and Emara explained to Amr Addeb on El-Qahera El-Youm.

Ships also require mazut — a heavy, low-quality fuel — which is not sold at the canal. Hammad would like to see the canal launch this service because each ton costs an average of $500 (LE 2,985) and ships require about 1,000 tons of mazut. Selling fuel could dramatically boost profits, which Hammad estimates would be worth as much as $3 billion (LE 17.91 billion) annually.

The initiative is slated to double the canal’s profits in the first two years from $4 billion to $8 billion (LE 23.88 billion to LE 47.76 billion) and then continue to double every three years, reaching a whopping $30 billion (LE 179.09 billion) nine years later.

And the ideas don’t stop there. Canadian-Egyptian Ayman Raoof is working on a desalination plan that would turn 2 billion cubic meters of seawater into fresh water for agriculture irrigation at a cost of LE 0.50 per cubic meter of salt water and LE 0.20 per kilowatt in electricity.

Raoof’s project is timely with Nile Basin water talks currently stalled. Because Ethiopia is working to build a series of dams, Egypt may have to find other sources of water with less flow from the Nile. The government is interested in this kind of project after seeing similar programs launched in the Gulf, says Bayoumi Attia, a consultant to the minister of water resources and irrigation.

Engineer Yasser Hellal’s innovation bank idea also involves agriculture. He is looking to purchase 60,000 feddans of farm land near Sudan’s capital Khartoum. Located between the Blue and White Nile Rivers, the land is renowned for its fertile soil. He hopes the innovation bank can help him create an holding company, with individuals buying shares worth LE 100 each, that will oversee production of 2 million tons of yellow corn and decrease the amount Egypt imports annually. (Egypt imports an estimated five million tons every year.)

The wealth of ideas springing out of Egyptian minds is proof that this type of service, which is popular in countries like India and China, will eventually benefit the nation. But without a middleman to get the ideas to the right people, they stand a chance of languishing or never seeing the light of day, adds Emara. And that’s where Bank El-Afkar comes in.

“I have discovered that the problem in Egypt is not that there is [not any] innovative ideas, but it’s with the law, regulations and procedures governing and regulating the process, so I make direct contacts to the people responsible to help with this paperwork too.” bt