Egypt launches $10 million Tamkeen 3 programme for micro firms

Published: 2026-07-10T11:06:15.000Z

Egypt has signed off on another tranche of cheap money for its smallest businesses, and the conditions attached tell you exactly what the state is after. MSMEDA has agreed a 500 million Egyptian pound facility with Banque Misr, worth roughly 10 million dollars.

Egypt has signed off on another tranche of cheap money for its smallest businesses, and the conditions attached tell you exactly what the state is really after. The Micro, Small and Medium Enterprise Development Agency, known as MSMEDA, has agreed a 500 million Egyptian pound facility with Banque Misr under the banner of Tamkeen for Microfinance 3, worth roughly 10 million dollars. The agency supplies the funding and the bank re-lends it to micro-entrepreneurs for working capital and equipment, with around 2,500 enterprises expected to benefit. The catch, or perhaps the point, is that the money is aimed at existing micro-enterprises that obtain a tax card after the signing date. In other words, this is not simply a credit line. It is a lever for pulling businesses out of Egypt's vast informal economy and into the official one, part of a Ministry of Finance initiative that lets newly registered firms tap the incentives in the MSME Development Law of 2020 and the simplified tax regime introduced under Law 6 of 2025. Bassel Rahmy, who runs MSMEDA, framed the agreement in terms of self-employment and reducing unemployment, and noted the agency is working with parliament on amendments that would update how enterprises are classified and raise the turnover thresholds that define them. The program has a lineage. Banque Misr's deputy chief executive Hossam El-Din Abdel Wahab pointed to Tamkeen 1, launched in 2021 with 500 million pounds, and Tamkeen 2 in 2024 at 300 million, describing the new deal as a continuation of a partnership the bank sees as central to its developmental role. What is striking is how much wider MSMEDA has cast its net, having signed a separate 300 million pound arrangement in May with Tamkeen Microfinance, the Al Ahly Capital arm, targeting a further 3,000 projects. The strategy is to work through banks and licensed microfinance companies rather than lending directly, using their branch networks to reach governorates the state cannot easily service itself. The regional context sharpens the stakes considerably. Egypt's informal sector accounts for a huge share of economic activity, and successive currency devaluations and stubborn inflation have made formalization both more urgent for the treasury and harder for the businesses being asked to comply. Egypt is also chasing the same goal its Gulf partners pursue with far deeper pockets, since Saudi Arabia's Monsha'at and the UAE's SME agencies channel money towards small firms as a matter of diversification rather than survival. What Egypt lacks in capital it is trying to compensate for with regulatory carrots, betting that tax simplification and cheap credit together will finally persuade its informal entrepreneurs that the formal economy is worth joining.