Egypt's EFG Hermes expands Saudi education fund toward nurseries

The headline number does not quite capture what is happening here. EFG Hermes, the investment banking arm of Egypt's EFG Holding, has begun moving to inject more than 150 million dollars into Saudi Arabia's education sector over the next two years. That figure is not the size of the commitment but the size of what is still to come, because the money sits inside a Saudi Education Fund that has already put 125 million dollars into six schools in the Kingdom. Karim Moussa, group co-chief executive, said the fund has raised 250 million dollars of a planned 300 million target. The remaining deployment is where the next phase of the strategy plays out, and it points toward expanding the Hayat schools brand, acquiring two further schools, and moving into the nursery segment where demand is climbing quickly. The fund itself launched in November 2024 with a stated ambition to build an institutional K-12 operator inside Saudi Arabia rather than simply take passive stakes in existing schools. Its inaugural move was an agreement with GFH Financial Group to acquire the Britus Education portfolio, seven international schools spread across Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Bahrain with combined capacity for roughly 12,000 students and around 8,000 enrolled at the time. Since then the fund has assembled six assets in the Kingdom with total capacity near 14,000 students, three of them new launches, and the portfolio includes recognizable names such as GEMS American International School Riyadh alongside Hayat International Academy, the international baccalaureate brand that EFG Hermes built in Egypt and is now importing. The firm has also stood up a central operating team of about thirty staff based inside Saudi Arabia, which is a meaningful signal that this is being run as an operating business rather than a portfolio held from Cairo. The commercial logic rests on a demographic bet that is fairly hard to argue with. Private K-12 enrolment in Saudi Arabia is expected to more than double by 2030 in line with Vision 2030 targets, and the market has historically lacked large professionalized operators capable of absorbing that growth. Moussa has described a dual strategy borrowed directly from the Egyptian playbook, acquiring established brands with room to scale nationally and separately buying schools that need operational repair and improving them. The fund is targeting internal rates of return above 25 percent over a five to ten year horizon, with stated priorities around STEM education, digital literacy and teacher training. Moussa has also said the size of the Saudi market calls for considerably more than 300 million dollars and that scaling the fund is quite possible, which suggests the current target is a floor rather than a ceiling. Worth noting alongside the education push, EFG Hermes is expanding its wholly owned Vortex Energy arm into Poland, Romania and Bulgaria through its company Eginis, targeting energy demand from data centers. Two very different sectors, but the same underlying view that infrastructure serving structural demand growth is where the returns sit. Regionally, this fits a broader pattern of Egyptian and Gulf capital converging on the same asset class. EFG Hermes has been unusually active on the advisory side of Middle East education deals as well as the principal side, having advised Maarif Education on its acquisition of Ibn Khaldoun Education Company, executed a 66.9 million dollar accelerated bookbuild on Taaleem Education and run the 514.6 million dollar Alef Education listing on the Abu Dhabi exchange. Its Egyptian platform, Egypt Education Platform, launched in 2019 off a 150 million dollar fund raised in partnership with GEMS Education, now spans 25 assets across five brands including Trillium and Petals nurseries and the Selah El Telmeez content business, generating around 4 billion Egyptian pounds in revenue and growing at roughly 40 percent year on year. In February 2026 it moved into higher education through an alliance with Talaat Moustafa Group to build a private university in Noor City. Competitors in the Saudi and Gulf private schooling market include GEMS itself, Maarif, Taaleem and the various GFH backed vehicles, and the sector is consolidating fast as families with rising incomes and increasing female workforce participation drive demand for both nurseries and full curriculum schools. Regulatory liberalization permitting full foreign ownership of schools in the Kingdom has made this kind of cross border deployment considerably easier than it would have been a decade ago.