At Consoleya, a coworking space in Cairo’s former French Consulate, multiple levels of meeting rooms and workspaces operate at capacity, from a ground-floor café to a rooftop deck. The scene—coders bent over laptops, concepts scrawled on whiteboards, clusters of people in deep discussion—is no different in this sprawling city of 20 million than it is in Silicon Valley or any other entrepreneurial hot spot. Yet, 10 or 11 years ago, incubators and accelerators were only emerging concepts in Egypt. An Arabic word for entrepreneur didn’t exist, even if the spirit of making something from nothing had long been part of the cultural mindset.

Today’s startup scene in Egypt is hopping. Venture capital funding reached $491 million in 2021, with a compounded annual growth rate of 117 percent between 2017 and 2021, according to Magnitt. A quick demographic check explains this activity: Egypt’s population is approaching 110 million, the highest in the MENA region, with about half of its citizens between the ages of 15 and 45 and the range of mobile-phone penetration well over 90 percent. The market to meet a host of consumer needs is wide open and still developing across the e-commerce, health care, transportation, edtech, and fintech sectors.

Ayman Ismail, assistant professor of entrepreneurship and founding director of the American University in Cairo’s (AUC) Venture Lab, pegs the earliest movements of Egypt’s venture capital scene to about 15 years ago, with a $50 million government-backed fund that saw one of the country’s first exits in 2011—an ISP called Link.net. That was one of an accumulation of tipping points, notes Ismail. “In 2012, 2013, we started getting the first attempts at incubators, accelerators, angel investors, and venture capital funds.”

A few years later, he adds, big acquisitions and IPOs started happening in the MENA region, catalyzing a virtuous cycle of entrepreneurial activity and investment: Amazon acquired Souq for $580 million in 2017 and Uber purchased Careem for $3.1 billion in 2019. Egyptian digital payments company Fawry’s IPO was oversubscribed by 30 times, generating $100 million. Significantly, a cultural shift occurred after the 2011 revolution when, suddenly, anything seemed possible.

Amal Enan (MBA 2014) witnessed these transformations firsthand, from roles in the private, nonprofit, and public sectors. In November 2022, Enan joined venture capital firm 500 Global as partner in its newly opened offices in a renovated factory near Cairo University. Founded in Silicon Valley in 2010, with $2.8 billion in assets under management, 500 Global had already invested in 60 Egyptian startups when Enan joined. The firm operates in the spirit of “founders first” says Enan, a mantra that maps well with her own priorities. “I don’t think I have any secret sauce when it comes to investing,” she says frankly. “I’ve made bad investments. I’ve made good investments. But first and foremost, it’s important to treat a founder with respect and kindness, to instill dignity and confidence. It’s not just writing a check. And as much as people say ‘Don’t take it personally,’ of course it’s personal. There’s so much at stake. For a founder, this is it: This is their life.”

It’s personal for Enan as well. After HBS, she moved to New York City to work for the Egyptian-American Enterprise Fund (EAEF), a $300 million investment initiative focused on strengthening Egypt’s private sector. On a trip to Cairo to renew her work visa, she met entrepreneur Tayssir Hawary; they were married in 2017 but continued to live apart, a situation both understood wasn’t sustainable. Should they build their life in the United States or Egypt?

Meditation is one of Enan’s morning habits; another is free writing in her journal. At the time, she wrote a lot about her doubts and questions concerning a return to Egypt. “It felt like the opportunities for career growth were more available in New York,” Enan recalls. “And the other trade-off was around quality of life. I loved going to the theater with friends, taking improv and writing classes. You can get whatever you want in New York. And my mom lives in Washington, DC, so being close to her was another factor.”

Still, after more reflection, Enan realized that the conveniences she enjoyed in the States were also the reason she wanted to leave. She was getting too comfortable. “I thought I cared about things I didn’t actually care about,” Enan explains. “I wanted to be closer to the work the Enterprise Fund was doing on the ground and to see what else I could do in Egypt—and that was too difficult to judge from the United States.” In September 2018, she returned to Cairo.

Enan grew up with her parents and sister in the Osman Towers, a block of apartments overlooking the Nile River. She graduated from Cairo University in 2006 with a degree in economics, followed by a master’s in environment and development at the London School of Economics. After stints as a researcher and analyst at investment bank EFG Hermes and the International Finance Corporation, she was recommended for a role at Egypt’s Ministry of Finance in 2010, working in the Macro Fiscal Policy Unit with a focus on energy subsidies and state debt. Enan, then 24 years old, leapt at the chance to work for Youssef Boutros-Ghali, an MIT-educated economist and advocate for trade liberalization who worked to reform Egypt’s social security and pension systems, among other innovations.

Six months after Enan joined the ministry, in early 2011, the Arab Spring swept through Cairo. Many of her friends from Cairo University were activists. “When they told me there was a sit-in on January 25, honestly, I didn’t believe it was going to be a thing,” she recalls. Enan also wanted to see change but was working to enact it from within the government. While out for dinner, she and a friend were informed they had to leave immediately due to a 5 p.m. curfew. The next day, and every day after that, Enan joined millions of fellow Egyptians in Tahrir Square. On February 11, after 30 years in office, then-president Hosni Mubarak announced he would step down.

It was an exciting, if unsettled, time. “Transition is very hard,” Enan says. “Now we know.” Over the next 18 months, she worked under three ministers of finance, sometimes sleeping at the office when protesters demanding reparations for martyrs of the revolution made it impossible to go home. That was when she decided to apply to HBS.

“I was young and had more options,” Enan acknowledges. “It was harder on people with families and responsibilities.” Looking back, she says she’s grateful for the ministry’s supportive culture. “We were all focused and intellectually driven to address the areas that were our responsibility,” she recalls, “but everyone also was very collaborative.” The deputy minister to whom Enan reported was a constant, providing the “courage shield,” she says, for whatever was happening at the time. “When I think about what makes a strong team, I think about that experience,” she says. “No one ever spoke about culture; it was embedded. We were in it together.”

That interest in the very human aspect of how work gets done is more than clinical. When asked, anyone who has worked closely with Enan mentions her strong sense of empathy and skills as a communicator and connector. When James Harmon, chairman of the Egyptian-American Enterprise Fund, hired her as the organization’s first employee, the US Congress had not yet delivered on the entirety of its $300 million funding promise. Negotiating with officials from the Egyptian and US governments, each with their own priorities, was a time-consuming challenge for Enan, he recalls.

“It was a real exercise in navigating various congressional committees and the general power structure in Washington,” Harmon says. “Enan’s ability to relate to people and explain opportunities in Egypt to members of Congress who hadn’t spent much—if any—time there, was exactly what we needed to move forward.”

Asked for her own take on that experience, Enan uses an unexpected word: fun. When she joined the EAEF, Congress had received two of five $60 million tranches, and the clock was ticking. If congressional approval wasn’t secured by September 30, the remaining $180 million would disappear, giving Harmon and Enan just weeks to change more than a few hearts and minds. (Arguments used for denying and delaying the remaining funding often centered around the Egyptian government’s lack of stability and what some saw as the EAEF’s slow pace of investment.)

“I started to make friends with staffers on the Hill,” Enan recalls. “I think they liked hearing how passionately I believed in the investment opportunities—what it meant to Egypt and to me personally. Eventually, it became more about camaraderie and solidarity. They were in our camp.” When the funding approval finally came through, Enan says the staffers were “ecstatic, over the moon. It was a joint achievement, not us vs. them. I learned the importance of getting buy-in from people and that it’s not a matter of who gets credit. Jim Harmon always told me, ‘Success has many mothers.’ ”

Working in the ministry and understanding the bureaucratic hurdles facing entrepreneurs primed Enan for a career in venture capital. So did her experience at the EAEF, which invested in early ventures that are now household names, like Fawry, cofounded by Magda Habib. “I’d always heard about Magda and how she was an execution machine,” says Enan. Still living in the States at the time, Enan asked Habib out for coffee whenever she came back to Cairo. Habib was consulting after exiting Fawry—a vocation Enan doubted was a good fit. She continued to check in with her. “Magda kept joking, saying, ‘What is it? What do you want?’ ” Enan recalls. “Until one day, she said, ‘Well, since you’re always asking, I just met two cofounders, and we’re going to start the Starbucks of health clinics in Egypt.’ ” Enan was interested; in Egypt, about 5 percent of the population has private health insurance, mostly as a corporate benefit. While the government introduced universal coverage in 2018, implementation has been slow. Dawi aims to meet primary care needs for Egypt’s highly fragmented middle market. When Habib started fundraising seriously, Enan urged her to reach out to the EAEF.

“Amal was really instrumental in closing that deal,” explains Habib, now CEO of Dawi, “and it was a milestone, because the EAEF was Dawi’s first institutional investor and helped us grow from 4 clinics to 16 today.” Enan also helped lead the EAEF’s investment in Egyptian accelerator Flat6Labs and its anchor investment in Algebra Ventures’ first fund. From there, it was an easy transition to a role as managing partner at Global Ventures, doing all the things hard-driving VCs do—like making presentations from a hospital bed. In March 2021, Enan traveled to New York for open heart surgery to repair a mitral valve prolapse. The recovery that followed offered time for reflection. A few months later, on vacation with her husband, Enan sat on the beach in Zanzibar and wrote the plan for what would become Lotus, a fund focused on gender lens investing and sustainability. Not long after, she left Global Ventures, citing a misalignment of values with a male partner who has since left.

“It wasn’t that they were wrong and I was right,” Enan says. “I just wanted to do something different.” She had also been told she was too confident, too ambitious. Why was this a problem?

“Women are well represented in the banking and government sectors in Egypt,” says Enan. But there are still gaps, which is why the decision to pivot Lotus to a support network for women entrepreneurs was easy to make. In partnership with local sponsors, Lotus hosts monthly breakfasts for investors and female founders—a time of day more compatible with family schedules than the typical evening and weekend offerings. It has also organized a volunteer group of investors, mentors, and advisors for weekly “office hours” to review pitch decks and offer workshops on recruiting, negotiating, and presenting, among other skills.

“When Amal told me what she was working on to support female entrepreneurs, I saw it as something that’s really needed,” says Farah Emara, cofounder and CEO of B2B agritech platform FreshSource Global. When she was fundraising in 2018, Emara says she often encountered male VCs who suggested she didn’t have the right skill set to lead a logistics- and operations-heavy business. One advised Emara to switch roles with her male COO cofounder, at least while she was fundraising. “There were a lot of issues on the investor side, and, honestly, they persist today,” she says.

The collaborative, big-picture approach behind Lotus also comes through in Enan’s investment style. “Amal doesn’t look at an opportunity as just 1 + 1 = 2,” says Ahmad Hammouda, cofounder and CEO of Thndr, a Y Combinator–backed investment platform launched at the end of 2019. “It has to be the team, the idea, the market, and above all, the impact; as an investor, she always drove us to make sure we looked beyond the financial objectives of the business.”

Thndr seeks to democratize access to financial markets for all, including women. In 2021, realizing the number of female investors was hovering around 5 percent, Thndr’s marketing team launched a campaign highlighting users like Marwa Helali, a single mother from Port Said investing for her 16-year-old son’s education. The number of women using the Thndr app has more than doubled since then, says Hammouda—a good result even if there’s more work to be done.

He also notes that Thndr’s valuation was 5.7 times higher in the round following Enan’s investment (one made as managing director at Global Ventures), demonstrating that impact and profit aren’t mutually exclusive. “I want founders and entrepreneurs to be wealth creators and invest in their communities and families,” Enan says. “And I also want to have wealth and choices and independence for myself. I’m cautious when investing because we need to build sustainable businesses and create a competitive track record for the country, if we’re going to improve opportunities for the next generation.”

Targeted efforts like Lotus and broader government initiatives to support the private sector are doing their part to accelerate startup activity for founders across the board. Many also believe the 2011 revolution was an additional catalyst. Business, they maintain, is the outlet by which creativity can currently find its fullest expression and support at a time when journalism and the arts are given more scrutiny.

Before the revolution, you might aspire to a government post or a job with a multinational, observes Nada Shousha, a senior advisor at the IFC and EAEF vice chairwoman. After, the more prevalent mindset was “I’ll just go do it,” the “it” being a new venture addressing any of a host of gaps in the marketplace. At a panel in 2016, Shousha remembers bankers droning on about opening bricks-and-mortar retail branches—when only about 10 percent of Egyptians had bank accounts. She left her talking points and went on a tear: “I said, guys, if you don’t move now, the fintechs will take you over.” The bankers complained about the difficulty of gaining customers in rural markets with high rates of illiteracy. “I told them those potential customers knew how to use a smartphone better than we do,” Shousha says.

The announcement that Enan would lead 500 Global’s first office on the African continent came in tandem with news the firm would partner with the IT Industry Development Agency over the course of three years to offer startup boot camps for seed-stage companies, a scaling initiative for ventures at the pre-series A stage, and training for individuals managing other accelerators. The effort is a continuation of the government’s investment of 5 billion Egyptian pounds in creating a strong startup ecosystem that includes education programs at six Creativa Innovation Hubs located throughout Egypt.

The week before starting at 500 Global, Enan was still recovering from two intensive weeks at COP27, the UN Climate Change Conference held last year in Sharm El-Sheikh. As a host-country representative for the World Resources Institute, she helped move the ball forward on a range of climate change initiatives, including loss and damage—the idea that the harmful consequences of climate change fall disproportionately on poor nations that have done little to contribute to it. Agreement on a fund to mitigate the disastrous effects of climate damage in poorer nations was seen as a surprising breakthrough, even if the details of how to implement such a plan are still to be determined.

Home for just a day or two, Enan meets with the AUC’s president in her role as chief investment officer to prep for an evening meeting with the university’s investment committee. Sitting outside on a sunny patio, engulfed by the din of surrounding students, she describes the personal nature of the work and the effort to bring more of a sustainability lens to investments in AUC’s endowment. “Education changed the course of my life—it’s something my mother fought dearly for, and my mission is to remove affordability as a consideration for current and future students,” she says. “The challenge now is to align financial and environmental sustainability in our investments.

“I believe in starting somewhere,” she continues. “If we study our options, it’s a stepping stone. You start a dialogue, and a window of opportunity opens.” It’s a strategy that feels analytical but also intuitive—one that acknowledges present realities while maintaining high levels of optimism. The same mindset is needed when navigating daily life in Cairo, particularly its infamous traffic—an unending river with few traffic lights or lane markings. Somehow, Enan’s approach calls to mind a balletic scene, one of thousands performed every day, in which an elderly man driving a donkey cart merges seamlessly between a minibus and a battered sedan. It doesn’t seem as if it could possibly work. And yet it does.

Someday, Enan would be interested in returning to government to work as a policymaker. She loved her time at the ministry of finance, building relationships with people who came at an issue from a completely different perspective and figuring out how to reason together. It’s neither easy nor glamorous work, she admits—and it can take years before a policy is implemented, even if the outcome affects millions. For now, business is another, more immediate lever for impact.

“If you’re not trying to change the process, then don’t complain about the process.” Enan is talking about working in government again but could just as easily be describing her approach to building Egypt’s future, one business at a time: “It’s very much, if not us, then who?”

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