The National AI Strategy sets the destination — 30,000 AI professionals, 250+ AI companies, 7.7% of GDP from ICT by 2030. Strategy documents don't produce engineers. Rooms, classrooms and shipped projects do. That's the part we took.
Hundreds of AI researchers across the National Research Centre, ASRT and the Agriculture Research Centre. A growing count of public Faculties of Computers and Information. A generation choosing ICT at university in numbers no other market in the region can match. And 60 million people under 30.
Too few highly qualified senior professionals. Research that isn't linked to society's needs. Insufficient AI education. Capable people leaving for employers abroad. Every one of those is a people problem before it is a technology problem — which is exactly where a practitioner community can move faster than an institution.
The Second Edition of the National AI Strategy organises the whole plan into six pillars, each carrying a set of named initiatives. Four of them are the state's to build. Ecosystem and Talent are the two that only work if people actually show up — which is the entire reason People of Data exists.
The national AI regulatory system, plus Egypt's seat in global and regional AI dialogues.
A national foundation model, abundant R&D resource, and an AI patent granting system.
Governance frameworks, high-quality sectoral Arabic datasets, an exchange platform, privacy.
Domestic data centres, intelligent cloud and compute, ubiquitous 5G and fibre, sustainability.
Investment environment, industry–academia–research platforms, support for AI start-ups, and public awareness of AI development.
We work hereSenior expert cultivation and retention, international academic alliances, cross-discipline courses, and a qualification and certification system.
We work hereTwo charts explain why we do what we do. One is the size of the talent gap. The other is how fast Egypt has already been moving when someone does the work.
You do not get 30,000 specialists out of a country that has not first put a million people near the tools. That funnel is the job we took.
Over the same window Egypt reached 52nd on the Global AI Index. The country moves when the work gets done — the strategy names talent and ecosystem as the two places it still has to move fastest.
Founders come from people who have already built something that worked. Companies come from founders. Every layer below is manufactured by the layer above it — which is why we measure ourselves on the width of the top of the funnel, not the applause at the bottom.
Figures from Egypt National Artificial Intelligence Strategy, Second Edition (2025–2030), National Council for Artificial Intelligence; Government AI Readiness Index, Oxford Insights
Four national targets sit inside those two pillars. Here is what each one asks for, and the specific thing we run against it.
The national target. Egypt sat at roughly 1,400 when the strategy was written. Our 1,000,000-by-2028 enablement target is the funnel that a number like 30,000 has to come out of — you don't get thirty thousand specialists from a country that hasn't put a million people near the tools.
Companies come from founders, and founders come from people who have already built something that worked. That's what AI-Based Entrepreneurship and the innovation challenges exist to manufacture — at KLS, ten solutions from fifty students, one now in daily use.
Doubling national research output needs industry–academia–research platforms that actually convene. We run the convening: campus innovation centres, corporate challenges opened to universities, and the meetups where the two sides meet before there's a contract.
Public awareness of AI development is a named national initiative. GenAI Nights, Egypt Eternal Voices, the AI Film Festival and the weekly note are public-facing by design — they reach people who would never sign up for a technical meetup.
Targets and framing drawn from Egypt National Artificial Intelligence Strategy, Second Edition (2025–2030), National Council for Artificial Intelligence
Prove the loop on three campuses before scaling to thirty. Evidence travels; announcements don't.
Every partnership starts contained and low-risk. It gives the partner something to take to their own board, and it gives us a case study.
Everyone who delivers has shipped in production. Curriculum benchmarked against UNESCO, OECD and WEF AILit frameworks.
A programme ends with something that exists — a solution, a film, a business case. Not a certificate of attendance.
27 governorates is the standard, not the stretch goal. A programme that only lands in Cairo has failed our own test.
We prove the model at home, then take it across the Arab world. 10,000,000 by 2030 is a sequence, not a leap.
That AI would not lift Egypt on its own. That a tool released in San Francisco on a Tuesday now reaches Cairo on the same Tuesday — and the only thing standing between our people and that advantage is whether they know how to use it.
So we stopped waiting and started building. Not a company first — a room. Practitioners in one place, talking honestly about what actually works in production. That room became a network. The network became schools, festivals, hackathons, corporate programmes and signed commitments across 27 governorates.
We are dreamers, builders and hustlers, and what we want is unglamorous and specific: better skills, better decisions, better income, better opportunities — and an economy that competes because its people can.
Two founders with roughly a decade each in education at scale across MENA — building the ecosystem they wanted to exist when they started out. Meet the team →
Not a slogan. A test we hold every programme to — if it only reaches Cairo, or only reaches people who already had a head start, we haven't done the work.
Get into the rooms where this actually happens — meetups, GenAI Nights, hackathons and the festival.
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