The Housing and Development Bank (HDB) pumped about EGP 56m into the “Your Project” programme meant to finance small-sized projects, according to assistant managing director for marketing and retail banking Ashraf El-Bassiouny.
El-Bassiouny added that this funding was put through over a period of nearly seven months and benefited about 80 people. This comes beside other loans that are under study to be completed before the end of this year.
“Your Project” is a national initiative aimed to provide citizens, and young people in particular, with loans to establish their projects. The initiative was created in order to incentivise local development, provide job opportunities for youth in villages and cities in all governorates, achieve sustainable development, reduce the migration from villages to cities, as well as to guide young people in order to create a new generation of investors.
This project is being implemented in cooperation between the Ministry of Local Development, the HDB, the National Bank of Egypt (NBE), Banque Misr, and the Egyptian Agricultural Bank.
The Ministry of Local Development is providing headquarters in governorates to receive citizens and youth who are interested in establishing projects away from government jobs. There are also bank representatives in those headquarters to provide technical support and advice to citizens along with the funding.
El-Bassiouny said this project is using the one-stop system through which people obtain all the approvals for the establishment of the project from the same location. This system allows the loan approval process to be completed in roughly five days.
Banks were facing problems with licensing these projects so the ministry had decided to issue a temporary five-year licence to project owners until they can apply for the final licence.
The loans that are offered in the framework of this project are worth between EGP 50,000-3m with an interest rate of 5%.
The delinquency rates in these projects are expected to be very low, not exceeding 2%.
