Nour El Zeny, general manager of corporate communication at Suez Canal Bank and lecturer at the American University in Cairo (AUC), called on businesswomen to take advantage of the CBE’s initiative of financing small and medium enterprises (SMEs) with a low interest rate and to set up bank accounts for their employees to benefit from financial and banking services within the framework of financial inclusion.
This came during her participation in the fourth annual BWE21 conference entitled “Women for Success.”
The conference took place from 17 to 21 February, and was attended by many Egyptian ministers including the minister of environment, investment and international cooperation, trade and industry, social solidarity, and the minister of planning, in addition to the president of the National Council for Women (NCW), as well as the director of the department of women, family, and children of the Arab League, and the director of the department of civil society organisations of the Arab league, with the participation of more than 120 businesswomen from Egypt and from all over the world.
She explained that the annual conference was an opportunity to present and highlight the experiences of businesswomen in Arab and foreign countries and to identify the challenges facing business leaders, as well as to identify investment opportunities and institutions that provide technical, financial, and marketing support for businesswomen and create partnerships between the businesswomen of Egypt and businesswomen from other countries.
El Zeny explained that technology has become an official language for the global economy in light of the current developments of the fourth industrial revolution, such as artificial intelligence (AI), self-driving cars, and nanotechnology, pointing out that experts expect that using AI and the effectiveness of machine learning will double the annual growth of countries’ economies and increase the efficiency of labour forces by 40% by 2035.
“We still have a degree of digital illiteracy where not everyone has information that helps them improve performance adequately. So we need to prepare a generation of young people with skills that keep up with that digital revolution,” she continued.
She explained that young researchers and businesswomen should be prepared to keep pace with the digital revolution in order to get serious investment opportunities based on digital marketing, e-commerce basics, and mobile applications to help them promote their products and perform their business better.
She assured that the future needs of the market not only depend on increasing the use of technical tools but also the need to increase specialised knowledge in the fields of information, ie science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM).
