Hala El-Said, Minister of Planning and Economic Development, said that the first guide for a gender-responsive sustainable development plan was prepared.
The importance of this plan lies in directing government agencies towards implementing development programmes and projects in the field of social care for women and children, and giving priority to funding these programmes, in addition to creating an environment encouraging for women’s work to mitigate the effects of the Coronavirus pandemic.
El-Said revealed, in her speech at the Human Rights Building Beyond the Pandemic Conference held by the Egyptian Center for Thought and Strategic Studies on Thursday, that microfinance directed at women jumped from about EGP 8bn in 2019 to EGP 9bn in 2020, and women accounted for 62% of the total number of beneficiaries.
El-Said emphasised that Egypt came in first place in the report issued by UN Women and the UN Development Program on the measures taken by countries around the world to support women during the pandemic.
On the economic empowerment of women, El-Said said that talking about it no longer has a social dimension or aims only to achieve gender equality, but rather has become an economic necessity to maximise the use of the productive energies of women. She pointed out that females represent 50.7% of the total workers in the state’s administrative apparatus.
El-Said added that the percentage of female representation on the boards of directors of companies registered on the Egyptian Exchange increased from 10.1% in 2019 to 11.6% in 2020, and in public sector companies the percentage improved to 8.7% in 2020 compared to 6.1% in 2019.
She added that within the framework of the government’s and Central Bank’s efforts to achieve financial inclusion; the number of women benefiting from mobile payment services increased to about 2 million women,. Women also accounted for 40% of the increase in the number of bank accounts during the last year, from February 2020 to February 2021.
