Yahya Aboul Fatouh, vice chairperson of the National Bank of Egypt (NBE) and Mona Mehrez, deputy minister of agriculture for livestock, fisheries, and poultry development affairs, signed a cooperation protocol to provide financing services for livestock development projects, including foraging or dairy production and helping to expand the importation of high genetic traits that improve the output of projects.
According to Mehrez, this protocol comes within the framework of the Ministry of Agriculture’s interest in implementing the government’s plan and directives of the political leadership to support and develop livestock, fish, and poultry in Egypt to provide a multi-source protein at low prices and high quality.
She added that the protocol includes the provision of financial and technical services necessary for livestock projects, in order to contribute to financing the purchase of strains with high genetic characteristics, both in the production of milk or meat.
According to Aboul Fotouh, this protocol comes to emphasise the bank’s implementation of its strategy to support and finance small and medium enterprises, particularly agricultural and livestock development.
He explained that the protocol aims at providing the necessary funding for livestock development projects for the production of meat or dairy, which have been approved by the ministry, in order to ensure the rapid implementation of these projects, marking an added value at the level of the national economy and positively reflected on bridging the food gap.
He added that the bank’s financing of these projects comes within the framework of the CBE’s initiative to finance small projects, if the conditions of the initiative are available, or any of the other concessional financing programmes available at the bank.
For his part, Saad Mohy El Din, general manager of the Small and Medium Enterprises Financing Sector at NBE, revealed that the bank has pumped EGP 1.2bn to finance 7,400 livestock, poultry, and fish projects.
