Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly on Saturday inaugurated the 30th Cairo International Exhibition and Technology Conference for the Middle East and Africa (Cairo ICT 2026) at the Egypt International Exhibition Centre in New Cairo.
Held from November 7 to 10 under the theme “AI in Action”, the event brings together regional and international delegations, government officials, global technology companies and startup founders.
Raafat Hendy, Minister of Communications and Information Technology (MCIT), alongside several cabinet ministers and industry leaders, attended the opening ceremony.
During his tour of the exhibition, Madbouly reaffirmed the government’s commitment to advancing the information and communications technology (ICT) sector to improve administrative efficiency, expand digital services and drive sustainable economic growth.
Hendy outlined the sector’s roadmap towards Egypt Vision 2030, presenting key strategic targets aimed at strengthening the country’s position as a regional digital hub.
These targets include creating 200,000 new professional opportunities, supporting 250 artificial intelligence-driven startups and attracting five to seven specialised AI data centres.
Egypt also aims to manufacture 30 million mobile phones locally and export 30% of that production, while increasing digital exports to $12bn by 2030.
The strategy also targets expanding fibre-optic network coverage to 55% nationwide, rolling out 5G services across all governorates, maintaining annual ICT sector growth of between 16% and 19%, and increasing the sector’s contribution to GDP to 8%.
During a briefing at the MCIT pavilion, Mahmoud Badawi, Deputy Minister for Digital Transformation, highlighted the significant expansion of government digital services in 2026.
The Digital Egypt platform now offers 261 services across 29 packages, supported by 21 mobile applications. Its active user base increased by 32% to 13.7 million in 2026, compared with 10.4 million in 2025, while the number of completed transactions rose from 23.8 million to 36 million.
The platform also reached the final shortlist for the United Nations Public Service Awards in the digital government category.
Key enablers supporting this expansion include biometric digital identity verification, electronic signatures and a secure digital vault for document management.
Newly introduced services and features include the remote issuance of general powers of attorney and digital work registration certificates.
The exhibition also highlighted Egypt’s National Artificial Intelligence Strategy (2025–2030), which focuses on governance, infrastructure, business ecosystems and the development of specialised talent.
One of the featured achievements was Karnak, a large language model developed by the Applied Innovation Centre, which ranked first among Arabic-language AI models and recorded more than 300,000 downloads.
The ministry also unveiled three new specialised applications built on Karnak. These include Karnak Legal, developed in cooperation with the Ministry of Justice to provide simplified legal guidance; Seya, an interactive educational assistant for high school students covering Arabic, history and physics; and Senna, an application designed to support the early detection of dental caries in children under six.
Cairo ICT 2026 features specialised exhibition halls covering communications infrastructure, mobile device manufacturing and digital financial solutions.
The main exhibition is accompanied by several specialised events, including the third AIDC² cloud computing exhibition, the 13th PAFIX digital payments conference, sponsored by the Central Bank of Egypt; the sixth Connecta gaming expo; and the Innovation Arena, which showcases emerging startups.
