A high-level national conference was held last week to discuss the lessons learned from the Upper Egypt Local Development Programme (UELDP), which aimed at improving the business environment for private sector development and strengthening local government capacity for quality infrastructure and service delivery in the Sohag, Qena, Minya, and Assiut governorates in Upper Egypt.
A seven-year joint effort funded by around $500 million from the World Bank and similar co-financing by the government, the programme has been dubbed a model for local development that could be replicated in other regions.
Addressing the conference on Saturday, Prime Minister Mustafa Madbouli said that over 396,000 direct and indirect job opportunities had been created by the programme and more than 8.3 million citizens had received improved infrastructure and services.
One of the innovations of the programme is that it tackles both service delivery and economic development simultaneously, Stephane Guimbert, World Bank country director for Egypt, Yemen, and Djibouti told Al-Ahram Weekly.
“Many countries try to do one or the other but rarely the two together,” he said. “We see it as a best practice,” he added, saying that the World Bank will try to replicate the model in other countries.
The programme was launched in 2018 in response to directives from President Abdel-Fattah Al-Sisi, who emphasised from the outset that “developing Upper Egypt is not merely an economic objective but a national mission to rebuild people and places and empower citizens in every corner of Egypt,” Madbouli told participants at the national conference.
It focused on improving public services, creating jobs, strengthening local capacities, and making local government an effective partner in implementing the sustainable development agenda, he explained.
On the service-delivery side, Guimbert noted that block grants were given to communities to choose and oversee infrastructure projects, about 5,000 in total, including roads, water pumps, sanitation equipment, and electricity. On the economic side, the effort focused on creating industrial zones and fostering “clusters” of producers such as handicrafts to improve competitiveness and generate local jobs.
Guimbert highlighted the strong job‑creation potential of these projects, saying that they fit in with the targets of the Egypt’s Economic Development Narrative. By continuing the cluster approach, emphasising competitiveness, expanding industrial zones, and linking them to local value chains, the government can draw on many ideas from this initiative to generate employment across the nation, he stressed.
To implement the programme, the Ministry of Local Development, working with governors, trained local leaders on how to identify investment priorities and bring residents together, Guimbert explained. The Planning Ministry channelled funds directly to the communities rather than being earmarked by a specific ministry.
After the projects were built, community surveys revealed an 87 per cent improvement in infrastructure and service delivery across the governorates, Guimbert said.
Not only were there consultation processes to choose the projects, but there was also a grievance mechanism to address implementation issues and answer questions. He added that the programme had supported the governorates in setting up platforms where citizens could lodge complaints, ask questions, or express concerns, ensuring transparency and accountability throughout the process.
Besides the projects on the ground, one of the major achievements of the programme is the idea of allocating capital grants in every governorate, giving local governments predictable and reliable funding, he said.
Moreover, each local authority has added local economic development to its mandate and created a dedicated unit at the local level. Even though external financing is now concluding, these institutional changes will remain and help sustain the results, Guimbert stressed.
But the implementation was not without obstacles. Madbouli recalled that the initial monitoring of the programme had shown that it was not achieving its goals. According to Guimbert, it was very challenging at first to get full alignment of the different ministries and local administration on priorities and how to put those in place.
But with time they managed to overcome those challenges, Guimbert said, noting that it was a lesson learnt the hard way.
Going forward, Guimbert said a second phase of the programme is not on the books. The government is cautious about new borrowing, he noted. Instead, it is funding the initiative from its own budget and keeping the World Bank involved primarily for technical assistance and policy analysis. He said there was a lot of appetite from the various ministries involved to scale up the achievements to more governorates.
According to Guimbert, the programme demonstrates that when local communities are given greater autonomy, paired with strong accountability, they can effectively manage resources, set their own priorities, oversee implementation, and deliver strong results.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 4 December, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
Short link: