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Egypt, 3rd March 2022… The African Economic Research Consortium (AERC) in collaboration with the Economic Research Forum (ERF) and the Overseas Development Institute (ODI), hosted the dissemination workshop of the research paper titled “Identifying Activities for Greater Employment Generation in Egypt: An Input-output Analysis” authored by Dr. Iman Al Ayouty.

This research paper comes out of a call for proposals under the African Economic Research Consortium (AERC), the Economic Research Forum (ERF) and the Overseas Development Institute (ODI) collaborative research project that seeks to identify the economic sectors with the greatest potential to increase youth employment. This collaborative research project, therefore, aims to strengthen the evidence base on youth employment, drawing on research that will be carried out to examine the growth sectors with the highest multipliers and potential to create employment opportunities.

The dissemination event aimed to give an overview of the paper’s objective, methodology and findings. The workshop was moderated by Dr. Chahir Zaki, Professor of Economics at Faculty of Economics and Political Science, Cairo University. Two lead commentators presented their feedback on the paper including Dr. Amirah El Haddad who is senior economist at the German Development Institute and Professor of Economics at the Faculty of Economics and Political Sciences, Cairo University and Dr. Ahmed Fikry who is the Managing Director of East Port Said Development Co. (EP), the National Egyptian Railway Industries Co. (NERIC), and the Egyptian German Automotive Co. (EGA).

In her opening remarks, Dr. Scholastica Odhiambo, Manager of Research at AERC, provided an overview on the project’s background, objectives as well as its phases. During the paper’s presentation, Dr. Iman Al Ayouty first gave some background information around unemployment in Egypt focusing on youth unemployment where she emphasized the importance of identifying activities with potential youth-employment-generation. Dr. Iman then continued to explain that the paper tries to identify the industries and geographic locations that have high employment multiplier using input-output analysis (IO), spatial analysis and descriptive analysis and using data that’s mainly obtained from CAPMAS. After providing an overview on the most important findings of the paper, Dr. Iman concluded her presentation with some policy implications that included, but are not limited to, the necessity of attracting investments to industries in the named governorates and the recommendation to link the findings of the research paper with the “Youth Employment Inventory (YEI): Egypt” of the International Labour Organization (ILO).

Drs. Amirah El Haddad and Ahmed Fikry then provided their comments on the paper which started a rich and interesting discussion around the paper’s methodology and findings. Held on March 3rd, 2022, the workshop attracted a various and large number of participants and experts in the field and the workshop was streamed live on the ERF YouTube Channel.