Selection Egypt

Simplex CNC

Simplex is one of Egypt’s leading CNC machine manufacturers, established in 2013, it is the only certified CNC machine manufactured in the Middle East for Schneider Electric. At Simplex we seek to localize the CNC machine industry by building the largest CNC machine factory in Africa while addressing unemployment and support women empowerment in an industry that is dominated by males.

The Problem

The median age in Egypt is 24.6 years, making it a country with a very young population. Unfortunately, the unemployment rates for Egyptian youth between the ages of 15 and 24 is around 30%. Among young women, unemployment rates are even higher, with a rate of 38.1% compared to 6.8% of young men.

Because the economy in Egypt is not growing fast enough to provide job opportunities to all the young Egyptians joining the job market, a lot of people work in the informal sector. Of all young Egyptians, around 30.2% are not in (formal) employment, education, or training (NEETs). Women face even higher NEET rates, 44% compared to 17.2% of men. Consequently, young Egyptians, especially women, are neither participating in the labour market nor building and learning the necessary skills to join the labour market in the future.

The manufacturing sector has a lot of growth potential and offers a lot of employment opportunities for youth and women. It has the possibility to offer different forms of labour to match the education and skills of young job seekers.

The Solution

With the new CNC-machine factory we want to contribute to the Egyptian industrial development and push local industries towards innovation by providing industrial and technological solutions. Besides that, we aim to create employment opportunities for young Egyptians, especially women, by tackling issues such as the underrepresentation of women in leadership positions, discrimination, and inadequate support for professional development and flexible work schedules.

We will reach this goal by building a new CNC-machine factory with a production capacity of more than 1200 machines per year. Also, we will focus on providing training to graduates and young Egyptians in the niche market of CNC machine manufacturing. To provide a suitable learn and work environment for women, we will make sure there are private places for them and paid maternity leave.

With our project we aim to create 2530 decent jobs and improve 250 jobs. To further promote gender equality, we intent to fill 60% of the office jobs with women. Our factory will also contribute to the local economy by increasing production, export, and hence access to foreign currency.

Additionality 

The support of CFYE will help us with:

  • Scale: it will provide the necessary financial resources to implement the solutions we have proposed.
  • Timing: our project will be able to proceed more quickly as it will provide the necessary resources to start project activities sooner. Consequently, we will be able to provide job opportunities to the local community sooner than we otherwise would have.
  • Target beneficiaries: the funding and technical assistance by CFYE will support our projects effort to bring in new groups of beneficiaries to benefit from the intervention.
  • Quality of output and outcomes: the technical assistance will help us to design a better project by providing guidance on industry standards.

 

 

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