Coffee With Leslie Maasdorp on de-risking Egypt and pushing into manufacturing

British International Investment (BII) is rewriting its Egypt playbook as part of a broader restructuring of development finance.

BII’s CEO Leslie Maasdorp came up through post-Apartheid South Africa’s economic reconstruction

We sat down with Maasdorp and the institution’s North Africa regional director Sherine Shohdy to talk about where the Egyptian market fits into BII’s new five-year strategy

: Where does BII’s Egypt portfolio stand today, and what’s the deployment target over the next five years?

: What is your honest read of where Egypt sits in BII’s priority hierarchy right now?

What we are investing against is the direction of travel, not the current turbulence.

: Your Egypt portfolio is heavily weighted toward renewable energy. Why is that?

That said, renewable energy has a structural limitation that matters enormously in a country with Egypt’s demographic profile:

Manufacturing is where we are leaning hardest.

: Who are you working alongside to deploy capital here?

: Are you finding more commercial co-investors willing to come in now post-stabilization?

: How do you get commercial partners into markets like Egypt without the concessional subsidy that made them accessible in the first place?

We built Ayana in India from scratch in 2017 with USD 100 mn

: You’ve backed local VC funds like Algebra Ventures and Endure Capital. How do you think about exits when the EGX pipeline for tech and growth firms is thin?

: Leslie, you come from a capital markets background. DFIs are often criticized for being too slow. What have you changed at BII since taking over?