Egypt and Microsoft partner to develop digital skills among youth

The Egyptian Ministry of Communications and Information and Technology (MCIT) and Microsoft Egypt signed two memorandums of understanding (MoU) to capacitate Egyptian youth with digital skills through several initiatives to build youth capacities, stimulate technological innovation and entrepreneurship, and incubate start-ups working in the information technology (IT) field. The first MoU between MCIT and Microsoft will kick off the national capacity building programme (Tamayouz), implement the ‘Professional Online’ initiative to provide professional self-training which targets 10,000 IT specialists annually, and implement the ‘Develop and Change’ initiative for digital, employment, and programming skills, which targets 1,000 youth annually. The second MoU between the Information Technology Institute (ITI) and Microsoft will support the implementation of ‘Go Ahead’ initiative, which targets 1,200 freelancers annually, and support startups and entrepreneurs through ‘Microsoft for Startups’ and Microsoft Azure cloud services which worth an estimated US$3m.