I was having a discussion with someone on twitter about the Egyptian economy and he argued that we are living an economy that we can't sustain. The gist of his argument was that the currently economy is powered by the sale of assets, unfair work law and all the advantages we grant foreign investors, all of which were possible because of the corrupt greedy x-regime that facilitated a virtual economical boom with an unrealistic growth rate of 7% just to be able to milk Egypt out of all the resources they can. On its own -he added- the Egyptian economy can't power such a growth rate.
I agree to first part however I'm completely opposed to the second part. We have more than enough resources to power an even larger growth rate (real one this time), most of the people I know don't believe in the quality of the Egyptian worker and they believe that our main issue is that our workers wont be able to perform as expected and they wont produce at the rate needed to maintain the required growth rate, in other words, most of the workers are inept dead weight pulling our economy down. However coming from an IT background I know what Egyptian workers can do if guaranteed that their work will be measured correctly and they'll be rewarded according to their performance.
In ITO (IT outsourcing) operations we face substantial competition from other countries that can provide a cheaper service (China, India, Hungary) and surprisingly we are always picked because of our much better quality of service, yes quality and Egyptian can still be used in the same sentence. Due to the nature of ITO work is measured and assessed by the customer (who usually exists in one of the first world countries) and usually we provide them with a better quality than that provided by their local employees. Employees usually exceed expectations staying late even if not asked to, and show commitment that you don't see any where else in Egypt. Which gives you hope in the Egyptian employee, the only different within our industry is the presence of a proper system that controls measures and assess employees activities, a transparent system that allows each employee to know exactly where he stands and that his work actually matters. Surprisingly same applies to football, clear well defined rules with no room for corruption, and surprisingly we exceed in that as well (at least regionally), the point I'm trying to make here is that the Egyptian worker is not the weakest link.
At the end of the day it comes down to people, your workforce is even more important than the resources you've got, countries with no resources to speak off are first world countries just because they have the highly skilled workforce. All it takes is believing in ourselves, once we get past that we'll be able to sustain a growth rate that coincides with the growth rate of our workforce.
