Wednesday 05/November/2025 – 12:02 PM
Alaa Farouk, Minister of Agriculture and Land Reclamation, participated in the high-level ministerial session within the “Regional Dialogue on Empowering Women through Financing Policies to Advance Circular Agriculture in the Arab Region,” hosted by the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan in the capital, Amman, in the presence of a number of agriculture ministers in the Arab region and representatives of relevant regional and international bodies.
During his intervention in the first session entitled “Gender, Finance and the Green Transformation in Arab Agriculture,” the Minister of Agriculture reviewed the pioneering Egyptian efforts and programs led by the Ministry of Agriculture under the guidance of the political leadership, stressing that financing rural women is “a direct investment in the national economy and food security and an essential pillar of the green transformation.”
Farouk pointed to the unprecedented support from the political leadership for women at the national level, as they began to participate in holding ministerial portfolios, in Parliament and the Senate, and on the boards of directors of companies, stressing that this is in the interest of comprehensive women’s empowerment.
He stressed that the Egyptian state gives special attention to the economic and social empowerment of rural women, and made it a fundamental focus in the National Strategy for Empowering Egyptian Women 2030, stressing that the ministry’s efforts were launched from a firm belief that financing is the key to true empowerment, and that financial inclusion is the broadest gateway to women’s active participation in the green bioeconomy.
Jordan and FAO praise the Egyptian experience: “Rural Women’s Financing” programs are a model to be emulated in the Arab region
The Minister presented three main courses of action, which were: integrating gender into agricultural policies, where gender concepts were integrated into all rural programs and projects to ensure equal opportunities and access to financing and technical support, and monitoring qualitative indicators to measure the impact of projects on rural women.
He said that the second path is to facilitate access to green financing and financial inclusion, as the Agricultural Bank of Egypt, in cooperation with the Ministry, launched programs such as the “Tahwisha” initiative for digital savings, which contributed to raising the percentage of financial inclusion for Egyptian women from 17% in 2016 to 68% in 2024, and also aims to exceed the benefit of 240,000 women within two years. He also pointed out that the “Egypt Finance” digital platform was also launched for electronic application on green financing, which ensures transparency and justice. In check.
Farouk also pointed to the third track, which is related to linking financing and productive empowerment, which is represented in some specific programs that combine financing, training, and production, the most prominent of which is: the “Bint Al-Rif” initiative, which trained more than 5,000 women and girls in food manufacturing skills, marketing, and small enterprise management, as well as programs to adopt the cultivation of medicinal and aromatic plants, which opened new horizons for export and increasing family income, in addition to development projects such as the Sustainable Agricultural Investments Project, which provided production grants, training, and technical guidance. For hundreds of women to establish stable and profitable projects in the field of green agriculture.
The Minister stressed that these efforts were reflected on the ground, as they contributed to the high rates of rural women’s participation in productive activities, as well as the improvement of income levels in some villages by up to 20% in recent years, as well as the transformation of women from marginal workers into local economic leaders and entrepreneurs in the field of green agriculture.
The Minister of Agriculture called for strengthening Arab cooperation and exchanging experiences to develop innovative and comprehensive financing mechanisms that enable Arab women to lead change in the Arab countryside, thanking the Kingdom of Jordan for hosting and the Arab Organization for Agricultural Development for its efforts.
For his part, Saeb Khreisat, Jordanian Minister of Agriculture, praised the pioneering Egyptian experiences in the field of women’s empowerment, in addition to the Agricultural Bank’s initiatives in agricultural lending systems for rural women, pointing out the importance of benefiting from these important experiences and transferring them to application.
For his part, Dr. Abdel Hakim Al-Waer, Assistant Director-General of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and Regional Representative for the Near East and North Africa region, also praised the measures and programs being taken to support women in Egypt as successful models that can be benefited from in the Arab region in cooperation with the organization.
