Internet networking company Cisco Systems signed an agreement on Monday to help Egypt develop its nascent software export industry.
The US-based firm will provide networking equipment at two new Cairo academies that aim to produce 1,000 skilled computer engineers a year, a joint statement by Cisco and the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology said.
Cisco, in its first such project in the Middle East, will start training instructors in Europe and the United States next month and will help set up 10 more such academies in Egypt.
It will also provide expertise for a three-year investment program costing Egypt $1 billion to establish a high-speed telecommunications network, the statement said.
Egypt signed a deal last month with US computer giant IBM to train 15,000 information technology graduates over five years as part of the same drive to bring Egypt into the Internet age and develop its software potential.
"I see a fantastic opportunity for Egypt as a country and for our own organisation to partner together to address the needs of this market," Rowland Griffiths, regional director of Cisco Systems Middle East, said at the signing ceremony.
"We want to create an army of engineers and qualified people here...at exactly the same level as anywhere else in the world."
Egypt, whose 64 million people are estimated to include fewer than 100,000 Internet subscribers, is banking on expanding Web usage fast to promote economic development.
This year US software company Microsoft offered discount price software for 100,000 state university students and technical training schemes to help the fledgling industry.
Communications Minister Ahmed Nazif said Egypt is currently witnessing 17% annual growth in communications and 30% in information technology.
"We expect to make Egypt a country that is geared to export software services to the rest of the world," he said, predicting that Egypt`s brain-drain of high-skilled workers who find better opportunities abroad would soon go into reverse.
Nazif said Egypt, where training a software engineer costs six times less than it does in the United States, is an attractive location for foreign information technology firms.
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