Egypt

Egypt is opening its water sector to private finance. A renewable-powered desalination partnership programme, with the Sovereign Fund of Egypt and the Ministry of Finance, had its first tenders out by September 2026,¹ towards a national target of 8.85 million cubic metres a day by 2050. Contracts are design-finance-build-operate-maintain-transfer against a long-term water purchase agreement, for five to thirty years, and a Supreme Committee chaired by the prime minister approves each project.^2 3 In August 2026 the state replaced sovereign guarantees with free land under 20 to 30-year usufruct and a long-term state offtake,⁴ and Law 172 of 2025 created operating licences of up to fifteen years.⁵ The register tracks 24 schemes, US$ 0.7 bn of their disclosed value in projects not yet operating.⁶ Analysts name currency mismatch and energy supply as the residual risks,⁷ and household tariffs have been unchanged since 2018.⁸

The commercial picture in Egypt: the scale of the economy and the water sector, the investment climate, and where the near-term activity is concentrated.

The bodies that commission, regulate and operate water infrastructure in Egypt. Ministries set policy and sign the offtake; utilities run the assets; in Egypt the regulator drafts the tariff rules and the cabinet adopts the tariff, while the regulator licenses operators and sets service standards.⁵

• Ministry of Agriculture & Land ReclamationMinistry
• Ministry of Housing, Utilities & Urban CommunitiesMinistry
• Ministry of Water Resources & Irrigation (MWRI)Ministry
• Drinking Water and Sanitation Regulatory and Consumer Protection Agency (formerly EWRA)Regulator
• Holding Company for Water & Wastewater (HCWW)Utility
• Egyptian Public Authority for Drainage Projects (EPADP)Irrigation & drainage
• National Water Research Center (NWRC)Research
• Orascom ConstructionEPC & technology

The framework in Egypt is Active (renewable-powered desalination PPP programme in tender, TSFE and Ministry of Finance), the schemes we track carry US$ 4.1 bn of disclosed value, US$ 0.7 bn of it in projects not yet operating, a further US$ 0.2 bn in cancelled schemes, and the funders most active in the sector are AfDB, AFD, EU.

Delivery splits by asset class across the region: dams and trunk conveyance are often engineering contracts carried by sovereign or development-bank finance; bulk supply increasingly uses build-operate-transfer concessions against a long-term offtake; and distribution work is let as performance-based contracts paid against measured leakage reduction. The Finance & Economics hub sets out each model and where it has been used.

The projects register bears this out. Of the 24 tracked schemes in Egypt, 2 name a concession or independent-producer structure in the finance note; the rest record only where the money came from, which is not the same as saying they were not concessions.

Two things changed in Egypt in the last year and neither is on most tender lists. Law 172 of 2025, gazetted on 1 September 2025 and in force six months later, reconstitutes the water regulator as a public authority attached to the cabinet and creates operating licences of up to fifteen years, obliging the ministry to activate private participation.^5 10 In August 2026 the state replaced sovereign guarantees on the desalination programme with free land under 20 to 30-year usufruct and a long-term state offtake.⁴ The first desalination tenders, promised for December 2025, were out by September 2026, with the SCZone plant at final tendering.^11 1

In September 2025 the bidder pool was the seventeen consortia the Sovereign Fund of Egypt had pre-qualified.¹¹ In May 2026 one desalination plant and four industrial wastewater plants were in preparation, including Abu Rawash at 400,000 cubic metres a day rising to 520,000 at peak, on a design-build-operate-maintain basis at about US$157 million;³ a government list reported in September 2026 puts it at US$48 million.¹

The rules shaping investment:

Tracked schemes in Egypt, largest first. Each has its own page with the parties, the finance and a dated history.

24 tracked in total. The full set, filterable, is in the major projects register.

Contracts on record in Egypt, from the awards log and the major projects register, dated by commissioning where known.

6 further awards in this sector have no value recorded in our register and are not in the chart.

Repeat winners

• Orascom Construction7 tracked awards, 1 as developer, 6 as contractor
• Metito6 tracked awards, as contractor
• Arab Contractors4 tracked awards, as contractor
• FCC Aqualia3 tracked awards, 1 as developer, 2 as contractor
• Hassan Allam Construction3 tracked awards, as contractor

Structured procurements and live tenders in Egypt, drawn from the same review that maintains the pipeline tracker.

Pipeline & awards

Tenders

What households pay

EGP 0.65/m³ for the first 10 m³ a month rising to EGP 3.15 above 40 m³, with sanitation billed at 75% of the water charge. This is the schedule set by prime ministerial decree 1012 of 2018, gazetted on 31 May 2018 and applied from the June 2018 bill; on 2 August 2026 the holding company said no new increase had been approved or applied. Among the lowest tariffs in the region in dollar terms, and falling in real terms as the pound depreciates against a schedule fixed in 2018.

Residential tariffs, and the cost of supply where a utility publishes it, are kept in one place for the whole region so the comparison holds: a tariff means little without the cost it is measured against.

What has actually moved in Egypt, dated, from the monthly briefings. Each item names the edition it came from.

• September 2026A government document reported in September lists 16 public-private partnership projects worth US$3.08 billion, with Suez and Port Said desalination plants said to be out to tender.From the October 2026 briefing

The full editions are in the briefing archive.